The World Is on Fire Read online

  Maybe sometime during the night one of those big old thunderstorms rolls up out of the west, and maybe they stand outside the studio and watch it come. Forks of cloud-to-ground lightning silhouette long reefs of cloud, flashing on eighteen-wheelers barreling toward Vegas with a ways yet to go. Arc, crack, boom. Moist wind presses the boys against the wall, the smoke from their cigarettes swirling around their heads and shunting up into the downdraft. Time stops cold in moments like this, everything sharper in the strange light, the ambient electricity strong enough to raise the hair on your arms. Rain on gravel, hot smoke in your throat. When they say, We better go in, you say, Give me a minute. Lean against the still-warm cinderblock and feel the storm coming. If it’s got your number, ain’t nothing you can do. It’s late by now, the night almost gone, but you’re swinging with caffeine and nicotine and a head full of notions. Inside, your friends are waiting, and there’s a seat with your name on it. Soon you’ll walk through that door, an explosion now from close by and closer still, not yet, not yet, now. Does it really happen like that? You bet your life it does.

  Beautiful Beyond Belief:

  Rock City and Other Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age

  THIS WAY NEXT

  —Trailside sign, Rock City

  Frieda Carter was an entrepreneur’s wife, and all she wanted was a garden. But it grew. In 1930, she walked through the woods with a string in her hand, letting it trail behind. Across the big flat stone, down a vale and through a narrow cleft, up a hill and out to the edge of the mountain, where the sandstone fell sharply away. Lookout Mountain was Georgia, but the valley was Tennessee, close enough to spit. This is a place where many boundary lines touch.

  Do as she did and head down the narrow path through the boulders, winding past hemlocks and bluebells, each plant neatly labeled. Autumn fern, Florida azalea, leatherleaf mahonia, Lenten rose, sourwood, buttonbush. The Enchanted Trail doubles back on itself; you can’t see where you’re going, but you know where you’ve been. The brochure in your hand notes each location of interest.

  Which came first, paving the way or planting the specimens? Laying stone for bridges or saying the names? Fat Man’s Squeeze, Needle’s Eye, Tortoise Rock. Who claimed (a stretch) that you could see seven states; who sent money overseas for the fallow deer? These deer, entirely white, bleached as old negatives, recline on granite slabs. Are they statues? people whisper. Not until one of the creatures flicks away an insect with its ear do we move on, spell broken.

  Standing here at the lookout, lean against the guardrail and sweep your eyes over the rim of the curving Earth. Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. But these faraway border distinctions must be taken on faith. What you’re sure of are the new subdivisions spreading over the grassy fields below, the pines’ dull green, a barn roof painted SEE ROCK CITY. Closer now: drop a quarter into the slot and fix your eyes to the peepholes. The cold metal hugs the bridge of your nose as you swivel the viewer toward various sights of interest: the nearby waterfall, ice rimming its edges; Stone Face, Missionary Ridge, Lover’s Leap; the freeway.

  High atop Lookout Mountain, overlooking Chattanooga, sits Rock City—garden, grotto, moneymaker. It opened in 1932, and if you’ve heard of it you can thank Garnet Carter; he started it, started, too, the marketing campaign that made the place famous, paying to have SEE ROCK CITY painted on barn roofs all over the Southeast. Today, thanks to stricter billboard laws, the barns have become relics. The Rock City gift shop offers birdhouses, coffee mugs, and ball caps shaped like those old barns.

  I haven’t been since I was a little girl and am not expecting much. At first, Rock City seems like any other walk through the woods. But see the circles cut in plywood? Look carefully through these round portals at all the dark dreams on display.

  The iron handrails sweat cold drops on this chilly day. Next up: Fairyland Caverns, a partially man-made cave lined with dioramas of fairy-tale scenes, lit with ultraviolet light. It’s a strange adjunct to an otherwise conventional rock garden, and the black light is what makes it unusual. To get there, you follow the trail to this entrance, Diamond Corridor.

  Step into the shadowy portico and let your eyes adjust. Sparkling minerals cover the walls: crystals of dogtooth quartz, rough blossoms of calcite, glassy chunks of smoky and rose quartz. The gems gleam in the poor light. Coral lines the ceiling, some bleached white, some dyed pink, all of it from somewhere else. Yes, I remember this from my childhood visit—this entrance room, covered in glittering rocks. Back then, I’d always kept one eye on the ground, searching for treasure. During the day I pored over field guides and begged my parents to take me on rockhounding trips; at night, I dreamed of stumbling upon caches of rare specimens. I must have coveted the quartz lining this room, would have been tempted to worry a piece loose, like a tooth, knowing that even the impulse was wrong. I would have longed to sit in this niche for hours, hoarding this sharp beauty.

  Not long ago, I uncovered my old rock collection, its specimens packed away in newspaper. There were tiny garnets I had sieved from mud at a North Carolina mine; quartz, still stained from the red clay it had been buried in; fluorite crystals, purple and white, safe in their old pharmacy bottle. Other specimens were glued to cardstock that provided bits of information: galena, heavy for its size and shiny, used in the manufacture of batteries; spotty bauxite, from which aluminum is made. There was the lavender muscovite from Canada, and the yellow knob of sulfur, still smelling as sour as it ever had. Best of all, there was a polished slab of agate, small as a baby’s fist, whose every wrinkle and stripe I remembered immediately. The band of rich red with a stutter of white floating above! It looked like the horizon of a desert landscape I hoped even then to someday see.

  I loved the world, believed its every inch paved with treasure, but knew it could be ripped away at any moment. Death was real; the preaching we heard every Sunday underscored that. A farm accident instantly killed my grandfather. A girl my own age, eight or nine, lost her mother one Friday night when her mother’s car was forced off a bridge. You’re no different, the preachers said, and I had to admit their logic. They’d start in on the scary parts of the Bible: Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, the moon turning red on that great and fearsome day. The Battle of Armageddon could start at any moment, the preachers would say, even now, while we’re sitting here in this big beautiful sanctuary, and are you right with God? Well, who could be? There will be a blast of wind, the rivers will turn to blood, the preachers said. Matthew 24:29, The stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. What a relief when we could all file out of the barn-like church, shaking the preacher’s hand on the way into the bright sun, past the blooming crepe myrtles and the old crabapple tree. How could we go out for fried chicken after that? How could I lie on the living-room floor and read the funnies or look at the paper’s pictures of boring debutantes? I asked my parents about the end of the world, and they said, Try not to worry about it too much. Sometimes, after that, when my mind wandered during the sermons, I let it go—down the path my own feet had made through the pines; later, to dresses, always red, that would fit only me. I gazed at the fake stones set in the little rings I loved to wear, saw the lights of the sanctuary reflected in them, and let my eyes go out of focus, staring at my earthbound vision.

  TO ESCAPE TEMPORARY BLINDNESS

  BURY YOUR FACE IN YOUR ARMS

  —Survival Under Atomic Attack,

  Office of Civil Defence; 1950

  Fairyland Caverns is a grotto, of course, and a grotto is a place with a long history. The ancient Greeks worshipped caves, the water flowing through them, and the nymphs associated with that water. The first grottoes were naturally occurring caves, but in time people dug caves out of rock, expanded existing caves, and heightened the effect of water sources by installing pipes that spurted liquid on the unwary. The practice of building grottoes was revived in Italy during the Renaissance, when wonderful things such as water organs—pip
e organs played by falling water—were invented. Artists embellished cave walls with bas-relief; they arranged shells, mineral specimens, and chips of glass in swirling mosaics. If there were no natural stalagmites, they made their own, dripping cement into elaborate towers. If there were no nearby beachcombing sites, they imported shells from the West Indies. Those with enough money created spaces where the natural world was represented in abundance. They entered, perhaps, through the carven mouth of an ogre, his forehead inscribed OGNI PENSIERO VOLA: “Every thought flies.” These were places to dawdle, shilly-shally; places to dream.

  As in a traditional grotto, part of Fairyland Caverns is natural, and part is man-made. There are mechanical elements: piped music, rotating water wheels, animatronic sailors gone to sea in a yawing washtub. And, as traditionally, water is a key feature from the first fountain to the final room, where a stream tumbles over quartz in a four-stepped water stair, catena d’acqua. Minerals line the walls, the ceiling bristles with coral, and the pool glitters with wishing pennies.

  Leaving Diamond Corridor, make your slow way through the caverns, pausing here and there for a look at dioramas through those round portals cut in plywood. The artist, Jessie Sanders, had been expert at creating the look of real surprise. Had sculpted dozens of figures for Fairyland: miners, Santa’s helpers, bootleggers, skaters floating on a flannel-rimmed pond. Bears chase Goldilocks, but their hearts aren’t in it. Dwarfs cluster with squirrels and rabbits, Snow White poses in a pretty glen, and the faint strains of “Rock-A-Bye Baby” filter in from somewhere. Hansel and Gretel approach a sad-looking Witch too tired to be sinister, just an old woman getting home after a long shift. Her cottage’s peppermint-stick pillars tilt out-of-true. Not much, but it’s paid for, she seems to say, trudging heavily toward the kids, their hands already out.

  I’d remembered Diamond Corridor but forgotten the dioramas inside, how they fiddle with dimension, tautly foreshortening or stretching out into delirious long shots; how the gnomes’ jaws and cheekbones jut sharply, shiny with lacquer. How their beards gleam in the ultraviolet light, and how their tights shimmer. Fairyland Caverns opened in 1947, and the ultraviolet light there carries a hint of radioactive threat. Everyday things—teeth, white T-shirts—glow under it.

  In July 1945, as I’ve mentioned, scientists exploded the first atomic bomb in remote New Mexico. I imagine Jessie Sanders working on her sculptures during the Trinity test, dipping her brush in pots of fluorescent paint as scientists half a continent away calculated what the fallout might be, the half-life of plutonium, where the winds might carry the particles. Some of those particles rained down on a rancher—nobody knew he lived where he did. Of the fallout he said, It smelled funny.

  Here’s a scene from “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving’s version of an ancient story. Unhappy at home, Rip escapes to the woods with his rifle and his dog. High in the mountains he meets a group of strange, silent men, bowling and boozing. They stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze, that his heart turned within him and his knees smote together. When they look away he sneaks draughts of their powerful wine, waking in the morning to find his rifle rusty and his dog vanished, twenty years lost. He returns to his town, a place gone strange. When he insists, I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, folks just laugh.

  Rip leans on his rifle for support. Two men stand nearby, jubilant, leering. One clenches a pipe in his teeth, and the other carries a basket of glowing coals. But the look on Rip’s face strikes me; despite his long sleep, he’s exhausted, eyes dark with worry, and if he could speak he’d say, What have I done?

  Well, he’s survived his own mortality, nothing less. And so he’s rewarded with the rare chance to see his place—family, home, community—after his death, for so his twenty years’ disappearance had seemed to be. How would he be remembered? For his kindnesses to strangers, for his gentle playfulness with children? Psalm 31:12, Forgotten as a dead man, out of mind. To fall asleep under the mountain is to be erased as though you had not been. If not for the tired welcome of his long-lost daughter, Rip would not be remembered at all.

  What draughts do we drink to make us forget so much? The world shifts around us; like an old man said to me once, Used to joke you could lie down in the middle of Highway 123 on a Saturday night and go to sleep. Look at it now. You can’t see where you’re going, but you know where you’ve been. Rip awoke old, safely doddering, ignored. They’d cut down the oak tree and planted a flagpole in its place. He’d slept through the revolution.

  DIAL: 4

  OBJECTIVE: CHICKAMAUGA BATTLEFIELD

  —View scenic points through these Bausch & Lomb

  binoculars. 25 Cents.

  We aren’t the first to visit this mountain, not by a long shot. Consider the Battle of Lookout Mountain, also known as the Battle Above (or Within) the Clouds. See Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain, with Pictures of Life in Camp and Field, B. F. Taylor, 1872. “And here we are pleasantly walking where sleeps an earthquake; making each other hear where slumbers a voice that could shake these everlasting hills,” wrote Taylor, musing in the munitions tent of the Army of the Cumberland, 1863. After the battle, he wrote, “Mission Ridge has been swept with fire and steel as with a broom.”

  Taylor’s camp imagery, vital and immediate, lets the reader in on a world that war movies skip. He notes the tents’ “genuine home-like air. The bit of a looking-glass hangs against the cotton wall; a handkerchief of a carpet before the bunk marks the stepping-off place to the land of dreams; a violin case is strung to a convenient hook. . . . The business of living has fairly begun again.” Can’t you see the place, clear as a stage set? So with a few strokes here and there, we make a resting place, as if to stay awhile. But things change quickly when the order comes to strike camp. Overnight, “the canvas city has vanished like a vision. On such a morning and amid such a scene I have loitered till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight, leaving nothing behind for all that light and life but empty desolation.” Broken branches in a smoldering heap; trampled fields of stubble. Give it a few years and you’ll never know anything out of the ordinary had happened here, though decades from now some keen-eyed person might turn up a bullet casing or a coin crusted with verdigris.

  Of the soldiers, Taylor wrote, “If there is a curious cave, a queer tree, a strange rock, anywhere about, they know it. . . . Home they come with specimens that would enrich a cabinet. The most exquisite fossil buds just ready to open, beautiful shells, rare minerals, are collected by these rough and dashing naturalists. If you think the rank and file have no taste and no love for the beautiful, it is time you remembered of what material they are made.” So they might have loved the grotto of Fairyland; they might have created their own cabinets of wonder, protomuseums, in the lidded boxes of peacetime life.

  If there is nothing new under the sun, neither is there anything new beneath the earth. Grottoes functioned as early theaters; caves have interesting backdrops and good acoustics, and their shape lingers still in the arch over the stage in modern theaters. So, too, Fairyland Caverns is stuffed with scenes from childhood stories, frozen and stiff. And that light! Ultraviolet light is a way for humans to see the world as some other creatures do; it translates their vision into our own language of sight. Honeybees see patterns on flowers that direct them to pollen and nectar. Because these patterns show up at shorter wavelengths, they are visible to bees, but not to humans. In a rock shop I visited once, a curtained corner hid a display case containing mineral samples. When you pressed a button, an ultraviolet light switched on, and certain samples glowed green and purple. Once the timer ran out, you saw the same specimens, dull and unremarkable. Ultraviolet light let you in on their secret.

  The light in Fairyland Caverns points toward something larger than itself; like an anxious friend, it pokes you in the side, whispering, This isn’t right. Things have changed, and it feels wrong to repeat the same old stories. Although it’s a comfort to know what comes next—Y
ankee Doodle went to town / Riding on a pony—there’s a disconnect, a break: Trinity. If you want to see something of Trinity, go to New Mexico, where the nuclear age began. Face the explosion, the original light that Fairyland slantwise reflects. Yes, you could trace it further: say the bomb started with the Curies’ radium research, or with Jewish physicists on the run from Hitler; say it started under the old squash court at the University of Chicago; say the seeds of apocalypse were sown at the Earth’s very beginning. But for argument’s sake, start in New Mexico.

  Drive the wide freeway to Albuquerque, past adobe houses and mitt-shaped buttes, anvil clouds and remnants of Route 66, and pull over at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. The exhibits there explain the preparations involved in the making of the first atomic bomb, with thumbnail biographies of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. One of the most interesting things on display is an old copy of the Los Alamos newspaper. Dated June 25, 1945, the Bulletin lists the movies to be shown at the compound’s theater; it scolds the mystery person who’s been pocketing the knives from the mess hall and promises that no new ones will replace those stolen.