Halianna Hartley Leland

I hold in my hand something green that didn’t exist before men made the atomic bomb. It’s an alien rock of sorts, not fully of this world. Mystic and destructive as its birth was, this stone was still created from the first blast. Trinitite: at one point, the government put it behind bars. At one point, anyone could grab a piece. This anthropogenic technofossil is the oldest atomic mutation, a vestige of the holy trinity, a token of the first nuclear bomb.

You can buy a bottle of that eerie green glass if you go down I-25 South toward the border, 180 miles or so. Nothing will be along that road, but at some point you’ll decide you’re somewhere, slowly coming to a stop. That’s how it works in the Wild West. I would take you there myself but it’s too hot for me this time of year, yes, in March. You can go buy some of that trinitite and put it on a shelf maybe—when the light hits it, maybe you’ll think it beautiful. Maybe you’ll see it emanating colors instead of rupturing them. It will be a dim glow and reveal a tiny bit of that first burning. In terms of a beginning, there are two things of note: copious white sand and Robert Oppenheimer’s favorite poem.

When I was young, I thought the gypsum was desert snow. I went to see the world’s largest deposit of it in Southern New Mexico and each grain appeared a remnant of the once Permian sea swirling in dry air, crystallized and revolving. I think of White Sands National Park and I remember being there as a child in ridiculous neon clothing. I remember renting little sleds to squish wax all over and then clamber my limbs into before sliding down the endless sand piles. I yelled into the empty and thought it was so clean and so bright. This place was isolated from everything around it, and the miles stretched all about me, wholly separate from the grey skies churning above. The heat and storms became irrelevant if the land was strange enough. I had never seen my own reflection in a place, in glimmering light bouncing off little rocks so small and reflective that they shone even when the sun fell. There was a plaque, something about history dark and crude but I didn’t read too much into it. I didn’t understand the difference between a missile range and all the rest of the territory; it was hard to comprehend how they could be in the same place when all of it was just tumbleweeds and cacti with little pink yucca flowers popping up. How nature was just what fell on one side of a line.

I remember being there when I was in that growing-up phase where all of history seems to begin with your birth, when you feel the most important and everything before you is a long, ancient time ago—how in that phase everyone dead and gone seems fossilized, blown away in white dust—how, even in the sunlight, your dreams only stretch back so far. I remember being that little, with that tiny concept of time and space, and imagining the days, so long and open to me then, when people could have destroyed this place. And it seemed as though, in all that vastness, silly little people could never.

There is a poem by John Donne named Holy Sonnet XIV that gave trinitite its name. He asks the holy trinity to destroy him, to make it all break, blow, burn. He begs to be ravished and changed by the three powers unified as one. Oppenheimer chose a corner of the sand to test his creation and named it The Trinity Site, which became the namesake for the green glowing demi-stone. That site was meant to be a new kind of secret so exclusive it’s sacred, and what happened there would be the burning and transformation of the world. As trinitite singed, man changed because his capability did, and because the land did. Green splintered outward—the papers would call it a pulsing scar. The site would be the ravishing and the opening; the holy, holy, and holy burst upward, and out, and a strange material was left behind, a glowing new earthling. Oppenheimer was looking for emptiness in the Jornada del Muerto region, and there, he forged the journey of death.

He saw what I saw, what anyone will see. There is an unusualness of motion in dunes that ripple in the presence of triumph and soon-to-be death. They shutter with whispers of sacrality and impermanence. Those formations are ever-changing mountains, transient, artificial, science fiction, story-book.

Map theorists say there are two terrains that Western surveyors couldn’t map well, the floodlands and the desert. That became a real challenge for a country obsessed with precision and progress, with knowing everything about something you haven’t seen. I wonder sometimes if that’s why he picked it here. If a place is always changing, in some sense it’s not ever fully there. If the dunes will pick up and change tomorrow, it can’t matter much if today a bomb is detonated, if people cheer, if the imprint of radioactive decay slithers outward across the fields, if a crater stands for a year or two before the wind moves it. There are still bits of trinitite out there, floating. They banned access to them, but that has never meant they aren’t there. The new age is always, if unseemingly, marked.

White Sands is the definition of the blank slate, magnified and melted by rock that is contained here, now, in these miles. Time breathes deeper than the wind can carry smells from Hatch, from Alamagordo, from the ranches up east. Philosophy loses to feeling when the air whips across and the howling clutches deep. These sands have been sacred for as long as they have moved, but, traversed by Apache ancestors, they were never untouched or pristine. The gypsum sand is residue of a past time, the apocalyptic glass, horridly, is too. Sea-made or man-made, it makes no difference when the desert changes.

I am playing with the sand again, running it through my hands. Holding this is such a different sensation from holding the green rock; tiny little gems move through but a big green one doesn’t. The trinitite chunk stays heavy, it weighs on the fingers and the hand and the arm and the shoulder and the mind, even. Gliding, the sand slips and jumps. The pieces move together and relax between palm crevasses, then, they flow like a recovered memory of the water they came from. The sand moves freely but the trinitite had to be removed. These white grain vestiges are a bitter revelation: the post-apocalypse, post-sacred, the simply there, bought in capsules and cubes. The history and its tangible material is all put on display, sold.

That secret first test was profoundly laced with larger-than-God aspirations and Oppenheimer drew upon the holy trinity perhaps in arrogance, more likely in apology. Before man was ravaged using his creation, land was. Humans would be next, newly threaded between natural and mutant, consecrated and profaned. It wasn’t passion driving that aim of the atomic project, but obligation. I love you, Donne’s poem reads, and I shall never be free. The lines blurred by the time the trinitite hardened and with glazed eyes, those men began a stopwatch as time, too, would be measured differently now, emerald traces left in a plume. Now this corner here isn’t natural, they must have thought, now, how the snow has come alive.

Halianna Hartley Leland

Halianna Hartley Leland

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