Los Alamos Punk

“Hey man, can I see your ink?”

I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Los Alamos, NM, working from the road and trying not to explode at the soccer Mom behind me. She has incessantly blathered for the past 45 minutes to a friend about her childrens’ college plans and whether or not they will get into Harvard or Stanford. In front of me is a timid–hard-ass to his friends no doubt–teenage boy with dandruffed hair and a washer-worn My Chemical Romance t-shirt. He wants to see my tattoos, and enjoying the recognition of my friends and I at his age, I oblige, even though I’m way past deadline and at my wit’s end over the paid Internet connection that works only intermittently.

He surveys the tattoos on my arm, and then points to his own, on it a shitty scrawl that would resemble a prison tat if not for his youth and obvious suburban upbringing. I feign a certain encouraging tone, too busy to continue the conversation indefinitely yet trying to encourage a young punk kid bored in a mountainous suburban wasteland.

“What are you doing here?” he asks incredulously. “Camping down at Bandalier,” I explain, and he asks what I think of Los Alamos. “Not much,” I say, and going with it, he launches into a keenly-rehearsed comedy bit, excitedly saying, “well I can show you the tour.” He points East. “The labs are over there,” West, “the desert’s over there,” South, “there’s trees over there.”

“This town fucking sucks,” he adds.

I can’t disagree. My wife and I have only been in the town a few hours, and while it’s got a certain fascinating appeal for its historical impact, despite all the nuclear scientists and nanotech experts, it’s not unlike other  suburban mountain towns. I’ve been places like this before–isolated, yet unexpectedly affluent, with a youth that has refined disaffected boredom to an art that those in more urban areas can’t muster. I lived in a place like this, shortly, right outside California tourist destination Lake Arrowhead.

Of course, the sort of tourist destinations I describe weren’t the home of the atomic bomb. They weren’t host to one of the most high-security research facilities in the world, where Oppenheimer and his boys brought the world reluctantly into the atomic age, where signs ominously remind you that even the Subway is on land owned by the U.S. government, where to get to your campground you must pass through fortified homeland-security kiosks.

And even as my wife and sit, within a mile of people developing technologies that could easily eliminate all forms of life on Earth, the immediate surroundings are shockingly prosaic.

The only things that immediately indicate the isolated, mountainous region as a space at the forefront of military technology are the demographics, which are unusual for a community of this sort. You wouldn’t guess it by the working-class people working at the local grocery store, who could credibly man the registers in any American small town. You wouldn’t guess it by the dissaffected youth that roam the streets, sit around the Starbucks, avoid attending class to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk shit to the guy who works behind the counter.

Los Alamos is a profoundly unusual place–disaffected youths roam the streets like they do in many small towns, but here they seem more concentrated. Soccer Moms beam about the Ivy League prospects of their children–presumably, not the same children smoking outside of the Starbucks. The tedium of the town rarely betrays that the city the self-declared “atomic city”, home of the atom bomb, center for classified government weapons research. A short glimpse at the demographics–unusual for such a sleepy hamlet–are revealing:

(According to the 2000 census, via Wikipedia:)
The racial makeup of the CDP was 89.13% White, 0.44% African American, 0.56% Native American, 4.47% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 3.01% from other races, and 2.35% from two or more races.

The median income for a household in the CDP was $71,536, and the median income for a family was $86,876. Males had a median income of $65,638 versus $39,352 for females.

These are unusual demographics for a town of this size, this secluded and with no major income source–other than the obvious, of course. If it wasn’t for the laboratories, this would be another sleepy tourist-trap of a mountain town, outside of a National Park, with a median household income far less than those listed above.

These distinctions might seem academic from a short walk around the town, with its Starbucks and Subways and grocery stores and whatnot. Only small details underscore that the town strictly exists for high-grade weapon research–the main strip is named Oppenheimer Dr. (after the father of the bomb,) and visitors to the town must first enter through a checkpoint. Signs note that all the land is owned by the U.S. government, and signs for tourist traps have kitschy explosion- or atomic-themed plays on words. For the most part, these are minor details, easy to overlook if it were not for what has emerged from the city.

Nowhere is the contrast of the banal and the apocalyptic in sharper relief than at the Bradbury Science Museum, a testament to the world-obliterating innovations developed in the city, funded by the research lab (mind you, the only museum we’ve entered on our trip with free admission.)

Not unlike the Simpsons educational video in which a cowboy neutron whimsically rhapsodizes about the potential of nuclear power, the Bradbury Science Museum is shockingly toothless. The information next to replicas of Little Boy and Big Boy make little reference to the horrors of Nagasaki or Hiroshima, and an informational video is cheerily benign, and seems to have been produced in the ’40s itself, with its cheery jingoism paying unconflicted tribute to American ingenuity.

Which isn’t to say there is no solemnity to the museum–the video makes reference to Oppenheimer’s fateful quotation of the Bhagavad Gita upon the detonation of the bomb–”I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”–and much is made in signs about the myriad national security threats the United States has faced over the past few decades. A small kiosk in the back of the museum has been set up to allow activist groups to make a counterpoint to the museum’s claims. It’s a tiny space, with horrifying photos of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a guest book in which visitors can leave their responses. The last comment left, in the scratchy script of a young teen, reads “those poor poor victims that got killed in the explosion…”

You’d be forgiven for forgetting this town’s legacy amid its prosaic suburban sprawl and tourist-tuned whimsy. Here, in a small mountainous town where most adults are engineers and their children roam the streets disaffected, scientists are developing technologies that could eradicate life on Earth. In the Northwestern corner of New Mexico, deep in the hinterlands of the United States, technologies of worldwide import are being developed. The disconnect between daily life and the implications of the work being done here are profound.

It’s the exact purpose of this town, which is secluded by definition and neccessity. The contrast is telling, though, as though the distance between the American experience and its implications for the world as a whole are rendered here in bold, stark terms. The disconnect of Los Alamos serves as a potent reminder of just how removed our daily American lives are from the effects of our foreign policy, from our military advances. This is the home of the bomb, where weaponry we can’t even imagine is being developed to be deployed in wars we can’t begin to predict. But walking the streets here, all you’ll find is suburban malaise.