July 9, 2006: Albuquerque, Los Alamos, & Centennial

Before we left Albuquerque, we took a quick tour of the old town, a district of narrow streets and traditional adobe buildings, where the city was founded exactly 300 years ago. Like its more famous counterpart in Santa Fe, the old town surrounds a charming, tree-shaded plaza. A Catholic Church, San Felipe Neri, is the centerpiece of the square. Nearby stand the aquarium, the botanic garden, and the very muddy Rio Grande River.

We left Route 66 at the junction of I-40 and I-25, where we turned north toward Santa Fe. The adobe-colored and turquoise-trimmed overpasses of the interchange reminded us that we were in pueblo country. It was unfortunate that we didn’t have time to visit the Indian pueblos of northern New Mexico, particularly Taos, but negotiating the winding mountain roads and high passes of this route would have been prohibitively time-consuming and would not have allowed us to reach Denver tonight. Debbie and I have visited these pueblos before, however, and bought some nice jewelry there.

Near Santa Fe lies the mesa-top town of Los Alamos, where my father worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was an assistant chief engineer, responsible for installing what project members called “the gadget” in its casing. His mother joined him there, and they lived and worked in cabins and Quonset huts for two years. You can see one of my dad's project badge photos here.

After the war ended, Dad participated in Operation Crossroads, also known as the Bikini test (from which we get the name of the swimsuit). He built a collector to sample the atmosphere after the atomic blast and rode with it on a plane that flew through the mushroom cloud produced by the bomb.

People sometimes ask me how my father felt about helping to build the first nuclear weapons. The short answer is that he believed them to be a necessary evil which brought the war to an abrupt close. He figured they saved more lives than they cost, since an untold number of people – both Japanese and American – would have died in a full-scale invasion of the home islands.

People also ask me how I feel about the bomb and my father’s wartime job. My answer: Japan was essentially defeated before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. The nation was so weakened that the US could have successfully sued for peace without resorting to the utter destruction of two more cities. In any case, the use of nuclear weapons upon civilian populations was and is absolutely unwarranted and unjustifiable.

But I say all of this with the benefit of hindsight. In 1945, the US was desperate to end the conflict, and it didn’t have good intelligence on Japan’s military capacity. Moreover, as with all new forms of weaponry, American leaders were itching to deploy them, demonstrate their effectiveness, and scare the hell out of their enemies.

My father, like the vast majority of his generation, held no personal animosity toward the Japanese. My parents later hosted a student from Japan for two years and attended her wedding in Tokyo. Debbie and I lived and worked in Japan in 1987 and 1988, and we were married there to boot. Most of my current students are Japanese, but I'm understandably hesitant to tell them of my father’s role in the war. When I do, however, they never seem to hold it against me, recognizing that the past is the past and that we cannot choose our relatives.

In Los Alamos, it was raining cats and dogs (“No,” shouted the boys, “hippos and elephants, sharks and whales!”), so we retreated to the Bradbury Science Museum, operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which contains a casing manufactured for one of the original atomic bombs. When my family visited the area back in the 60s, the casing was mounted outdoors and my mom took a snapshot of my dad (in his characteristic bowtie) and my brother, sister, and me (the one waving) sitting atop it. (According to museum staff, the "Fat Man" in the photo below was painted white to prevent corrosion, and the "Little Boy" is a reproduction.)

The museum focuses on the history and research of the lab, charged with maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal. It must do so without detonating any nuclear weapons, since the active US test program was discontinued by President Clinton in 1992. The lab accomplishes this by subcritical component testing and one of the largest agglomerations of supercomputers in the world.

Like the lab, the museum is stuck firmly in the Cold War: it addresses in great detail the whats and the hows of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, but not the whys. It simply assumes that the U.S. needs a “safe and reliable” nuclear deterrent, without a trace of irony in the juxtaposition of those words. By "safe and reliable," the lab and museum just mean that the bombs should go off if and only if the button is pushed.

Tommy and Danny found the films of nuclear explosions and quizzes about the effects of nuclear radiation quite absorbing, pardon the pun. Only Tommy, however, seemed to fully grasp the grave import of what he was seeing.

Due to the gully-washing rain we encountered, we decided to skip nearby Bandelier National Monument, which contains Pueblo Indian ruins. But the rain did give our car a wash, which was much needed (along with gassing up, at $2.99 a gallon). By the time we returned to Camel Rock, near Santa Fe, the sky had temporarily cleared.

Beyond Las Vegas (New Mexico) to the north, we entered gently rolling prairie, where the torrential thunderstorms continued most of the way to Denver. Heavy raindrops smacked our windshield in a furious tattoo and lightning flashed all around. We listened to the conclusion of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book on tape, and then the boys watched Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit on our laptop. Here’s a memorable quote from the book: “Some people spend all their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home, they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. They don’t pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home.”

After dinner in Raton, just south of the Colorado state line, Debbie offered to switch places and drive a bit, but the wind and rain and approaching darkness unnerved her, so I took over again. Debbie prefers to drive when the sun is out, the skies are clear, and the road is dry, straight, and flat; that should describe Kansas in a couple of days if the weather forecast is accurate. Debbie's driven a bit in California and Arizona, but I've driven about 95% of the way so far.

We passed Colorado Springs, headquarters of the huge and very creepy conservative Christian cult known as Focus on the Family. Colorado Springs is also home to Garden of the Gods, a city park unlike any other city park in the world, filled with towering, uniquely-shaped rock formations. It was one of Debbie's favorite spots on the cross-country trips her family took when she was a child, but it was too dark and wet and late to stop, so we promised ourselves we'd visit later in the week.

Cousin Mark and his wife Kathy and daughter Abby welcomed us to Centennial, a southern suburb of Denver, at 9 p.m. Mark is an attorney, Kathy is a nurse, and Abby is going to be a high school senior. Her sister Emily is currently in Belize on a church mission.

I have many fond memories of childhood visits to Denver to visit Mark's family. His folks, my Aunt Gerry and Uncle Ed, passed away last year. Gerry was a schoolteacher and, as the eldest sister, a repository for a lot of the genealogy and lore on my mom's side of the family. Mark sent me two big boxes of her archives after she died: photos, documents, memorabilia, and more. Guess I'm the repository now.

Gerry, by the way, is short for Geraldine. She's the one on the right. Her sister, my mom, who is named Mildred, is in the middle, and her other sister is Harriet, on the left. (They don't name 'em like that anymore!) The three were born in Akron, Colorado, a small town on the plains in the eastern part of the state, in the 1920s.