by Richard Risemberg
When a town is there, a town is there for a reason: a reason that may grow and flower as the town grows, and spring forth seeds that in turn spring forth new reasons for a town: and these then can outgrow and overwhelm and smother the original reason, which lives on only in the dried twinings of a name in an ancient language. And no one now will think there could have been another reason for this town than the one there is today, or another name, another language, a people, a simpler need.
Especially this is so
in the Southwest of this, America, where there have been
so many changes of regime: there were the unknown painters of
rocks near Carrizozo; there were the Anasazi farther north, so lost
in time their name means simply, "Old Ones," in a later
language that is now itself dying out; there were the Indian tribes
whose daughters kneel in Spanish churches now, quiet dawns
of desert Sundays; there were the Spanish themselves, who gave this country the
names our tongues still pronounce; there were miners and cattlemen,
farmers and railroadmen, artists and tourists and soldiers
and wielders of fire.... And each remembers only that the
town was here for him alone, for the convenience of the
task at hand. As the traveler stops to buy, so the
storekeeper stays to offer, and then each with his curious
accent continues on into time, according to his habitudes.
So it is also for Alamogordo, the town pictured here,
latterly named in Spanish for a great cottonwood tree that
grew near some hills in southern New Mexico, distinctive
enough a mark that travelers once met there. It is gone
now, cut down probably to feed the railroad in the days of
wood-burning engines, just as the rivers and streams were
long reserved for the boilers of the Southern Pacific line.
Then in the Fifties came Diesel powered trains, and the
railroad sold the water rights to the town. And the
townspeople said, Now we can grow, as we should have been
able to grow all these years if we had had that water.
For something had happened at the end of the second war,
something that changed the world, and from the tiniest of
seeds had sprung a new reason for the town to be there: a
reason that could be neither comprehended nor ignored.
The military had been there for a while already,
sowing the desert soil with dynamite while its flyboys
practiced murder in their delicate craft: the heroes of
Europe, of the Pacific, trained their hands, hearts,
eyes above this desert, while artillerymen yanked on the
lanyards endlessly and waited for the puff of smoke on the
distant hill. This too had become normal since the first
war: it was as good a reason as any for a town. But one day
in the summer of 'forty-five, a strange thing happened
nearby: the sun rose twice, first in the west, and a little
later in the east. A couple of weeks after, strange news
came from Japan: and the rest of the people of Alamogordo
knew what a few had known already: that not too far out of
town, in a valley whose name translates from the Spanish as
"Deadman's Journey," at a pair of map coordinates code-
named Trinity, mankind had exploded the first of the
l00,000 or so atom bombs so soon to be assembled. And an
old town had a new reason to be there.
People can accommodate themselves to nearly anything--
and they usually need to. Today, downwind from Trinity, F-
15s paint twists of thunder in the skies over Alamogordo,
while missiles dart from hill to hill at range outside of
town: and it has become somewhat quaint. Just as a bomb
casing from the days of the B-17s can decorate the
gateposts of a ranch, a rocket styled after the old V-2 can
advertise a cocktail lounge, and the military space
shuttle Discovery a dry cleaners. Surely it must seem
picturesque and naive to the scientists driving through town from
foothill suburbs that would be comfortably anonymous
anywhere in America: How can these little people know, they
must think, that even the sleekest of those symbols is old
hat, that the new kid on the block is the chemical laser
that can smoke a plane at 50,000 feet or blind the cameras
of a surveillance satellite? Rockets, they think, as they
drive past endless tracts of trailer parks, who do I know
who does rockets anymore....
And in the trailer parks they wake, the little people, and lay aside
their dreams for uniforms, for mechanic's blue or driver's
green or the T-shirt of the manual laborer; they eat
breakfast to the fighting of the kids, and when they drive
off in their grunting cars to go to work the wives wait in
the doorways watching, half-dressed and already weary with
anticipation of the day. Most of the men drive over to the
Air Force base or the missile range to work as tenders of machines or
tenders of men who tend machines, squinting into the bleak
sky for days on end till the paycheck comes that's already
spoken for by bills on the table. Standing, waiting,
pretending they don't know that someday they will wait for
a rocket not much different from the one they tend to come
lurching silently toward them from the Other Side. 
Well,
it's a job, they think, as they drive back to the endless
tracts of trailer parks. Where else can a guy like me get a
good steady job. And the wife and kids are waiting for
them, hot and fidgety after a long day in the trailer, or
tired from schools and typewriters and the bustle of lunch
counters, and together they fold themselves into the
shadows of that long long box, squirming for comfort in the
sofa in front of the TV set. They crack open that first cool
beer of a long day's long night, put off their uniforms, and
take in the canned dreams of the tube, while the desert
stars whirl over them in ignorant majesty.
They are the "Mozarts assassinés" of which St. Exupery wrote, the little people
nurtured to mere utility like so many rows of hothouse
vegetables, their living tailored to the convenience of
industry, politics, war--to the service of Power. When a
town is there, a town is there for a reason: this one, to
embrace the little children of the Bomb.
By day, they are allowed to hold the reins of a force they are not allowed to understand: and at the sounding of the horn they scramble home, to small tin rooms that shiver as they wrestle for a semblance of love, which is another force they are not allowed to understand. Young men and young women hungry in innocence, endlessly breeding innocence in the lingering twilight of that first false dawn.
Words and pictures by Richard Risemberg
