Transmission from P. O. Box 1663

Day 92: Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Bradbury Museum at Los Alamos Lab in Los Alamos, NM
Drive from Santa Fe, NM to Albuquerque, NM
I was not happy to be leaving Santa Fe; the above should make that abundantly obvious. Matthew was likewise upset. He had quite loved the Borders bookstore.

But Auntie insisted we do something interesting and educational, and she was driving, so off we went.We drove along some absolutely stunning stretches of land on our way to the top-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory that one hears so many whispers about. The parents of some of Matthew's friends once worked at the genius lab, so we were curious to learn more about its history and current role.We swung by the (completely free!) Bradbury Museum and learned about the lab of fame. Los Alamos was created to house the development and testing of bombs during World War II by the unlikely pairing of a soft-spoken scientist (Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer) and a blunt, bold military man (I forget his name; I'm carsick). General Leslie R. Groves.

The entire town was given birth around that premise—that young intelligent scientists and their wives and children would need resources to blot out the creepiness of the federal government summoning you into the middle of the desert for an unspecified amount of time for a confidential purpose. The town did not technically even exist; on everything from government documents to marriage certificates to birth certificates the address given was a mere p.o. box number. P.O. Box 1663.
The museum was pretty good, very informative and quite factual. My (somewhat old-fashioned) concern with modern museums is that they try to oversimplify concepts that should not be simplified without distortion occurring. The Bradbury Museum was not the case. We were tested spatially and allowed to experiment with conduction; we learned the properties of uranium and the challenges of nuclear waste. We did not have sufficient time.
But all the while, as secretive and controversial as the Manhattan Project was, I could not help feeling jealous of those scientists and workers--not jealous of the job necessarily, but the nuanced richness of the vistas surrounding them. I loved the sweeping hills of red dirt, the fierce scraggly bushes clutching desperately for life, the jagged sedimentary rocks, the endless compassionate sky. I truly love the desert.