El Paso, TX
I am become Death, The shatterer of Worlds. — J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, July 15,1945
It’s a hell of a thing to stand in the midst of a silence so oppressive you can’t even hear your own heartbeat and squint against the sun-bright intensity of brilliantly white gypsum fields to your north and try to imagine seeing a mushroom cloud boiling up in the pre-dawn darkness.
What an intensely beautiful and intensely creepy place.
Sadly I am about a week early (or six weeks late depending on perspective) from being able to go to the actual Trinity Site (only open the first weekends in April and October). But I could stand in the midst of the White Sands National Park on the highest and most northerly dune I could reasonably get to and look out to the north and imagine where the Atomic Age began. It’s pretty heady stuff. Somewhere out there, amidst all this desolate beauty and distracting silence mankind first demonstrated the weaponized potential of the most basic elemental forces. Wow.
Maybe that’s why the aliens showed up two years later a little bit to the east. Surely there’s some travel delay in coming from Alpha Centauri.