Early on the morning of Friday, August 17th, with the rumbling of heavy trucks, the neighing of horses and ponies, the screeching of monkies, the trumpeting of Susie Q, the elephant, everyone will know that BUD E ANDERSON’S ALL AMERICAN CIRCUS has arrived at the Tularosa circus lot.
It has always been spectacular to watch the arrival of a circus and how with precision, truck after truck of material and animals are run on the lot, unloaded, and in just a few hours the big top, with its pennants floating in the air, the side show with its colorful banners, all have been erected in the twinkling of an eye, forming a complete little city of its own, ready for the sound of the calliope, the blare of the brass band which announces that all is in readiness for another day of good wholesome family fun and entertainment.
The circus coverage barrels on for another three grafs, down to the bottom of the page, just as flowery as it began, mentioning the “monkies” a few more times and adding the “Great Wilkins Family of aerial artists” along with “Buckley’s Troop of trained dogs” and “Rodeo Ranger with his well known educated white Stallion Tonto” and finally bringing things to a close with the promise every reader eagerly awaits: “clowns, clowns, clowns.”
Just below the circus ad is an invitation to the Church of Christ in Alamogordo—the warehouse chapel my family has attended for much of the seven generations we’ve been here. They invite you in August 1945 to attend a study of chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, aka Revelation, aka the Apocalypse. The name of the sermon this week is “A Mere Form, or a Mighty Force; Pretence or Power,” preached by Minister Tice Elkins. His congregation had been working their way through the Apocalypse for months, one chapter at a time, meaning they started way back in May, long before they had any notion of the Bomb. When the Gadget exploded in secret early on the morning of Monday, July 16, the church had just finished, the evening before, reading aloud from chapter 8, which ends with the writer proclaiming, “And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabiters of the earth!” The angel says woe because the angel holds a key to some awful force and has every intention of using that key, which the angel does straightaway: “And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.”
As we sit at the ballpark, listening to names of the dead, luminarias flickering and merry-go-round spinning, Henry Herrera and I try to talk about something other than the Bomb. We talk about how he plays guitar every Sunday at mass, about how his favorite thing in the sky these days is hot-air balloons, about how he knew my granddaddy and uncles from work out at the missile range in the seventies, after the Department of Defense had gobbled up so much of the land in SNM and was offering the only decent-paying jobs around. But I can’t shake the clowns and so I put it to Henry: Did you go to the circus a few weeks after the Gadget’s blast? He doesn’t remember. He can’t say for sure. But, yes, every now and again, there’d be a circus right here. Then he waves his arms again just like he did when he was showing how the fallout came down, saying from where we sit along the third-base line over to Highway 54 running north to Carrizozo, right in that thousand or so feet of sand and mesquite is where Bud E. Anderson’s All American Circus raised their big top seventy years back. We’re more or less sitting on top of the old Tularosa circus lot. And so the neighing of horses and ponies, the screeching of monkies, the trumpeting of Susie Q, all that happened right here but back then and in the wake of the Gadget. Susie Q stomping her giant feet in the radioactive ash. The Great Wilkins Family of aerial artists swinging on their trapeze high above all the settled ash. Trained dogs and Rodeo Ranger and clowns, clowns, clowns, traipsing around in it. And maybe Henry but definitely plenty of the other residents of Tularosa who were children then, many of those whose names are no doubt being read in the endless list over the PA, all of those first children of the Gadget running around excitedly and hollering and the screams of the kids on the merry-go-round out past center field are the screams of all these luminarias rolled back in time and reformed into the light inside the children they once were, running around with their peanuts and big eyes and experiencing magic for the first time right here at the circus in the world’s first radioactive fallout.
July 17, 1945
(One Day After the Blast)
Twenty miles northeast of Trinity, M. C. Ratliff and his wife and their grandson and dogs and livestock have been wondering why their house and fences and land are covered in gray snow in the middle of summer. The Army sends out two doctors to investigate a canyon they’ve just named Hot because it keeps sending the needles on their Geiger counters into a tizzy. The doctors wander onto the ranch in Hot Canyon and are surprised to see the family going about their chores, gathering food and shoeing horses. All the official Army reports claim nobody lives in this area. The doctors do not identify their reason for visiting the Ratliff ranch and do not explain the snow of ash, which will continue to appear at dawn and dusk for many days, blanketing the roof and garden and livestock, sinking into the soil. The Ratliffs appear alive enough and are left to go about their business, dusting the soot from their animals and vegetables, collecting ashy rainwater from their roof for drinking and washing after a long day of chores.
* * *
The luminarias are extinguished and Henry heads onto the baseball field with nearly everyone else in the stands, people currently suffering from cancer and people who have loved ones who are suffering from cancer and people who have survived by the skin of their teeth, all to get blessed by the village priest, who lays his hands on their heads one by one as a medicine man, an Apache from the Mescalero reservation in the nearby mountains, dances and drums and sings and kneels down in the dirt around home plate and rubs his hands in the dirt and tosses the dirt up into the air like he’s trying to show all things it has contained over time. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes: the simplest story ever told because the whole human part is erased.
When I arrived at this ballpark vigil for the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, there was a fair amount of confusion at a table where people were gathering and compiling the names of the dead. Some folks wanted to add a name to the list but didn’t know if they could because the person didn’t die from cancer. And the list makers said, Well, this is just for those that are dead. And the family with the name said, Oh, yes, our father is dead. And the list makers said, Oh, well, this is for those that had the cancer. And the family said, Oh, yes, he had the cancer but that’s not what killed him. After a long back-and-forth regarding the exact factors that went into the father’s death and all the illnesses he suffered and all his addresses of residence, his name was added to the list, a luminaria lit in remembrance of him.
It is so hard to know, seventy years on, exactly whom the Gadget hurt. The explosion killed no one yet the fallout fell all over this desert. In a world where the causes of cancer seem to seesaw between everything and most things and absolute randomness, the issue has become what you might call muddled. The National Cancer Institute is in the midst of a years-long study in Tularosa, but there’s not a whole lot of hope that it’s a real priority because they only interviewed a half dozen residents of the village and, according to Henry, their questions were dumb. The state’s own Tumor Registry claims cancer rates for Anglos, Hispanics, and Native Americans in the Tularosa Basin are similar to those throughout New Mexico, that there is nothing anomalous. So I hold a three-page homemade health survey in my hands, a thorough inquiry of family background and medical history and a page listing over thirty types of cancer, each with a box next to it for writing your year of diagnosis or your family member’s year of diagnosis. The village wants to finally collect their own proof that they were downwind of something terrible that now creeps through every new generation too.
The notion of downwinders, American citizens exposed to fallout from nuclear tests, wasn’t part of the national consciousness until the 1970s, even t
hough aboveground nuclear weapons testing stopped because of environmental and safety concerns in 1963. The horrors of death by radioactive fallout were well-known, despite government obfuscation, as early as 1946 with John Hersey’s publication of Hiroshima. But somehow we convinced ourselves that nuclear weapons detonated in the name of science rather than war (if such a distinction can exist) caused little or no harm, despite all evidence to the contrary. In 1954, U.S. tests of a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll made the Marshall Islands the most contaminated place in the world. That fallout eventually killed a Japanese fisherman on the boat Lucky Dragon 5 along with eighteen Marshallese children who played in the downfall of what they called snow. Their deaths would lead to compensation payments just two years later for all Marshall Islanders, the first-ever restitution to people affected by nuclear weapons testing, and the last of that kind for nearly four decades. The year 1954 included live television broadcasts of the Bikini test, and a flood of press about the dead fisherman and Marshallese children, and an aftermath of men in full hazmat suits closing down fish markets on California’s coast, and a blockbuster film, Them!, about giant killer ants, mutants born out of the Gadget’s blast at Trinity—all of that and still there was little political pressure to do much of anything about the plight of American downwinders. Not until 1979, and about 750 more nuclear tests on our soil, did Ted Kennedy first try (but fail) to pass a radiation-exposure compensation act for American citizens.
Then John Wayne died.
In November 1980, seventeen months after Wayne lost his long battle with lung, throat, and liver cancer, People magazine ran his photo on their cover with the question “Did atom bomb tests give him and other stars cancer?” Their story raised the possibility that, while filming The Conqueror in Utah in 1954, John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and many others in the cast and crew were exposed to radiation from a test site at Yucca Flat, Nevada, about one hundred miles from their shooting location. The year before production began, there had been eleven nuclear explosions at the Nevada site, including the infamous atmospheric test of Dirty Harry, which resulted in the highest downwind contamination ever measured in the United States. Ninety-one of The Conqueror’s 220 cast and crew were diagnosed with cancer by 1980, with forty-six of them already dead, including Wayne. No definitive link between these nuclear tests and the cancers of those from The Conqueror production has ever been established. Wayne’s penchant for six packs of Camel smokes a day didn’t help to resolve anything. But the possible nuking of an American icon finally helped imprint the plight of downwinders on the national conscience. Apparently the only thing more horrifically un-American than the filming of The Conqueror, a historic flop in which John Wayne plays the monstrous Mongol emperor Genghis Khan, is the thought that while John Wayne played Genghis Khan, we murdered him with our Bomb.*
Joseph Masco’s got this idea in his book The Nuclear Borderlands that he calls the nuclear uncanny: “Fear of radioactive contamination has … colonized psychic spaces and profoundly shaped individual perceptions of the everyday from the start of the nuclear age, leaving people to wonder if invisible, life-threatening forces intrude upon daily life, bringing cancer, mutation, or death.” Masco writes mostly about Northern New Mexico, the strange collision of Pueblo culture and weapons scientists around the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos where the Gadget was built, where most all iterations of the Bomb were designed after the Manhattan Project, where all contemporary nuclear weapons science is increasingly happening in immersive computer simulations, where the horrors of the Bomb have become, quite literally, only virtual. You’ve likely never heard of Masco’s book because we don’t read about the Bomb much anymore, we don’t talk about it much except as a plot device in our blockbusters or a chess piece in foreign policy charades. The Bomb is shorthand for all sorts of fear and unimaginable devastation that we’d rather not ponder too deeply, and so we keep it at arm’s length, a symbol encompassing so much that it might as well be empty. We are becoming numb to the Bomb despite it pervading nearly every aspect of our lives, which is exactly Masco’s thesis and why you’ll likely never read his book: the Bomb has become a bore, an unimaginative plot point to inflate the stakes of any film or book or political discussion. But Masco argues that we still feel daily the worry and fear of the nuclear uncanny even as we have made the thing that causes that fear a cliché so innocuous by our pop-cultural representations of it that we can no longer remember why we feel so fearful all the time. And that makes the fear worse, and useless.
The guy in front of me on the bleachers at the downwinders vigil with the John Wayne koozie is George. I met George a few weeks ago at a downwinders meeting in the village town hall, where he also brandished his Duke koozie.
“The dislocation and anxiety produced by these moments of tense recognition,” writes Masco, is “the nuclear uncanny…”
George hasn’t seen The Conqueror and didn’t know about Wayne’s possible downwinder status but waves his koozie at me, showing me he’s still got it.
“… The nuclear uncanny exists in the material effects, psychic tension, and sensory confusion produced by nuclear weapons and radioactive materials…”
George sat through a whole rant of mine about Wayne and The Conqueror and the existence of the nuclear uncanny and how I found his use of that particular koozie, that seemingly innocuous object, at a downwinders meeting to be a kind of anxiety-inducing deal.
“… It is a perceptual space caught between apocalyptic expectation and sensory fulfillment…”
George doesn’t have enough fingers to count up the number of people in his life with cancer. This became evident as he was counting them on his fingers for me and, when he ran out of fingers, just pointed to people in the room, telling me how he knew them and which cancer they had or, if it was someone who had already passed, shaking his head and shrugging because he had nowhere to point.
“… a psychic effect produced, on the one hand, by living within the temporal ellipsis separating a nuclear attack and the actual end of the world, and on the other, by inhabiting an environmental space threatened by military-industrial radiation.”
George finished his pointing and shrugging and said, There’s nobody but us to remember how these people died. There’s no monument. No recognition and no compensation and no monument to anyone. The only monument we got is for the Bomb.
George talks about compensation because that’s exactly what many downwinders have already received. In 1990, thirty-six years after the first payments for nuclear-weapons-test fallout were given to Marshall Islanders, the U.S. government passed RECA—the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act—which provides up to $50,000 of compensation for downwinders and up to $100,000 for uranium miners, mill workers, transporters, and any other workers exposed to radiation at nuclear test sites. RECA covers exposures of private citizens in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona but fails to acknowledge that anyone may have been hurt by the Gadget in Southern New Mexico.
I don’t have the expertise to convince anyone that the Gadget is responsible for all or any of the cancer in the Tularosa Basin. But I can tell you Henry’s story. And I can quote the government’s own 2009 report: “Exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion were measured at levels 10,000-times higher than currently allowed.” And I can give you Masco’s summation of the character of our species’ nuclear weapons testing:
The international nuclear complex is estimated to have already produced over four hundred thousand cancer deaths worldwide simply from the dispersion of radioactive materials into the environment. It also has consistently targeted minority communities for the most dangerous nuclear projects, creating a new form of global environmental discrimination some have called radioactive colonialism. Put differently, even as the sole remaining superpower, the United States is also the most nuclear-bombed country in the world, having detonated nearly one thousand nuclear devices within its own territorial borders.
So then this is really why we’re at the ba
llpark, why the downwinders of Tularosa have organized into a consortium, why there are letters of support from U.S. senators and representatives being read from the press box—the victims of the very first atomic blast want an apology and a chance at compensation. The standard RECA settlement, $50,000, might help pay for a few months of chemotherapy but wouldn’t even begin to settle the full bill for someone such as Henry, who’s battled the sickness multiple times. Really the folks of Tularosa want recognition, acknowledgment that the first of nearly one thousand nukes exploded on American soil had some consequences for the citizens nearest Trinity. We were lab rats, says Henry. That ought to make us hero patriots or something. Which we are. But nobody gives a damn.
Henry’s eighty-one now and his story of the Gadget likely has all the refinements any of our stories might after seventy years of retelling. In some ways it’s just another anecdote mapping the birth of a new age our scientists now call the Anthropocene Era, an epoch in which the earth is affected by human technology more than all natural forces combined, an epoch whose beginning we often pinpoint at exactly forty-six seconds past 0529 hours on July 16, 1945: the moment of the explosion at Trinity. A miner felt the blast forty miles east in White Oaks. Windows broke 180 miles southwest at a bar in Silver City. A whole passenger train gawked at the flash 235 miles to the north. On a highway between Socorro and Albuquerque a blind woman, Miss Georgia Green, exclaimed, What’s that?! In Tularosa, little Henry’s eyes lit up and his bones shook and his momma blamed him. But the part of Henry’s story that runs against the grain of the official narratives is that most vivid part: the white linens and underwear flapping in the wind on the clothesline and then all of it going gray in the snow of fallout. The government has always claimed that the wind on the morning of July 16, 1945, blew the radioactive plume of the Gadget’s fiery mushroom cloud northeast toward the plains in that corner of the state that truly was sparsely populated, that the cloud of fallout simply missed the towns of Carrizozo and Tularosa and Alamogordo in the basin to the south. The whole issue of whether anyone in the Tularosa Basin will ever get any recognition or apology about the Bomb in their backyard relies entirely on weather conditions over about twelve hours on a morning seventy years ago. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the bygone winds.
Acid West Page 4
