Wednesday, 8 September
Brock, who we'd met at Mary Ellen Long's art opening in Albuquerque, took us on a day-trip to Los Alamos and Banderos National Monument. He worked at Los Alamos for five years (on a superconductivity project, I believe) before setting up his own business in Albuquerque and starting a PhD in electrical engineering. He has many anecdotes about explosives testing (having friends more closely involved with Los Alamos' core endeavour) and has met -- or knows the children of -- prominent figures in the nuclear research field (I don't remember whose daughter Rebecca is, but she works for the National Park Services at next-door Banderos and we bumped into her hiking up to the Cliff Dwellings).
Los Alamos. The coming-into-being and purpose of this 'scientific community' are shrouded in secrecy and linked to death and destruction (it having been created to produce the A-bomb) -- but on the surface it is as banal as any other suburban development. The site was chosen back in the thirties for its remoteness, climate and natural beauty -- the former meant there were fewer people (mostly Native Americans) to displace, while the latter made it easier to lure brilliant minds to the site. It is built over three or four small canyons -- to reach the National Laboratory, for example, you drive across a bridge on the far side of which are 'toll-booths' where in the years following 9/11 each vehicle was stopped and checked rigorously, but since the recent budget cuts, now stand open and unmanned.
We spent the morning in the Bradbury Science Museum, home to scale models of Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima just three weeks after the first prototype was detonated in New Mexico) and Fat Man (named for Winston Churchill and unleashed on Nagasaki). Curiously, the only photo of a devastation was of downtown Tokyo, leveled by incendiary bombs in WWII -- which, the caption informed us, "caused more casualties and damage than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki." There were (further) educational displays on Plutonium and LINAC (the Linear Particle Accelerator), and on current research into brain scanning and genome mapping. global warming and radiation. And a whole historical section including a timeline of the development of Los Alamos and short 'personal testimonies' of the first scientists (and their wives) to be recruited to the site. Helen Cowan (on of the few female professionals), for example, spoke of how before she herself was recruited, most people at the metallurgical lab in Chicago where she worked started 'disappearing' in the late 30's --"I knew they were working on the bomb." Then they started disappearing from Los Alamos -- this time to the Trinity Site near Alamagordo, where the bomb was being tested, but Cowan was again "left out; she had to wait in Los Alamos." Weird stuff.
We lunched at the Central Avenue Grill (with the 'Quark' bar attached), then drove to Bandelier (named for Adolph Bandelier, a Swiss amateur archaeologist who was the first European to be shown the site in the1880s) where we strolled along the cliff face and ascended ladders into tiny claustrophobic caves, ceilings blackened by soot from fires, to a long ascent up 140ft of ladders to a much larger cavity which once held 23 dwellings.
On the way home, as the sun was setting, we stopped by the Santa Fe Opera but ended up deciding not to attend the Mariachi Extravaganza, instead opting for dinner at the Cowgirl Cafe in downtown Santa Fe.
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