The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
a few strokes here and there, we make a resting place, as if to stay awhile. But things change quickly when the order comes to strike camp. Overnight, “the canvas city has vanished like a vision. On such a morning and amid such a scene I have loitered till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight, leaving nothing behind for all that light and life but empty desolation.” Broken branches in a smoldering heap; trampled fields of stubble. Give it a few years and you’ll never know anything out of the ordinary had happened here, though decades from now some keen-eyed person might turn up a bullet casing or a coin crusted with verdigris.
Of the soldiers, Taylor wrote, “If there is a curious cave, a queer tree, a strange rock, anywhere about, they know it. . . . Home they come with specimens that would enrich a cabinet. The most exquisite fossil buds just ready to open, beautiful shells, rare minerals, are collected by these rough and dashing naturalists. If you think the rank and file have no taste and no love for the beautiful, it is time you remembered of what material they are made.” So they might have loved the grotto of Fairyland; they might have created their own cabinets of wonder, protomuseums, in the lidded boxes of peacetime life.
If there is nothing new under the sun, neither is there anything new beneath the earth. Grottoes functioned as early theaters; caves have interesting backdrops and good acoustics, and their shape lingers still in the arch over the stage in modern theaters. So, too, Fairyland Caverns is stuffed with scenes from childhood stories, frozen and stiff. And that light! Ultraviolet light is a way for humans to see the world as some other creatures do; it translates their vision into our own language of sight. Honeybees see patterns on flowers that direct them to pollen and nectar. Because these patterns show up at shorter wavelengths, they are visible to bees, but not to humans. In a rock shop I visited once, a curtained corner hid a display case containing mineral samples. When you pressed a button, an ultraviolet light switched on, and certain samples glowed green and purple. Once the timer ran out, you saw the same specimens, dull and unremarkable. Ultraviolet light let you in on their secret.
The light in Fairyland Caverns points toward something larger than itself; like an anxious friend, it pokes you in the side, whispering, This isn’t right. Things have changed, and it feels wrong to repeat the same old stories. Although it’s a comfort to know what comes next—Yankee Doodle went to town / Riding on a pony—there’s a disconnect, a break: Trinity. If you want to see something of Trinity, go to New Mexico, where the nuclear age began. Face the explosion, the original light that Fairyland slantwise reflects. Yes, you could trace it further: say the bomb started with the Curies’ radium research, or with Jewish physicists on the run from Hitler; say it started under the old squash court at the University of Chicago; say the seeds of apocalypse were sown at the Earth’s very beginning. But for argument’s sake, start in New Mexico.
Drive the wide freeway to Albuquerque, past adobe houses and mitt-shaped buttes, anvil clouds and remnants of Route 66, and pull over at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. The exhibits there explain the preparations involved in the making of the first atomic bomb, with thumbnail biographies of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. One of the most interesting things on display is an old copy of the Los Alamos newspaper. Dated June 25, 1945, the Bulletin lists the movies to be shown at the compound’s theater; it scolds the mystery person who’s been pocketing the knives from the mess hall and promises that no new ones will replace those stolen.
None of this would be all that noteworthy were it not for the fact that the Trinity test is less than a month away. There will be a blinding flash and rolling thunder, hot wind and shock waves, but in the meantime someone on the base has lost a “long-haired black Persian cat with yellow eyes, wearing a collar with bell”; someone else misses “a Buick hub cap,” offering a reward for its return. The list of items FOR SALE includes a “Large, strong, varnished clothes basket. Used 1 month as bassinet. $3.50.” This bears out what I’ve read about the growing Los Alamos maternity ward, as does the WANTED TO BUY list, which includes a request for a “Good baby buggy. Call 496.” Trinity’s plutonium core will arrive at the test site three days early; someone will drive it down from Los Alamos to Jornada del Muerto in the back seat of a ’42 Plymouth. A good family car.
AND WE ARE IN A STRANGE NEW LAND
—“The Atomic Age,” Life, August 20, 1945
Does Rock City show our past or our future? Without the ultraviolet light, it’s the past—nursery rhymes, fairy tales, a garden static as blooms preserved under glass. But the ultraviolet light shows the future, a place radiant with garish color. The familiar fairy tales are transformed by this luminous color scheme into something peculiarly atomic-age. I read about the workers, mostly women, who painted the glowing tips of alarm-clock hands. They licked their paintbrushes to get a fine point; at night, their skin, clothes, and hair glowed. The radium in the paint gave them bone cancer, and they filed suit in 1927. By court day, they were too weak to raise their right hands. This strange light makes innocent stories sinister, recognizable but changed. The atomic calves who grazed in the desert during Trinity look normal but for their dusting of white. Swept with fire and steel as with a broom. Seared everywhere the fallout touched.
Before Trinity, the scientists at Los Alamos made a wager. Would the bomb set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire, and if it did, would the consequences be local or global? They liked betting, those physicists; in another pool, each of them guessed how much power the bomb would have, as compared to tons of TNT. The man who won happened to come in late, after all the reasonable figures had been taken. Out of politeness, he guessed what seemed like a ridiculously high figure, and it turned out he was the closest. (Twenty thousand.)
At the moment of detonation—July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m.—a passenger was on her way to morning music class. She saw the bright flash of light and thought it was the sunrise. What was that? she asked her brother. She saw the explosion, this woman—even though she was stone blind. Hadn’t it seemed like any other morning? Maybe the brother drove a little too fast through town, running late, past the still-dark filling station, radio dimly on. Suddenly a blast of light, unlike anything ever seen, and what must he have thought, the brother?—blind too, at that moment, and too stunned to steady the car. No word for thought, not at first, silence then thunder and hot wind as not far away, the physicists lifted their faces from the ground, and Oppenheimer thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
It smelled funny, the rancher said, standing in the desert as the fallout rained down. Was that the vaporized jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, greasewood, killed at the moment of detonation, falling on him? Rip woke from his long sleep and staggered out from under the mountain to a world scrubbed bare, glowing gray in dull light. Slept through the revolution. What if he were the only one left? Even Wolf long gone; every dog gone.
THE FUTURE BELONGS
TO THOSE WHO PREPARE FOR IT
—Advertisement, Prudential Life Insurance, Life,
September 24, 1945
After Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, it makes perfect sense: you go underground, a place of safety, but also a place of ancient, subconscious threat. Go where the dead go and make your home there. Where ants and blind worms tunnel, where moles stroke smoothly through the clay. You will beg the mountain to cover you, and the rocks to hide you. It will not be enough. By August of 1945, the bomb no longer secret, an editorial in Life read, “For if there is no defense, then perhaps man must either abolish international warfare or move his whole urban civilization underground.” Fallout shelters (suburbia below ground) are grottoes lined with hoarded goods. Hollow out a place and fill it with the stories you used to know, but even the light is changed here, and things shine as they once did not, setting your glowing teeth on edge. Continued Life, “Constructing beautiful urban palaces and galleries, many ants have long lived underground in entire satisfaction.”
Paging through these old magazines, you want to shake the people in the ads for Packards, frozen peas, Campbell’s Soup. Wake up! But the draught’s been drained; done is done. What can follow the photos of the Trinity crater? An article about the new Miss America, flutist, a tall New Yorker. Ads for underwear and Arrow dress shirts. Mamma, use Swan soap.