The World Is on Fire Read online

  None of this would be all that noteworthy were it not for the fact that the Trinity test is less than a month away. There will be a blinding flash and rolling thunder, hot wind and shock waves, but in the meantime someone on the base has lost a “long-haired black Persian cat with yellow eyes, wearing a collar with bell”; someone else misses “a Buick hub cap,” offering a reward for its return. The list of items FOR SALE includes a “Large, strong, varnished clothes basket. Used 1 month as bassinet. $3.50.” This bears out what I’ve read about the growing Los Alamos maternity ward, as does the WANTED TO BUY list, which includes a request for a “Good baby buggy. Call 496.” Trinity’s plutonium core will arrive at the test site three days early; someone will drive it down from Los Alamos to Jornada del Muerto in the back seat of a ’42 Plymouth. A good family car.

  AND WE ARE IN A STRANGE NEW LAND

  —“The Atomic Age,” Life, August 20, 1945

  Does Rock City show our past or our future? Without the ultraviolet light, it’s the past—nursery rhymes, fairy tales, a garden static as blooms preserved under glass. But the ultraviolet light shows the future, a place radiant with garish color. The familiar fairy tales are transformed by this luminous color scheme into something peculiarly atomic-age. I read about the workers, mostly women, who painted the glowing tips of alarm-clock hands. They licked their paintbrushes to get a fine point; at night, their skin, clothes, and hair glowed. The radium in the paint gave them bone cancer, and they filed suit in 1927. By court day, they were too weak to raise their right hands. This strange light makes innocent stories sinister, recognizable but changed. The atomic calves who grazed in the desert during Trinity look normal but for their dusting of white. Swept with fire and steel as with a broom. Seared everywhere the fallout touched.

  Before Trinity, the scientists at Los Alamos made a wager. Would the bomb set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire, and if it did, would the consequences be local or global? They liked betting, those physicists; in another pool, each of them guessed how much power the bomb would have, as compared to tons of TNT. The man who won happened to come in late, after all the reasonable figures had been taken. Out of politeness, he guessed what seemed like a ridiculously high figure, and it turned out he was the closest. (Twenty thousand.)

  At the moment of detonation—July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m.—a passenger was on her way to morning music class. She saw the bright flash of light and thought it was the sunrise. What was that? she asked her brother. She saw the explosion, this woman—even though she was stone blind. Hadn’t it seemed like any other morning? Maybe the brother drove a little too fast through town, running late, past the still-dark filling station, radio dimly on. Suddenly a blast of light, unlike anything ever seen, and what must he have thought, the brother?—blind too, at that moment, and too stunned to steady the car. No word for thought, not at first, silence then thunder and hot wind as not far away, the physicists lifted their faces from the ground, and Oppenheimer thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

  It smelled funny, the rancher said, standing in the desert as the fallout rained down. Was that the vaporized jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, greasewood, killed at the moment of detonation, falling on him? Rip woke from his long sleep and staggered out from under the mountain to a world scrubbed bare, glowing gray in dull light. Slept through the revolution. What if he were the only one left? Even Wolf long gone; every dog gone.

  THE FUTURE BELONGS

  TO THOSE WHO PREPARE FOR IT

  —Advertisement, Prudential Life Insurance, Life,

  September 24, 1945

  After Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, it makes perfect sense: you go underground, a place of safety, but also a place of ancient, subconscious threat. Go where the dead go and make your home there. Where ants and blind worms tunnel, where moles stroke smoothly through the clay. You will beg the mountain to cover you, and the rocks to hide you. It will not be enough. By August of 1945, the bomb no longer secret, an editorial in Life read, “For if there is no defense, then perhaps man must either abolish international warfare or move his whole urban civilization underground.” Fallout shelters (suburbia below ground) are grottoes lined with hoarded goods. Hollow out a place and fill it with the stories you used to know, but even the light is changed here, and things shine as they once did not, setting your glowing teeth on edge. Continued Life, “Constructing beautiful urban palaces and galleries, many ants have long lived underground in entire satisfaction.”

  Paging through these old magazines, you want to shake the people in the ads for Packards, frozen peas, Campbell’s Soup. Wake up! But the draught’s been drained; done is done. What can follow the photos of the Trinity crater? An article about the new Miss America, flutist, a tall New Yorker. Ads for underwear and Arrow dress shirts. Mamma, use Swan soap. Free cake of soap to any baby born in 1945; write away for coupon. The business of living has fairly begun again, wrote Taylor; said Mom and Dad, Try not to worry about it too much. Good advice, if you can take it. At breakfast, just after Trinity, physicist George Kistiakowsky sat in the dining room at the Los Alamos Lodge and said, “That was the nearest to doomsday one can possibly imagine. . . . I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last man—will see something very similar to what we have seen.”

  Who knows how Jessie Sanders felt about the bomb? She was busy in her studio, pouring Hydrocal; a survivor, building a new world. How do we live with this new knowledge of how the Earth will end? Set it aside. Keep on working. Said journalist William Laurence, witnessing Nagasaki—of which Trinity had been a test—“We removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky. . . . As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petals curving downward, creamy-white outside, rose-colored inside.” It’s an artist’s description, filled with color and comparison, and yet this is light unwholesome, strong-armed into something never before seen. If Fairyland Caverns is a memento mori, it is unlike the Renaissance ones, where sculpted skeletons reach from caskets to claw the air. Here there are no bones—vaporized instantly—just the glowing circles of Baa Baa Black Sheep’s wool, hanging in the darkness like an afterimage. What made me think of Trinity as I walked through Fairyland? Light spoken in a new tongue; a cave peopled by children with glowing faces. But the truth is you find what you look for. Maybe not the exact specimen, but once the scales fall from your eyes you must see the world, strange and dark. A red moon floated above a stadium on a noisy Friday night. I could have read there a sign of doom, or atmospheric dust, or both. Just the same, once I saw Trinity I would see it always, everywhere.

  Imagine the world deserted. The raven did not return to the ark, but lit on the bodies of the floating dead. Under a photo of the Trinity crater, the caption reads, “The first atomic bomb’s crater is a great green blossom in the desert near Alamogordo.” The heat from the blast fused desert sand into a greenish glass, trinitite; how I would, as a child, have loved to find a piece of that poison glass. Imagine a desert rasped clean of every living thing. The bomb’s crater, shallow to start with, fills in a little more every sundown when the wind kicks up. Now, sixty years out, you wouldn’t know anything had happened there if not for the plaque, though there’s rarely anyone around to read it. Bits of trinitite pocketed years ago, ground to powder, or buried. A waste place. Neither stubble nor crumb. Till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight. So it has been. Will be.

  Outside the caverns, safe in the half-empty parking lot, come back to yourself. Unlock your car and drive slowly down the mountain road, careful on the switchbacks. Turn on the radio. Pass the first barn: GOOD BYE TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT ROCK CITY. Yes, that’s right; these barns are how you heard about the place to start with. SEE SEVEN STATES. WORLD’S 8TH WONDER, BRING YOUR CAMERA. BEAUTIFUL BEYOND BELIEF.

  THE LORD’S WILL SHALL BE DONE
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  NOT YOURS OR MINE

  —Roadside sign outside Chattanooga

  The barns were new once. Bright boards wept sap. There was that one roofed with hand-rived shakes cut from the great felled oak. The old men said, You got to do it at the right time of the light of the moon lest the shingles curl. Shakes nailed down tight.

  Clark Byers didn’t need stencils; understood the different iterations of barn, varying shapes in the same family. Painted SEE ROCK CITY on roofs with a wide brush. That dry wood drank paint, didn’t it. Hot work, sweat running down his spine, paint spattering his forearms, pulling his hair as it dried. Carolina grasshoppers leaping from yellow straw to light on tall pokeweed. Pokeweed juice a dye the Cherokee used. Had used.

  Made his own paint from linseed oil and lampblack. “There were no such things as rollers,” he said. “Used a four-inch brush, never had to measure letters and always worked freehand. Once that paint got on, there was no getting it off.” He carried paint, rope, chalk, brushes. Dying barns deflate like lungs. Inside them it is dusty, with a different kind of darkness, and in the rafters you might see wasps swarming, or old swallows’ nests. Termites chew the planking, piling gray dust on the floor of pounded red clay. TO MISS ROCK CITY WOULD BE A PITY read the John Molyneux barn. That was from the 1930s. It’s torn down now.

  Traditionally, it took forty days and forty nights to cure tobacco in the barns. In early spring, you weighted seeds with ash to sow; come midsummer, cut green leaves, working slowly down the line. Bundled stems together in hands and set a slow fire. The leaves cured to brown, supple as skin on a wrist. Smoke wriggled out through gaps in the walls. You’d see it wafting over the fields, smell it on a still night, dusty and sweet, like grass in August but darker. Most people have forgotten all this by now, or never knew. One day won’t anyone remember.

  Ten Years You Own It

  Salton Sea, California

  Smears of heat rise from the car, the pavement, my sister’s head. I step out of the car and onto a dead fish, crushing its skull under my heel. The air’s so dry it shivers, the sun’s so strong that freckles pop like paint across my arms, and the stink—from tons of decaying fish—is making us all sputter and choke. The Salton Sea is the kind of place most people go out of their way to avoid. Not me. I’ve talked my family into coming here, all because of a photograph I’ve seen.

  Tilapia can stand bad treatment—hotter water, higher salinity, more pollution—better than most fish, but sometimes the Salton Sea gets to be too much even for them. When that happens, they die off in huge numbers, sometimes as many as eight million a day. I walk down the beach with my family, all of us crunching tilapia underfoot. The fishes’ eyes go first, pecked out by ravenous shorebirds, but eventually all the fish transform from curled-up wholes to neat ladders of vertebrae to, finally, pearly piles of loose scales that lie scattered across the beach like bingo chips.

  I lean over the water’s edge but don’t step in. The water itself is tea-dark, but its surface is as bright as tinfoil. Broken slabs of concrete and stubs of rebar jut underwater. We walk slowly past a row of abandoned house trailers, wrecked during the last of the big storms. Here’s a planed-open shower stall, a rusty oven with its door wrenched off, a shank bone from a big dog, probably a Lab. Here, washed up on the water’s edge, lies an empty pack of Skydancer cigarettes, a warrior in a headdress lifting his open palm to the pale-blue sky.

  We were joking in the car, but that’s all evaporated now as we squint at the water, a little confused, a little sweaty. It’s eerie here, even at high noon, and I’m not sure why. This feels like a place located outside the bounds of normal time, like an amusement park, but we’re missing something. Calliopes and tin whistles: this beach is silent.

  MIRAGE: 1958

  Cue the music, coming to you live from an unseen band. Somewhere, some fellow sings, beyond the sea / Somewhere, waiting for me. The trumpets, nasally muted, swing along in the background, counterpointing the melody, propping it up. A drummer brushes the skins, and despite the terrific heat, everything is very, very cool. And you’re here to see it all: the sleek cigarette boats peeling the water open; the gulls flying past crinkled mountains; the platinum sun. The ice in your drink goes to water and you swallow it. When a breath of wind passes over your face you’re immediately grateful, as if heaven sent it particularly to you, just to see if you’d notice.

  For thousands of years, Desert Cahuilla Indians lived here, watching the water come and go, and farming on these banks. But the Salton Sea’s current incarnation began as a mistake. In 1905, the Colorado River, which had been diverted to irrigate local agriculture, overcame its banks and poured full bore into the desert for two years, when engineers from the Southern Pacific Railroad finally blocked it with tons of riprap. The Alamo and New Rivers continue to drain into the Salton Sea, as does agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley. Since 1909, the Torres Martinez band of Desert Cahuilla has held the title to ten thousand acres of land that lie on the bottom of the Sea.

  In the mid-1980s, Richard Misrach shot a series of large-format photographs of the Salton Sea. These images, collected in Desert Cantos, are dangerous viewing for those with a certain bent: they’ll put a spell on you. Take this one, Diving Board, Salton Sea, of an empty swimming pool with a diving board and a flooded horizon receding to the vanishing point. The floodwater surrounding the pool is a strange, limpid blue, with a depth impossible to divine. I’ve gone back to the image again and again, trying to figure out why it haunts me. Partly it’s the story that the empty pool contains; what turned a resort into a ghost town?

  But more than that, it’s something in the water. This is no ordinary sea, no ordinary sunset, and despite its calm surface, the water reminds me somehow of solvent, mercury thinned with gasoline. This is water with an opinion.

  MIRAGE: 1902

  The sun doesn’t do all the work, but it does what you can’t. You pour barrels of water into pools you’ve dug, then go round to tend the ones you set out yesterday and the day before. The sun licks the pools dry, like the fire of the Lord on Elijah’s offering, licking up the water on the altar and the water in the trough and the water soaking the wood, then the wood itself and the pieces of the sacrifice and the stones of the altar, cracked open in the flames. Sweat crawls down your neck as you rake these things over, turning the damp spread of new salt into neat piles. Pinch the stuff between your fingers and taste of it. Precious dust, come to you free, waiting in the desert like manna. Bow down in the sand, eyes shut from gratitude or knifelike sun. Nobody here to see you or ask why.

  After World War II, speculators promoted the Salton Sea as a resort destination. At just fifty miles south of Palm Springs it seemed like a sure bet. Agents brought investors by the busload from Los Angeles to put their money down on tidy lots lining the curving residential roads. Boomtowns like Salton Sea Beach, Desert Shores, and Bombay Beach—where we’re standing now—grew up along the water’s edge, near boaters who raced across the water, setting world records. The salinity (saltier than the Pacific) and elevation (more than two hundred feet below sea level) combined to make this very “fast water.” Frank Sinatra and Guy Lombardo played shows at the Yacht Club just down the way.

  But over the next twenty years, the boom faded, and then the storms hit. Hurricane Kathleen in 1976, Doreen in 1977—the second “hundred-year storm” in two years’ time—followed by seven years of heavy rains, which reduced the trailers we’re walking past to support beams and twists of insulation. A few people still hang on in town, but nobody lives on this beach anymore. The flooding patterns are too unpredictable, and most of the time the whole area stinks to high heaven. A few years ago, the state tore the Yacht Club down.

  I can see why Richard Misrach shot his photographs in the mellow, rosy light of sunset. Noon is grimmer than I’d expected, and the scene is stark and sad in the eye-watering sun. Scalded, scabbed. There’s a woman in a bikini doing a fashion shoot on the water’s edge. She vamps and poses on the broken
concrete, the Sea shimmering behind her. A car whips into the parking lot, the woman at the wheel scanning the area for someone she doesn’t find. (Vanity plate: KANNABA.) She cuts the wheel hard, and as she streaks away, we can hear the Bon Jovi she’s cranked up. Who says you can’t go home?

  Wasn’t this what I’d wanted to see? Evidence of a practice apocalypse, terrible but local: if you’re lucky, you can leave it behind. We stopped to see the disaster, but which one? Several bird species depend on the Salton Sea, and these beaches can teem with egrets, herons, gannets, terns. Yet there are massive bird die-offs, too; during the worst one, in 1996, park rangers worked day and night and still couldn’t keep up, stuffing dead pelican after pelican into the blazing maw of the same incinerator model favored by undertakers.

  I head for the car. Buttons of salt on nail heads, rusty radio stuffed with sand: if you go looking for a portent, everything you find will seem like one. I know that on the bottom of the Sea there’s an old salt works, a locomotive, a railroad track. When the river flooded in 1905, it covered everything, double lines of track leading down and vanishing into the water. On a slab of broken concrete, someone’s written MEMENTO MORI, MEMENTO VIVERE in neat Sharpie letters. What looks like lime Jell-O bubbles in a pair of footprints on the water’s edge. It would be so easy to float in the Sea, the muscular water holding me up, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

  We drive away, passing a truck loaded with gleaming fists of garlic and a tidy trailer park named for St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. Past a billboard that reads $99.80 DOWN, $99.80 A MONTH, TEN YEARS YOU OWN IT. EVERYONE QUALIFIES. And even though I know the Salton Sea is an old-time swindle, even though the car still reeks from dead fish and iodine, I’m tempted. You can get it for a song. Said Bon Jovi, Who says you can’t go back?