The Belly of the Beast

February 18, 2006

Los Alamos is two-dimensional, like where I grew up. Everything faces the street, built and organized in rectangles and right angles, parallel or perpendicular to everything else. I guess I’ve grown accustomed to Taos’s spatial depth: a portal leads into a restaurant, which has a patio, with a path to an arched gate in a wall, which opens into a courtyard—and so on. Peer through a gate in Taos and you’re looking into successive dimensions. Peer at a Los Alamos parking lot and you see the back of the building on the next block. As my husband and I drove around the city, Calvin kept singing a line from the “South Park� theme song: “ample parking day and night!�

Taos’s spatial multi-dimensionality may reflect the length of its history (beyond what a Midwesterner like me can easily comprehend), as well as an old-culture comfort with complexity. Los Alamos, by contrast, is newborn, incorporated in 1963, only 20 years after local Native Americans and Hispanics “proudly and willingly� relinquished the site on the Pajarito Plateau at the foot of the Jemez Mountains to the government for nuclear research. At least, that’s history according to “The Town that Never Was,� a peculiar 16-minute film shown at Los Alamos National Lab’s Bradbury Science Museum. We didn’t linger long in the jingoistic, free-admission museum, but long enough to discover that Calvin generates 80 microamperes of current compared to my 20. (Guess who makes the sparks fly in this relationship?)

We had pizza at Tony’s Pizzeria, which is, alas, like so many Northern New Mexico Italian restaurants, oblivious to the glories of flavorful, aromatic garlic and piquant basil; and drove to the Aquatic Center, where several trailheads intersect. We strolled between canyon walls of porous volcanic tuff on a network of pungent, needle-carpeted paths amid ponderosa pines. Our admiration for the inner-city sanctuary took a nosedive when we consulted the information kiosk after our walk. It cheerfully informed us that Acid Canyon was named for the “effluent� dumped there by the lab from the ’40s to the ’60s.

The city born of the Manhattan Project is riddled with paradoxes. There’s the Trinity on the Hill Church, its name encompassing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as well as the 1945 Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon that would ultimately kill hundreds of thousands. The church is currently presenting a lecture series on “The Imperfect Species: Reflections on Mass Violence and the Future of Humanity.�

The Black Hole
Our go-to Los Alamos destination is The Black Hole, a former grocery store that now sells LANL surplus, called “nuclear waste� by proprietor Atomic Ed Grothus. The reportedly non-radioactive high- and low-tech stuff spills out the door and fills the parking lot—including gizmos straight out of an Ed Wood sci-fi movie, with gauges, dials, and knobs, and names like spectrophotometer, reflectoscope, and oerstedmeter. A few years back, when we watched the award-winning short film, “Atomic Ed and the Black Hole,� my husband was astonished to spot a pile of equipment he’d helped design in the ’70s for LANL’s experiments using solar energy to treat nuclear waste. Talk about paradoxes!

On this trip, I couldn’t find the terribly beautiful colored slides of nuclear mushroom clouds that used to sit out on a light table. Calvin came away with a sprocket, a chain, and some steel rods that disappeared into his workshop. Artists love the place, too. Atomic Ed is not above bragging that Larry Bell is a regular customer.

At well over six feet, with thick white hair and sad, basset-hound eyes, Atomic Ed bears a startling resemblance to Uncle Sam in the “I Want You� recruiting poster. Now in his eighties, Ed worked at LANL as a machinist for 20 years, retired in 1969, and became an outspoken anti-nuclear activist. The FBI raided Ed’s store in 2004 and took a computer hard drive marked “secret,� a couple of rolls of stickers with “secret� printed on them, and an 8mm tape. Ed is used to run-ins with authority. He told Calvin a year or two ago that he’d drawn peace symbols in the wet cement of his driveway during a municipal repaving project. The cement was dry by the time the government found out, so they came back with jackhammers and pulverized the symbols, then repaved the driveway.

Beyond The Black Hole loom foothills that look like the stubbled cheeks of an unkempt man, swept with expanses of skeletal trees burned in the 2000 Cerro Grande fire. That was the year the whole of New Mexico held its breath.

noblestwork@yahoo.com