Road to Roswell
August 21, 2005 - Sunday
Off to my right I see a butte, perfectly formed but in miniature, probably sixty miles south of Lubbock. I will drive hours before I see another and the next one will be very much bigger. This one stands orphaned, alone for many miles, as if it wandered away from its family in a slow motion, glacial-time crawl until it got to this spot and sat down beaten and completely lost and unable to get back home.
In Post, Texas, I pull into a McDonalds to pee, music from the Rocky Horror Picture Show is playing, and on the way out, guilt gets me so I stop at the counter to buy a coke.
"What size?"
"Medium, I guess."
"That'll be a dollar fifty-nine. But you can super-size it for seventy-five cents."
I give the kid two-thirty-four.
"No sir. You pay seventy-five cents." And he hands me back a dollar fifty-nine.
Which is how I came to be drinking a forty-two ounce Coca Cola which lasts me across the rest of west Texas, through places like Tokio and Tahoka and Brownfield and Bronco and past every crossroad that looks like the final scene from Castaway where Tom Hanks has to choose his future. I zoom past dead little movie theaters in these dead little towns and this is another movie, The Last Picture Show, a wasteland of empty storefronts and busted businesses. Steinbeck's dust is everywhere. Bugs are hitting my windshield like a protein storm. Giant towers run along the highway and they look like one angular, massive cowboy after another standing high shouldered, arms wide, electric wires as rope stringing them all together. No, wait … they look like George Bush tries to look.
Hooray New Mexico! The road is much smoother, a longhorn steer stands off to my right just across the state line and sunset is dead ahead. When I look at the clouds, I am fooled into believing for a moment that I am seeing a huge shoreline of a beautiful and strange red lake.
In the twilight cars come infrequently from the opposite direction and I count when I first see a headlight, one Mississippi, two Mississippi … three hundred Mississippi. I can see cars at least ten miles away. With the wide, flat distance, I feel like I am riding on the earth, really riding on the earth. For the first time in my life, I am aware that I am an earthling.
There is a haze of light to the west, not actual light, just light residue. I am twenty-five miles away but it is probably Roswell, UFO capital of the world, and to make the scene even better than the Chamber of Commerce could have ordered it, on the radio is the George Noory syndicated talk show which is devoted to a serious academic discussion of flying saucers. It makes me look up into the sky but the only peculiar thing I see are flames near the northern horizon which turn out to be gas burning off oil wells.
This is perfect. More perfect than yesterday when I drove through Bill Clinton's hometown of Hope, Arkansas and the debauched televangelist, Jimmy Swaggart was on the radio crying on about Clinton's sins.
I cross the Pecos River and in a few minutes I am entering Roswell, population 45,000, just a regular town with a wide Main Street, a sturdy courthouse, and signs everywhere saying, "Aliens Welcome." My grandfather would have loved this. Everyone in the family laughed at him when he said he once saw a UFO. They laughed even more when he said he saw hippos in the Chesapeake Bay. He'd feel right at home out here. He drank some.
August 22, 2005 – Monday
The next morning, from faraway, I see the curious visitors: jeans shorts and blue lined legs, purple flowered Hawaiian shirts, purple purses, cigarettes smoked and tossed on the sidewalk.
I'm not exactly sure what I expected the UFO Museum to look like. Perhaps a disk-shaped building in the desert. Maybe something misty with fog machines and lights blinking to musical tones as if in a movie. At least a geodesic dome. But for the moment the UFO Museum (Research Center and Hall of Fame) is housed in an old movie theater near the corner of Second and Main in downtown Roswell.
Inside, the place is a fifth-grade science project: Papier mache space ships, rocks that look like ET, drawings of rockets, and affidavits swearing to god all this is true.
A large man and I wander through the museum, in step and silent. Finally, I ask the man where he's from.
"West Virginia. Taking the RV over to Vegas in a day or two."
"Casinos?" I ask.
"No sir, Area Fifty-One."
I am perplexed and he sees it.
"That's where they took the space-vehicle after it crashed." He says this with complete and total conviction.
"Right, Area Fifty-One," I say.
"Been out there a couple times. Great place to eat right nearby. You like chicken-fried steak?"
We both pause to pay our respects at the glassed-in, life-sized display of the dying, or dead, alien. (I can't be certain which.) It lies on a hospital gurney being examined by a doctor in a white coat and a more ominous figure (military intelligence?) in a black suit, black hat and white surgical mask. A terrible burn between the legs of the wispy nude figure, who really does look remarkably like ET, seems to have burned off his or her genitals. The alien's nipples, fortunately, are untouched. I wonder why it has nipples. I wonder why I have nipples.
I stop in the gift shop on the way out, buy some junk and talk with the cashier, a good-green kid who is joining the National Guard next week.
"How come?" I ask.
"So I can get me my GED and get a good job when I get out."
The boy's best friend, who also joined the National Guard, just got sent to Iraq, but the recruiter said it won't happen to this boy because he's going to be an MP.
I lean across the counter, shake the boy's hand and wish him luck.
"Be safe," I say.
"Oh, don't worry about me, sir. The man told me I won't go. I believe him."
Near the lobby, about fifteen feet from the boy who believes he won't go to Iraq, there is a list of five reasons why the government has covered up alien visitations. Reason number four is the best. World religions and their true believers would go nuts if there was evidence that humans were not alone in the universe.
I leave the museum and get a cup of tea across the street at the Not of This World Christian coffee shop. The woman who owns the place looks only at her computer screen where she plays a never-ending game of solitaire.
Next door at a small gift shop, I buy a small plaque – "Roswell, The Truth Lives Here."
An hour later, I drive north out of town on Main Street and pass the courthouse again, this time in daylight. I see that The Ten Commandments are etched onto large stone tablets.
I suppose it's good to believe, no matter what you believe. And Roswell has managed to believe nearly everything.
Los Alamos
August 22, 2005 – Monday
Mexican hip hop is on the radio. I hit seek and find, voila! Taj Mahal, from back home in Springfield, singing a Bluesy-Caribbean song. I smile enough to make my face hurt. Elk signs appear, they look like muscular deer, and this sign, along with nearly a million other signs just like it, has been the victim of a drive-by shooting.
I want to stay in Santa Fe. The exits fly by, I pick one and in a mile or two I am on another highway with no way off. I change plans and keep driving.
I drive through a town whose name I cannot pronounce until later when I get home and look it up, Pojoaque (pe-wa-ki), and past its high school proudly announcing that it is the home of the Pojoaque Elks and Elkettes.
Los Alamos is the next town, about ten miles ahead, up a winding road of cutbacks. On my left, cars curve down the mountain and to my right, on the other side of the guardrail, the road drops straight-away, a thousand feet below. Rain is falling, soft in stretches, only hard every now and then. My eyes flit across the valley to the ridiculous beauty of the pink rocks and the changing shadows spreading under the darkening clouds. I drift into the downhill traffic, jerk my car back in line and my stomach sinks. My palms sweat all the way up to Los Alamos, half a mile higher than the highest place back home in New England. Thunder rolls across the valley like distant bombs and the coincidence of that sound in this town, where the first Atom Bombs were made, unsettles me.
The Bradbury Science Museum is a couple of stories tall, clean and modern, angled walls painted every shade of red I've seen in New Mexico. I buy my ticket, walk in, and before I know it I am crying. Almost sobbing and I cannot believe how quickly this feeling rises, how strong it is, how I don't really care who sees me.
The two reasons for these tears, this museum, this town, and perhaps the state of the world, sit almost next to each other. The bombs. Fat Man and Little Boy. They are usual. Mundane. They are unimpressive. They look like you could fill them with propane, hook them to a couple of grills and barbecue pork chops for your neighbors. And these things started it all? This was it? This is what we are afraid of? They have caulking like my bathtub has caulking. They have nuts and bolts and metal and screws the way all dumb things have nuts and bolts and metal and screws.
I circle the exhibit and stop near Fat Man to watch a short, small, 3x5-sized video of men loading the original white metal bulb onto the plane. A bulls-eye is painted on the nose of the bomb. Notes are written on its side – "To Hirohito with love and kisses."
I cannot believe I am watching this. I say to the small screen, Don't do it. Stop, as if my voice could travel backward sixty years and sixteen days and be so loud and so convincing that they would put the damned thing down and just walk away. And of course, all I am is an idiot standing in a museum talking to a three-minute loop of silent videotape.
Just beyond the bombs is a timeline of the war and I think of my father, the age of my own son right now, fighting in the Pacific and how without the damned bombs he quite likely would have been one of many to have died in an invasion of Japan. And I cry all over again because I cannot think of him killing people, although he did, and I cannot think of him as dead, although he will be not too long after I get back home.
Around the corner, another panel shows that Eniwetok (Ānewetak), an island where my father fought and killed people, became a nuclear testing site.
Near the exit there are wall-sized pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they are awful. Awful. Burned bodies, real bodies, not funny waif-like mannequins from this morning's diorama of the dying alien down in Roswell at the UFO museum. These bodies are stiff and bloated and smoke rises off many of them and other bodies are just vaporized into the air. Poof. Gone. And some asshole is on his cellphone walking behind me talking business, loud – "Can you get a quote on the price?" – and I want to turn around and punch him. I leave the museum.
A Japanese family walks toward me, a father and mother, their son on a skateboard nearby. I nod, they nod, we smile shyly.
I walk past Fuller Lodge, a large log building that used to be home base for the Manhattan Project. I begin muttering to myself, shaking my head, overwhelmed that on this exact spot, everything, forever on earth, changed. I have never before been to a place of such importance, never before felt what I feel right here. My knees stiffen.
A little boy about six or seven holds his mother's hand as they walk away from Fuller Lodge, now the town's community center. He is wearing a karate uniform with a brilliant orange belt, exactly the color of her hair. She fiddles with her cellphone as they walk to their minivan and drive away. And life goes on, doesn't it?