The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
wrote Taylor; said Mom and Dad, Try not to worry about it too much. Good advice, if you can take it. At breakfast, just after Trinity, physicist George Kistiakowsky sat in the dining room at the Los Alamos Lodge and said, “That was the nearest to doomsday one can possibly imagine. . . . I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last man—will see something very similar to what we have seen.”
Who knows how Jessie Sanders felt about the bomb? She was busy in her studio, pouring Hydrocal; a survivor, building a new world. How do we live with this new knowledge of how the Earth will end? Set it aside. Keep on working. Said journalist William Laurence, witnessing Nagasaki—of which Trinity had been a test—“We removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky. . . . As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petals curving downward, creamy-white outside, rose-colored inside.” It’s an artist’s description, filled with color and comparison, and yet this is light unwholesome, strong-armed into something never before seen. If Fairyland Caverns is a memento mori, it is unlike the Renaissance ones, where sculpted skeletons reach from caskets to claw the air. Here there are no bones—vaporized instantly—just the glowing circles of Baa Baa Black Sheep’s wool, hanging in the darkness like an afterimage. What made me think of Trinity as I walked through Fairyland? Light spoken in a new tongue; a cave peopled by children with glowing faces. But the truth is you find what you look for. Maybe not the exact specimen, but once the scales fall from your eyes you must see the world, strange and dark. A red moon floated above a stadium on a noisy Friday night. I could have read there a sign of doom, or atmospheric dust, or both. Just the same, once I saw Trinity I would see it always, everywhere.
Imagine the world deserted. The raven did not return to the ark, but lit on the bodies of the floating dead. Under a photo of the Trinity crater, the caption reads, “The first atomic bomb’s crater is a great green blossom in the desert near Alamogordo.” The heat from the blast fused desert sand into a greenish glass, trinitite; how I would, as a child, have loved to find a piece of that poison glass. Imagine a desert rasped clean of every living thing. The bomb’s crater, shallow to start with, fills in a little more every sundown when the wind kicks up. Now, sixty years out, you wouldn’t know anything had happened there if not for the plaque, though there’s rarely anyone around to read it. Bits of trinitite pocketed years ago, ground to powder, or buried. A waste place. Neither stubble nor crumb. Till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight. So it has been. Will be.
Outside the caverns, safe in the half-empty parking lot, come back to yourself. Unlock your car and drive slowly down the mountain road, careful on the switchbacks. Turn on the radio. Pass the first barn: GOOD BYE TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT ROCK CITY. Yes, that’s right; these barns are how you heard about the place to start with. SEE SEVEN STATES. WORLD’S 8TH WONDER, BRING YOUR CAMERA. BEAUTIFUL BEYOND BELIEF.
THE LORD’S WILL SHALL BE DONE
NOT YOURS OR MINE
—Roadside sign outside Chattanooga
The barns were new once. Bright boards wept sap. There was that one roofed with hand-rived shakes cut from the great felled oak. The old men said, You got to do it at the right time of the light of the moon lest the shingles curl. Shakes nailed down tight.
Clark Byers didn’t need stencils; understood the different iterations of barn, varying shapes in the same family. Painted SEE ROCK CITY on roofs with a wide brush. That dry wood drank paint, didn’t it. Hot work, sweat running down his spine, paint spattering his forearms, pulling his hair as it dried. Carolina grasshoppers leaping from yellow straw to light on tall pokeweed. Pokeweed juice a dye the Cherokee used. Had used.
Made his own paint from linseed oil and lampblack. “There were no such things as rollers,” he said. “Used a four-inch brush, never had to measure letters and always worked freehand. Once that paint got on, there was no getting it off.” He carried paint, rope, chalk, brushes. Dying barns deflate like lungs. Inside them it is dusty, with a different kind of darkness, and in the rafters you might see wasps swarming, or old swallows’ nests. Termites chew the planking, piling gray dust on the floor of pounded red clay. TO MISS ROCK CITY WOULD BE A PITY read the John Molyneux barn. That was from the 1930s. It’s torn down now.
Traditionally, it took forty days and forty nights to cure tobacco in the barns. In early spring, you weighted seeds with ash to sow; come midsummer, cut green leaves, working slowly down the line. Bundled stems together in hands and set a slow fire. The leaves cured to brown, supple as skin on a wrist. Smoke wriggled out through gaps in the walls. You’d see it wafting over the fields, smell it on a still night, dusty and sweet, like grass in August but darker. Most people have forgotten all this by now, or never knew. One day won’t anyone remember.
Salton Sea, California
Smears of heat rise from the car, the pavement, my sister’s head. I step out of the car and onto a dead fish, crushing its skull under my heel. The air’s so dry it shivers, the sun’s so strong that freckles pop like paint across my arms, and the stink—from tons of decaying fish—is making us all sputter and choke. The Salton Sea is the kind of place most people go out of their way to avoid. Not me. I’ve talked my family into coming here, all because of a photograph I’ve seen.
Tilapia can stand bad treatment—hotter water, higher salinity, more pollution—better than most fish, but sometimes the Salton Sea gets to be too much even for them. When that happens, they die off in huge numbers, sometimes as many as eight million a day. I walk down the beach with my family, all of us crunching tilapia underfoot. The fishes’ eyes go first, pecked out by ravenous shorebirds, but eventually all the fish transform from curled-up wholes to neat ladders of vertebrae to, finally, pearly piles of loose scales that lie scattered across the beach like bingo chips.
I lean over the water’s edge but don’t step in. The water itself is tea-dark, but its surface is as bright as tinfoil. Broken slabs of concrete and stubs of rebar jut underwater. We walk slowly past a row of abandoned house trailers, wrecked during the last of the big storms. Here’s a planed-open shower stall, a rusty oven with its door wrenched off, a shank bone from a big dog, probably a Lab. Here, washed up on the water’s edge, lies an empty pack of Skydancer cigarettes, a warrior in a headdress lifting his open palm to the pale-blue sky.
We were joking in the car, but that’s all evaporated now as we squint at the water, a little confused, a little sweaty. It’s eerie here, even at high noon, and I’m not sure why. This feels like a place located outside the bounds of normal time, like an amusement park, but we’re missing something. Calliopes and tin whistles: this beach is silent.
MIRAGE: 1958
Cue the music, coming to you live from an unseen band. Somewhere, some fellow sings, beyond the sea / Somewhere, waiting for me. The trumpets, nasally muted, swing along in the background, counterpointing the melody, propping it up. A drummer brushes the skins, and despite the terrific heat, everything is very, very cool. And you’re here to see it all: the sleek cigarette boats peeling the water open; the gulls flying past crinkled mountains; the platinum sun. The ice in your drink goes to water and you swallow it. When a breath of wind passes over your face you’re immediately grateful, as if heaven sent it particularly to you, just to see if you’d notice.
For thousands of years, Desert Cahuilla Indians lived here, watching the water come and go, and farming on these banks. But the Salton Sea’s current incarnation began as a mistake. In 1905, the Colorado River, which had been diverted to irrigate local agriculture, overcame its banks and poured full bore into the desert for two years, when engineers from the Southern Pacific Railroad finally blocked it with tons of riprap. The Alamo and New Rivers continue to drain into the Salton Sea, as does agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley. Since 1909, the Torres Martinez band of Desert Cahuilla has held the title to ten thousand acres of land that lie on the bottom of the Sea.
In the mid-1980s, Richard Misrach shot a