Time has some curious properties. We age, we separate from our pasts, learn new things, and on and on and still, there is repetition and a certain tinge of cruelty to the world.
When I was in fifth grade, 10-years-old, we lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In 2000, the Cerro Grande fire took out 50,000 acres of land and over 400 homes. We were evacuated for about two weeks, stuck in Santa Fe, and no one could do anything but watch the same scenes over and over and over on the news, very late into the night.
A 10-year-old child, I think, processes a natural disaster very differently than a 21-year-old adult.
These past few days I've been watching as Los Alamos once again burns, as its people are evacuated, and as once again threat to nuclear materials supersedes the protection of homes.
I have more distance from it this time, far away in California, but it certainly provokes the old memories. It is an eerily-similar situation to the one over 10 years ago, but watching a video of the line of cars creeping down the single mountain road out of the town has a distinctly different flavor from actually being in one of those cars myself, unable to see very far past the smoke plume and practically tasting the ash.
Even to this day, the smell of wildfire still provokes a kind of barbed jabbing somewhere deep in my abdomen.
Los Alamos is a complicated place. It has a shadow on its spine. Most towns arise sort of organically, I think. People plant themselves and say, we will cultivate a home for ourselves on this land.
That is not Los Alamos. Los Alamos was birthed for the singular purpose of nuclear research—of determining the most naturally unnatural way to ease destruction. Did the scientists of World War II realize that the work done at Los Alamos would have implications far beyond an atomic bomb? That it would tip the future of human beings into a perpetual global fear of total nuclear annihilation?
Probably not.
It is so complex, that place, the life it brings to its residents...the intensity of its beauty and its far darker underbelly.
When the Cerro Grande Fire ravaged the town in 2000, it was a disaster, the result of human stupidity—what should have been a “controlled burn,” gone awry.
Now, though, I have to wonder...another blaze...another eruption into fire. Los Alamos has had a history of death and trauma since its very conception. It is locked into this strange, almost mythical relationship with Japan, as well, and both populations retaliated and killed and now both places have faced tremendous recent devastation via natural disasters. There is still death and still pain and the people of both places have had no option but to face it all stoically and steadfastly.
I have time and distance now, but I can hardly know what the current residents of Los Alamos are feeling right now, especially the ones who have already seen the Cerro Grande fire.
Stay safe, everyone, and strong.
You are always in my thoughts.
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