The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
Send her through hell and see how she holds up.
Someday this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.
—The Searchers, 1956
One night in Vegas, I stood under the neon in Fremont Street and watched as a crowd of strangers linked arms, swayed, and sang along with the chorus This’ll be the day that I die, smiling like it was a lullaby. Then I read about the phenomenon of nostalgia for the A-bomb as a symbol of a “simpler time.” For me, these iconic images of the late 1950s—Buddy Holly’s grinning face, the exploding Cape Cod house, and the mushroom cloud—all signify the same thing, death. And they all demand that we grapple with them.
Despite all the documentation of Apple-2 and tests like it, there is something fundamentally unknowable about an atomic explosion. Physicists can explain how it happens and why. Historians can place it into the larger context of time and place. Eyewitnesses can tell the story of how it felt to watch it rise from the desert, unfold into the sky, and veer off toward the mountains. But for me, the atom bomb represents the breakdown of certainty. Here is a weapon that enacts hell in three ways: fire brighter than the sun, wind stronger than a cyclone, and fine particles that imbue the air with death. Only myth can explain it. This is the salamander that lives in the fire and eats of the fire. This is the basilisk that binds you, once you look. And this is the hammer that fractures time: the house is gone in the space of a moment, but the radioactivity of the fallout, what the house becomes, will be deadly for millennia, longer than our languages will last.
Let’s be honest. To really imagine what happened, you have to put yourself in her place. So make me the girl with the View-Master. Me with the Hula-Hoop, staring at the horizon, watching for something terrible. Me on the living-room floor, listening to the song with its bridge like baby-doll music. And on the television, light fills the screen, and thunder pours from the speakers. (Should the girls be watching this? Mother says. To which Father replies, You can’t shelter them forever.) Man, woman, and child, millions of them, exposed to these tests, whether or not they drove out into the desert to watch. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “the National Cancer Institute estimates that around 160 million people—virtually everyone living in the U.S. at that time (mid-1950s)—received some iodine dose from fallout.” All water exposed to the upper air since 1945 contains radioactive signatures. The A-bomb is in us all, its isotopes in all our blood: the tests, all 1,021 of them, live on through us.
Well, I’m either going to go to the top—or else I’m going to fall. But I think you’re going to see me in the big time.
—Buddy Holly, to concert promoter Carroll Anderson, before the show at the Surf Ballroom, February 2, 1959
How we paw over these old relics, a picture of his overnight bag stuffed with Ban, a half-used roll of adhesive tape, a Stanley hairbrush exactly like mine, all these ordinary things freighted with disaster. Twelve years after the crash, a man wrote a song about it. Thirty years after Apple-2, moviemakers repurposed its footage for The Day After’s depiction of atomic devastation. To simulate fallout, they used cornflakes, painted white. The man who flipped Ritchie Valens for a seat on the plane bought a bar and named it Tommy’s Heads Up Saloon. In the gift shop at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, you can buy a Buddy Holly Spinning Snowflake Ornament.
“This is the way we get our word out,” said the atomic veteran. “This is the way we get the word out. It’s the only way.” At the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, you can turn a thumb reel and watch a school bus burning, smoking, tipping, and being swept away, or you can turn the reel the other way, and put it all back together. In the gift shop, you can buy a T-shirt of Miss A-Bomb wearing her rictus of a grin. Or sterling silver earrings, one of Fat Man and the other of Little Boy.
Well, that’s my life to the present date, and even though it may seem awful and full of calamities, I’d sure be in a bad shape without it.
FINIS
FINALE
In other words,
THE END.
—From “My Autobiography,” written by Buddy Holly for his sophomore English class, 1953
The year The Searchers was released, John Wayne filmed another movie, The Conqueror, in St. George, Utah, downwind of the Nevada Test Site. Before the filming, shot Harry, later called Dirty Harry, was exploded. The movie’s action, set in Mongolia, required several scenes with blowing sand, and maybe nobody thought much of it when they brushed the dust from their hair and eyes, shook it from their shirtsleeves, wiped it from their feet. They had work to do. Years later, when John Wayne died of cancer, he blamed his smoking habit, and maybe he was right. But ninety other actors and crew from The Conqueror were also diagnosed with cancer, over 40 percent of those who worked on the movie, along with uncounted extras, most of them local people.
In the last scene of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards returns the kidnapped girl, now a woman, to her neighbors, the closest thing to kin she has left. The movie’s theme song rises—Ride away, ride away—and Ethan turns his back on the camera. As he walks slowly out of frame, the white rectangle of sun in the door grows brighter and brighter, until finally the door closes. By the time The Searchers was playing in movie theaters from Lubbock to Clear Lake, John Wayne was in Utah, fighting through swirls of dust to finish that day’s scene. He just wanted to get a good take. Buddy just wanted to wash his clothes and take a shower.
Hardly worth dying over, but then what is? One of Apple-2’s objectives was to determine blast effects on different types of clothing. Today, historians list Apple-2 as one of the dirtiest atomic tests; its fallout made its way into children’s bodies in disproportionate numbers. No matter how many times you click through these images, they don’t change.
When asked what “American Pie” meant, McLean replied, “It means I don’t ever have to work again.”
—Alan Howard, The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs
Does Buddy go on the road to sell records, or does he sell records to go on the road? Does he savor these giddy minutes of getting ready in a strange place, cement-floored dressing rooms with chipped green paint, hand-me-down dressers, and mirrors fastened to the wall with daisy-shaped rivets? He carries with him what he needs: guitar strings, fuses, handkerchiefs, nail file, pencil stub. Safety pins. Nobody ever has one. He could make a fortune if he started a new safety-pin factory; the world desperately needs more. And outside, the scurf of people talking, waiting for the show. Waiting for him.
Waiting for him, Maria Elena, back in their little apartment, lighting the pilot on the stove and talking to her mother in a warm haze of gas fumes and soup. Blue feathers of flame under the pot, telephone on the wall, push button to light the kitchen: all of these cost money. The honeymoon in Acapulco. The property in Bobalet Heights; he’s signed his real name on the deed, Charles “Buddy” Holley, with an e. The stage manager says it’s time, high time. He finds his mark, waits for the curtain, and when the stagehand hauls it up he can’t hear the creaking of the rope for the screams, and he’s playing the first chords of “Peggy Sue” without even realizing it, diving deep into a pool. Feeling the crowd stomping through the soles of his feet, shaking with the bass like he’s hooked to it, and between songs he has to take off his glasses and wipe the sweat from his eyes. Hey, he says, we sure are glad to be here. The crowd’s a blur but he can see the mike, its woven mesh familiar as his own fingerprint. Whew! That’s better. Slides the glasses on. Looks back. “Oh Boy,” do you think? When you’re with me, the world can see. That you were meant for me.
Every day
It’s a-getting closer
Going faster
Than a roller coaster.
—Buddy Holly, “Everyday,” 1957
Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone lived, once, on the land that became the Nevada Test Site. But by now, clicking through this third reel, “The Test Site Today,”