Spoonwood (16 page)

I failed in my attempts to make a useful spoon from box elder. Nor did I do anything to improve the repute of this much maligned tree. Indeed, my labors reinforced the idea that box elder is a trash wood, that is, by the human definition of trash. Long after I am dead and gone and my labors forgotten, the box elder will still be known as a trash tree.

SPOONWOOD DOCUMENT: Radioactive

We came down off the El Capitan Mountains on Route 380 in New Mexico in a celebratory mood, down through the tiny town of Carrizozo onto flat desert land. For the next sixty-four miles we would pass through only the ghost town of Bingham, which consisted of a weather station and a rockhound shop. Current population seven. Sounded like my kind of place—forgot and forlorn. As we drove I imagined establishing a homestead in Bingham, finding an abandoned shack where my son and I could set up housekeeping. Maybe grow some hot chili peppers, keep goats, hunt rattlesnakes for food. Of course I didn't expect to find such a place, but the thought of it occupied my mind. We had been crisscrossing the country for half a decade and I was looking for a place to settle down. Every time I found a landscape that I liked I asked myself, Is this home? The answer was always: not quite.

A few miles outside of Carrizozo was the Valley of Fires National Recreation Area, a broken landscape of mainly black rocks and black wrinkles in the earth, the result of volcanic activity.
I pulled our van off the highway and drove a short ways to the campground. There were about twenty camping sites that included outdoor grills, a rest room, and the dreaded (by me) RV hookups. Normally I'd avoid a place like this, but no other people were recreating here but us. We left the van to look around. It was March, the air cool but the sun hot.

I scanned the horizon and saw grass, junipers, a few other shrubs. No trees. And yet it was all so beautiful.

“This is God's country,” I said. “God doesn't need living creatures to make Him happy. He can make do with sunlight, rocks, texture, and color—these are His amusements.”

“What about people?” my son asked.

“Some people say that God made us in His image and likeness and so we're special.”

“Maybe He likes bugs better,” my son said, “because He made so many more.”

As a toddler my son did not talk for a long time. All the evidence suggested that something was wrong with him. But I could tell from the very beginning that he understood everything I said or did and that he would talk in his own good time. When he finally spoke it was in complete sentences, without baby diction or baby elocution.

“Good point,” I said. “If He exists. I'm a doubter.”

“I believe,” my son said with fierce conviction.

I have never treated my son like a child. I've always insisted that he speak clearly and articulately. I've kept him away from other children. Childhood is cruel, full of erroneous thinking, and like other kinds of abuse best left unexperienced. The result is that my son does not know how to talk or behave like a child.

A self-guided trail wound from the campground for about a mile across the lava flow. There had been no volcanic explosion here. Lava just slowly spilled out of the earth in a river forty-five miles long and five miles wide, olivine basalt, same stuff you see in Hawaii. We found a nice prospect and I gazed out and just tried to absorb what this place had to offer. I heard no car sounds, no wind stirring. And yet it was not quiet. I heard a hush, a huge deep-throated hush.

I pointed. “That's west. Somewhere in that wide open space is the Trinity site, where they detonated the first atomic bomb back in 1945.”

The look on my son's face told me that his thoughts were elsewhere.

“Do you ever really listen to me?” I said, as much to myself as to him.

“Yes, Father. I remember everything,” he said.

“Everything?” He'd told me this before. We were together so much that we repeated ourselves, not to inform one another but to signal importance and meaning.

“Don't you forget after a while?” I said.

“No, I keep practicing it in my head so it doesn't go away.”

“Why?” I asked, though I knew what the answer would be.

“To tell my mommy,” he said.

“And you'll tell her that we love her.”

“And always will.”

My son knew his mother was dead, but he pretended she was out there waiting for him and that he would find her during one of our trips. He told me he learned language so he could talk to her. I neither questioned nor criticized him. I've developed my own theories of parenting. I wanted my son to watch me and listen to me and learn from my faults as well as my few virtues but mainly from my actions. I refused to tell him his thinking was wrong. How could I when I was not sure of my own thinking?

“Dad, when are we going home?”

“Where do you think home is?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said, “but it's not here.”

“If you don't know, how can you know it's not here?”

“Because you told me this was God's country, so it can't be ours.”

I looked at him. The corners of his mouth were turned up in whimsy.

We continued west on Route 380; my intention was to return to the Valley of Fires campground for the night. I anticipated staying in this forgot area for a month or more, maybe until the
weather was too hot. We had water and food enough for a week. I could always go back to Carrizozo for supplies.

Bingham consisted of a few tumbled-down buildings that could not have been grand even when they were standing and the remnants of dusty streets that went nowhere. The only places showing habitation were a rockhound shop and next to it a mobile home. Nobody answered my knock on the door and no vehicle was parked in the driveway. Off the highway beside the shop was a dirt road and sign: Desert Rose Mine. The road headed into the desert toward a rugged, jagged hillside. I told my son all I knew about the minerals to be found here—fluorite crystals, galena, barite, brochantite. I also told him about trinitite, which was the glassy substance created by the heat of the first atomic explosion, only about ten miles away.

We arrived at the hillside, and I could see remnants of the former mine higher up. I didn't dare take the van up the road, which looked as if you'd need four-wheel drive. We parked and hoofed it to the mine.

My son wanted to scout for rocks.

“Go ahead,” I said, “but look before you reach. These lands are infested with snakes.”

My interest was in the weathered wood that would inevitably find its way to a mining operation—support beams, tool handles, the remnants of structures, wagon parts. I enjoyed looking at such wood. Weathered wood is condensed history.

“Dad,” my son called my name, not loud, not urgent, but something in the voice sent me running to him.

He was on his hands and knees, peering between two rocks at a creature that was peering back.

“Dad, is that some kind of land crawfish?”

“You're still thinking South Louisiana,” I said. “That's a scorpion. His sting can make you very sick. Remember what I said before. Be careful where you put your hands.”

“Yes, Father.”

There was plenty of wood up here, but none of it intrigued me. I was disappointed but my son was happy. He'd found a
rock he wanted to keep. It was about the size of a golf ball. Inside was a perfect glass cube, pale blue in color.

“I do believe that's fluorite,” I said. “I know because I've seen fluorite on the trust lands where your mother's people are from.”

“Are we ever going to go back there?”

“I don't know.” Suddenly, I was thinking of a car-sized boulder shot through with green slivers of fluorite, the boulder dropped by God when he was experimenting with glaciers as a rock-transportation device. Must have taken some thousands of years to move the rock from Canada to that special piece of land in the USA. When you're immortal you have the luxury of taking your time.

“Keep the stone for good luck,” I said. “We'll stop at the rock shop on the way back and see how much we owe for it.”

We walked down the hill to the van. I gazed south at the two-rut road that led in the direction of the Trinity site. That was when I had the crazy idea to join the Army of Unauthorized Personnel.

“Son,” I said, “let's go look at the place where they exploded the first nuke.”

We were able to drive six miles before the road vanished into some soft ground in a dried lake bed. I packed a tent, some food and water, binoculars, and a bow saw; I took a compass reading, discussed the situation with my son, and we set off on foot, each of us carrying our walking stick. I calculated we would reach the Trinity site in a couple hours. We would be back by dark. If not, we'd camp out for the night. I was very careful to take accurate compass readings, jot them down, and share them with my son in case something happened to me. I frequently took risks like this. I should not have done it—because of the boy. He could read a compass, but could he really find his way out if I were, say, bit by a rattlesnake? I didn't know the answer. I took risks without answers. A death wish? But for two? Was that criminal? I was a fugitive from justice, but was I a criminal?

It was easy walking, the land flat, the footing firm, though it was grassy in places. The grass worried me, because we might surprise a snake, which would do what snakes do in the grass. I
prodded with my walking stick, hoping that Mister Snake fanged the stick and not me or my son. We didn't see any snakes, but we did see a pronghorn antelope doe with her fawn a couple hundred yards away. When they caught sight of us the mother stared in our direction. The fawn stood perfectly still, waiting for marching orders.

“Can we follow them?” my son whispered.

“Why?”

“I want to see where they live.”

“They're like us. They live everywhere.”

“I can read the little one's mind. I want to follow them.” His voice was full of urgency.

“We'd only disturb their lives.” I took his hand and pulled gently. But he resisted.

“Okay, we'll follow them,” I said.

The mother moved off, her fawn right behind. We were able to keep up with them for only five minutes before they out-distanced us and disappeared into the horizon.

“I wonder where they went,” I said.

“They went to heaven,” my son said.

We moved on, the compass our guide.

In the middle of this nowhere we came upon a sign: “White Sands Missile Range, No Admittance.” There was no fence, just brush, sand, and rocks. No sign of civilization but the sign itself. You would think the government would build a fence. Then again, who in his right mind would wander into a wasteland where missiles might drop at any moment? In either my right mind or my wrong mind—hard to tell the difference—I was not worried. No doubt if the range were in use our movements would long ago have been detected.

“You think we are in our right minds?” I said to my son.

“Yes, Father,” he said.

The sign had been there for decades. The paint was faded, and part of it was falling down. I pulled at the frame and ripped off a dry-rotted two-by-four six feet long. Sun-baked, grayed douglas fir. Pleased by my criminal mischief, I stared at the board at my feet. Twenty minutes and a mile later, we did see a fence, which
enclosed a flat area that did not integrate with the landscape. I surmised that the atomic explosion left a crater, which was later filled to keep the radiation down. I whipped out the binoculars. After scanning the area, I handed the glasses to my son.

“Take a look,” I said.

“I don't see anything except that thing in the middle,” he said.

“Yes, I don't know what it is. Let's go find out.”

We walked down to the fence. The “thing” inside the fence was a small obelisk. We went around to the locked gate. A sign said, “Welcome to Trinity. The use of eating, drinking, chewing and smoking materials and the application of cosmetics is prohibited within this fenced area.”

Looking through the binoculars, I read the plaque on the obelisk: “Trinity Site where the World's First Nuclear Device was exploded on July 16, 1945. Erected 1965.”

And that was that. Our adventure appeared to be over. I was thinking about Tubby's dad, who died when Tubby was fourteen years old. His father had been a soldier during atomic bomb testing in the 1950s, and the radiation eventually gave him cancer and killed him. Or so the old soldier claimed. He told us that the army put them in trenches as close to the blast as they dared. “When the flash went off you could see the bones in your arm through your closed eyelids,” he said.

We started back, going 180 degrees from our previous compass reading, and then my son said, “Hey, wow.” He was pointing at the ground.

“Another scorpion?” I asked.

He shook his head no. I bent to look and saw what could have been a pea-sized glassie from my childhood, colored with swirls of blue. It was trinitite.

“I don't think I want you playing with this,” I said. “It's probably mildly radioactive.”

“That's okay. I like the fluorite better.”

I removed my backpack, fished around until I found the medicine box, removed a Band-Aid, and wrapped it around the trinitite for safekeeping.

On the return trip I stopped at the missile range sign in the middle of the desert and picked up the board I'd taken down. With the bow saw I cut off a piece of the two-by-four and stuffed it in my backpack.