New Mexico Mercury

The Gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man, and Mr. Sandman

In the back seat of a l942, olive drab Plymouth sedan, sits a little box in a wooden tray that looks like you might have made it yourself in junior high wood shop. If it were July 1945, the little box would have contained 13.6 pounds of plutonium, enough to release the power of 20, 000 tons of TNT, the equivalent, some calculations have it, of the payloads of 2,000 B29 bombers, with enough destructive force to take the lives of 60,000 to 90,000 people when a similar device in Fat Man was exploded over Nagasaki a few weeks later.

The plutonium in the little box perched on the back seat seems now oddly normal as if it could be a baby in its bassinette. It’s not even in the trunk. The Plymouth Sedan would have driven down from Los Alamos in mid-July going through the intersection of 4th and Central downtown in the early morning on its way to the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, now known as White Sands Missile Range. The contents of the little box in the back seat would be installed in The Gadget, the first atomic bomb, and exploded July 16th at Trinity Site, sending shockwaves that were felt over 100 miles away.

When you visit the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History on Eubank SE in Albuquerque, you can see for yourself how casual and almost run-of-the-mill these monstrous and incredible devices seem. The paradox of such things being created in New Mexico, one of the world’s most serene and beautiful places, is almost as hard to grasp as the explosive tonnage of the weapons.

We forget this staggering contradiction all the time. We forget that just down the road from the museum much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is stored, secretly, somewhere underground. We forget that the biggest nuclear depot in the country until l992 was Manzano Base, around the area known as Four Hills.

Had my little friends and I in elementary school in the l950s been hiding under our desks and glimpsed “the ten thousand suns” before being turned into ash because MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) wasn’t the deterrent it was meant to be, I’d never have known that the potential for ultimate human absurdity was created in the place I would call home.

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History reminds us of these incongruities. We remember once again that anything can happen anywhere, and often does.  It’s driven home again that not three hours by car from where The Gadget and its vast killing capacity was made, Chaco Canyon remains splendid in its quietude and isolation. We know that the sanctuary of the Jemez Mountains, the gentle retreat of Santa Fe and its history, lore and museums, seven major Pueblos and the exhilarating landscape of the Espanola Valley are all a short drive from Los Alamos National Laboratories, the seemingly innocuous source of the Cold War’s terrors of instant annihilation that inhabited the nightmares of generations around the world.

These are not reasons to skip the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. In fact, it makes it one of those must see places. It gives us a sense of how reality itself operates beyond our expectations and limited perceptions, just like the atomic and subatomic worlds.

On the floor of the entrance to the museum is a beautifully polished granite rendition of the Periodic Table, itself a map of reality for all of the things of matter, natural and not, of this earth or of the world of humankind and its unaccountable stupidities. As I cross the Table and approached the mock ups, in identical metal casings, of Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, the eerie strains of “Mr. Sandman, send me a dream” by the Andrews Sisters I think, came from the radio display of l940s memorabilia right out of my early childhood.

And outside you can actually walk around a B-29 Superfortress, like the Enola Gay which carried Little Boy to the skies over Hiroshima. It’s a tiny plane when compared to the B-52B Stratofortress that patrolled the airways with thermonuclear weapons at the ready during the Cold War.

For a person born in the l940s, the museum has an uncanny feel, intentional I’m sure on the part of its designers and curators. The section on the cold war, with its newsreels of Russian nuclear explosions and TV broadcasts of American propaganda telling kids and their families that there are Soviet bomb sights aimed at “YOU,” is brilliantly and efficiently displayed. The museum, in fact has so much information, it requires numerous trips. The lessons on radiation, nuclear medicine, and the uranium cycle are worth exploring when museum fatigue hasn’t yet set in.

When I left, I felt a sense of recognition and strange gratitude that the crazy notion of MAD had worked, and is working, so far, despite all the hydrogen bombs on all the missiles still left around the world, pointed at “YOU” and at all of us. Why MAD works, though, is beyond me. Why should a supremely sane equation – try to obliterate us and we’ll obliterate you – work in a world that seems utterly irrational most of the time? And will its sane logic continue to work if “extremists” get a hold of one of those weapons, or make one themselves, extremists against whom one cannot retaliate because they’re freelancers without countries?

Working Cowboy Rodeos at the Charles R Ranch

The mental image is indelible. Working cowhands, some pretty young and lean, some with gray mustaches and a suitable paunch, running after cows trying to milk them, and squirt the liquid into the small opening of small milk bottle, then mounting up and riding to beat the dickens to the finish line without spilling the milk. Folks laughing, cheering, snorting all over the bleachers, folks from the country and the city, folks who work the land for a living and folks who work cities as a way of life.

It wasn’t a big thing. And that’s the point. Big moments in history tend to stay with us, so much so that we tire hearing of them and even come to think of history itself as a collection of big things that come to mean very little personally.

But, course, the movement of human time is made up of countless moments that come and go, and some of them, small though they may seem, end up being remembered.  And with great fondness.

A while back, southwest of Las Vegas, New Mexico, rodeos for working cowboys were held at the 10,000 acre spread of the Charles R Ranch, owned by Mike and Pat Koldyke of Chicago who bought the ranch in the early l980s. Mike was one of the principle investors in the Albuquerque Isotopes and helped bring back minor league baseball to the Duke City.

The Koldykes love people.  Those who were invited to the rodeos year after year came to realize that Mike and Pat had a happy genius for bringing people together, all kinds of people, Chicago politicians and educators, New Mexico architects, writers, teachers from the United World College and New Mexico Highlands University, and wiry cowpokes from ranches in the area,  from Romeroville, Las Montoyas, and Ribera to Sarafina. Dilia, Anton Chico and beyond.

In the early years of this century, cowboy artist Duke Sundt was the ranch manager of the Charles R with its herd of beef cattle and Corrientes, big horned, fiesty beasts used in Rodeos. And he’s a fine two-step dancer as well.

The Charles R rodeos were small, intimate, and a hoot for everyone. The mood was so loose and comfortable it felt almost like a family affair, even if the family was made up of a crowd of strangers. Out there in the rugged rangeland of the Charles R, cowboys were roping calves, cutting steers, barrel racing, bumping down the arena on ornery calves, and laughing and hollering, and talking to one another, getting a chance to converse with people they’d probably never knew existed before.

But it was the big feed and barn dance that brought everyone together the most. And it looked like if you could ride a horse, you could two-step your way to cowboy heaven while you’re still alive.

Out there in the night, under the stars and the warm lights from the barn, it wasn’t hard to think of the Charles R Ranch rodeos as an oasis in history, peaceful, safe, filled with music and, for a moment, so far away from the troubles of the world, they almost ceased to exist.

I think such times happen more than we think, and most of them are much smaller and more fleeting than country rodeos. Still, they are never to be taken for granted, and ever to be recalled. If we don’t pay attention they’ll desert us, these memories of moments that the end, perhaps, we hold most dear.

Ralph Looney of the Tribune

When Ralph Looney retired as Editor of the Rocky Mountain News, the Scripps Howard afternoon paper in Denver, in l989 he took to writing a weekly column. The eloquent economy of his prose made you want to read anything he wrote.  And his concern for justice, for the misfortune of others, for a sense of right action and civility and social compassion gave his readers courage to follow their instincts of decency even if the issue was unpopular or obscure. Ralph was an old fashioned conservative. He believed in honor, in doing your job, in being scrupulous and law abiding, and never taking advantage of those who are less capable of defending themselves than you are.

Ralph wrote a column once about honoring both Indians and Custer’s soldiers at the Little Big Horn National Monument. In the face of a lot of anger he supported a bill to build a shrine honoring the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors that fell in the battle. Looney reasoned the warriors were not the “enemy” but rather people redressing a grave wrong when the U.S. government went back on a treaty giving the Sioux the Black Hills “which was theirs to begin with.”

As an editor, Ralph lead by example, and taught young reporters by never sparing the rod and spoiling the piece. But when you got something right, his smile was worth ten raises. He was the Albuquerque Tribune’s editor from l973 to l980.

I first met him in l966 when he was City Editor of the Tribune. I’d lost a job, and was verging on desperation when I walked into the office of Tribune Editor Dan Burrows and said something like “I’m a poet, I can write, and I need a job.”

The gods of luck look after idiots like me. Dan took me to Ralph’s desk and the next thing I knew I was hired and writing up news releases for fillers.

A kind and gentle man with a gift for friendship, Ralph growled under the pressure of deadlines. He could roll his eyes, he could frown, he could get outraged when a source wouldn’t come though and would tell a reporter, as he picked up the phone, “we’ll, see about that,” as he chomped antacids and barked into the phone, “This is Ralph Looney.” That’s all it took.

He was, in fact, terrifying. But if you worked for him, you produced what he wanted, clear informed stories written so people would want to read them. And if you didn’t, he’d teach you how. His loyalty under pressure was amazing.

In a month or so after being hired, I was assigned to the police beat. I thought at the time I was being punished. But it was Ralph’s way of giving a compliment with a heavy burden attached. The Tribune liked crime stories, as many as I could produce a day, funny little fillers about the fat burglar stealing a sausage and getting stuck in the air vent as he tried to climb out of a kitchen; the dog owner who was charged with being a public nuisance when his poodle peed on a policeman’s cuff; the car thief who cut his hand so badly after smashing in a window he hailed a cop to call an ambulance.

Ralph was demanding. A student burns up in a traffic accident and Ralph’s instructions were to “humanize it,” which meant to talk to the parents or siblings. If you couldn’t, you risked pain of death or Ralph’s equivalent, the shake of his head in despondent disappointment. If a murder happened a half hour before deadline, he’d expect you to have all the info, write it up fast, faster than fast, this instant, with a lead that foreshadowed the whole piece, would make readers sit up and take notice, and hard press the Journal to find a new angle the next morning.

He was a teacher. After the first time you spelled a name wrong (he seemed to know how to spell the name of every person in the city) you just prayed you’d never do it again, and triple checked every attribution, five-minute deadline or not. You learned your craft from Ralph. And you always knew he could do your job way better than you could.

I started covering the federal beat after a while and was sent to a forest fire in Cloudcroft. Ralph tossed me a camera, the keys to the company car, and said, “bring me back a front page pic.” And I thought I heard him mutter, “or else.” “But Ralph, I don’t know how to use a camera.” He humphed. “Point it, push this button, and don’t come back until you’ve got what I need.”

I went into the fire itself to get that picture, and I was coughing and gagging, I saw to my left a man in a helmet, an ax over his head, flames all around him, and I pointed the camera and snapped the shutter. Blind luck. It ran on the front page the next day. Like all great teachers, Ralph trusted his students, he empowered them, sometimes with abject fear, but mostly with confidence that you’d find out how to do what needed to be done. He never pulled his punches but he always helped make you look good, if you couldn’t do it yourself.

A column Ralph wrote at Christmas in l992 seemed strangely prophetic after his death eight years later. It had a headline I’m sure he wrote: “Find a Way to Counter Alzheimer’s Before Trying to Extend Life Span.”  It was a funny piece about so-called progress, adding years to life with drugs but without adequate health care or a growing social safety net, adding 500 TV channels with nothing better to see than football and “more and louder commercials with lots of rock,” he wrote. “I don’t believe I want to live to be 225 years old.” As fate would have it, Ralph died in September 2000 in Albuquerque at age 76 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

My last memory of Ralph was in supermarket some years before his death. We had just run into each other in one of the aisles, and when he recognized me he gave me the kind of smile an old general gives a soldier he hasn’t seen in years. We didn’t have much to say, but that smile has warmed me ever since.

Velociraptor Runners and Snapping Turtle Frisbees

The Roadrunner leaves no doubt as to its genealogy. It is, without a doubt, a dinosaur even now. But it does have its endearing qualities. Loyalty appears to be one of them.

A handsome roadrunner with a gimpy leg – it may have been broken and so splayed slightly but with a flair – was seen in our garden appearing abandoned and alone. Our worries for its ability to feed itself were allayed almost instantly when, bad leg notwithstanding, it darted with considerable speed after a lizard.  Its handicap was no obstacle. We admired its fortitude.

It stayed in our garden for a few weeks, then disappeared. We were concerned but had learned over the years to abide with the ways of wild.

Next spring, though, we were relieved to see her again and realized that our gimpy friend was a lady with a gallant gentleman courting her. It would seem her strange leg was not even a handicap in the world of romance. Anthropomorphizing in the garden is a professional hazard of Romantics, but the couple warmed us greatly, delusions of Aphrodite or not.

It doesn’t compute, I agree, that a feathered dinosaur could become something of a household pet. But one Roadrunner of our acquaintance did make frequent, if not daily, stops in our neighbor’s kitchen. It would walk right in the front door, move to the counter and wait patiently for its offering of cooked chicken. And then, turn and walk back out into the world with the confidence of a being who could snare a mouse or a lizard or a snake with the effortless speed of lightening.

Once we witnessed the Velociraptor nature of the Roadrunner. We were on the Duranes Lateral for our daily walk. Some Roadrunners caught our attention, two of them were hunting in the alfalfa fields right next to the ditch road, darting in and out of the desert willows. Then we saw three of them hunting, then four and five and perhaps even seven, all in one place, all making Duranes seem like Jurassic Park. We pitied the poor field mice and lizards.

One must never forget that even in the middle of Albuquerque, down by the river or near the main ditches human beings are the anomaly and critters rule the day.

Passing by a sandy ditch bank one morning, we spotted a strange circular object, sort of army issue olive drab, looking for all we knew like a military Frisbee partially buried in the dirt. I reached down to pick it up and my adrenaline went wild. A little head darted out, with a vicious beak and a frighten hiss, looked around, eyed me with lethal malice and would have struck if I hadn’t jumped back with a yelp. It proved to be a snapping turtle. Our friends at the Rio Grande Nature Center informed us it could take a finger off with no trouble at all, something that not even a Velociraptor Roadrunner could do.

(Photo credits: Nuclear Museum by Jim McIntosh, rodeo by a4gpa, roadrunner by Lwp Kommunikacio, snapping turtle by Paul Stein.)