by Matt Weiland
The frequency of lightning storms meant most kids I knew already had a lightning story. But, unlike mine, their stories were usually apocryphal, or at best second-hand: a cousin Steve or Carlos who was nearly struck coming out of the post office with his mother, or an Uncle Diego or Mike who was struck through a keyhole at his machine shop, or a friend of a friend whose vicious mutt had survived three successive bolts before he finally rolled over and died. Now, at sleepovers, before moving on to frightful tales of the La Jirona ghost sightings, I was invited to tell my lightning story. Kids I didn’t even know ran up to me on the playground to inquire about the life-threatening bolt. I was suddenly in. The only thing that could have made me more popular would have been to survive a direct strike.
My parents moved to Albuquerque from Chicago in 1965, the year I was born, after my father was recruited for an engineering post at Sandia Laboratories. Founded in 1949, Sandia opened six years after the Los Alamos Research Center. Sandia’s original emphasis was on ordnance engineering—turning the nuclear physics packages created by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into deployable weapons. Following the first atomic bomb test, at the Trinity Site in 1945, and the subsequent end of the Second World War, New Mexico emerged as a leader in nuclear, solar, and geothermal energy research and development. Meanwhile, Albuquerque—located on a wide swath of land between the Sandia and Jemez mountains, divided into east and west by a frequently dry strip of the Rio Grande River—grew from an estimated thirty-five thousand inhabitants, in 1940, to nearly a quarter of a million by 1974, and Sandia Laboratories became one of state’s largest employers. We were in the middle of the Cold War; my father, like many of my friends’ fathers, was employed as a high-level-security “engineer” at the Labs, the specific tasks he performed classified top secret.
As I passed from childhood into adolescence and learned more about New Mexico’s recent history, the superstitions that had plagued and animated my childhood were replaced by a sense of foreboding related to my father’s work and the secrecy that surrounded it. My teenage years were filled with rumors of hidden missile silos in the mountains behind our house, rumors that my father played some role in stocking them. Rumors that these missiles put us, in insignificant Albuquerque, on the front line of a nuclear strike. I no longer looked out for lightning; instead I looked up and wondered when a barrage of nuclear warheads would come raining down on us.
Fortunately, I had friends like Gregg, whose father also worked at Sandia. We did our best to diffuse our doomsday apprehensions by making light of the situation. We became avid Cold War spy movie fans, imagined our pocket-protector-wearing parents playing glamorous roles in intricate plots to prevent the Soviets from destroying the free world. We took pleasure in believing that our phones were tapped: We were important enough to have our privacy invaded by the federal government! At school, we shared humorous stories about the convoluted explanations our fathers offered to describe—all the while trying to cover up—exactly what they did at work. A typical dinnertime conversation between Gregg and his father, reported the following day at lunch, went something like this:
GREGG’S FATHER: “Well, hmm … I guess you could say I design very specific electronic mechanisms that measure the existence of—well, the levels of, actually—certain radioactive particles in the atmosphere … well, not dwelling in the atmosphere, but particles that can get into the atmosphere, by which I mean to say the air, or possibly the water—yes, they can get into the water, too—under, um … well, under certain conditions, as they don’t naturally exist, these radioactive particles I mean, either in the air or in the water … but certain conditions that might suddenly be present under extraordinary circumstances … or rather a sudden and unpredictable circumstance created by human interference …”
GREGG: “You mean, like, if the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb on us?”
GREGG’S FATHER: (a long pause) “Have you finished your homework yet?”
Still, as much as Gregg and I delighted in our fathers’ squirming to avoid revealing secrets they were legally forbidden to tell—under threat of committing treason—there were moments when we couldn’t escape the weight of our scientific legacy. The day my tenth-grade history teacher gave a lecture on the terrors of Hiroshima, for instance, I wondered if she even realized the guilt and anguish she provoked in many of us, children of parents who worked on mysterious government projects that, we were convinced, might one day perpetuate similar devastation.
In the spring of 2003, my father and I had breakfast at the original Perea’s on Juan Tabo (my father’s choice), where we often ate when I was in town. I was living in France with my boyfriend Francis but had flown back to New York for several weeks, having arranged my work on a film project there to overlap with a large-scale protest against the war in Iraq. I’d added a New Mexico leg to the journey to visit my parents, now divorced.
Perea’s prided itself on its green chili sauce—which in New Mexico is simply called “green chili”—and boasted some of the hottest in the city. As an extra bonus, the morning waitress had a good memory and knew what we wanted even before we ordered: two huevos rancheros, my father’s with extra green chili and mine with the milder red chili on the side. When she arrived with our plates, I poured a few cursory drops of the red on my eggs and then scraped half of the black beans away from my tortilla. My father grinned at this but said nothing. At sixty-two, he is still a vibrant man, his general air a good-natured, if paradoxical, mix of intensity and lightness. He scooped up a forkful of tortilla, beans, and eggs, dripping with green chili, and aimed it toward his mouth.
“So how long are you in town for?” he asked.
“Only a few days,” I said, reaching for a glass of water. “Francis is meeting me here tomorrow. We’ll stay at Mom’s place for the night, then we’re off to visit the Caverns.”
My father looked up from his plate. A lightly veiled cringe ticked across his face, then he quickly changed the subject. Knowing the extent to which he disapproved of my being gay, it was difficult for me to talk about Francis. And I completely avoided mentioning my strong feelings about the war. Since 9/11, my father had become increasingly conservative, an avid supporter of the preemptive military strikes that I opposed.
So we talked about food—namely, the fact that many small restaurants like Perea’s had recently closed, making it harder to find really hot chili. We talked about my father’s latest fishing trip in the Jemez Mountains; he always preferred New Mexico’s heavily pined mountain ranges to its arid plains. And I watched as he became light again, describing the trout he’d caught at Fenton Lake. All the while, I could barely touch my plate—the huevos were much too spicy, even watered down—and I realized I’d been away from New Mexico for too long. I’d forgotten how to feign indifference when confronted by such a vast array of muzzled topics.
The trip to Carlsbad wasn’t my idea—I was flat out against it—but Francis insisted. Only weeks into the Iraq War, the country was in the midst of a conservative swing that included a spike in hate crimes, a broad mistrust of strangers, and a pointed hostility towards Francis’s compatriots, the French. Under these circumstances, I had what felt like a natural—and growing—fear of traveling as a gay black man, in a biracial, bi-national relationship, with a snail-eating, beaujolais-swigging frog, no less, through any culturally homogeneous rural setting, even in my home state. Central and northern New Mexico, which include Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and Los Alamos, have long been safe havens for scientists, artists, hippies, and aimless drifters of various types (Francis and I had visited these regions on his two previous trips). I was unsure, however, of how benevolent southern New Mexicans were when it came to outsiders. Twenty-odd years had passed since I’d last seen the Carlsbad Caverns and I wanted to go back, but it clearly wasn’t the time.
Yet when I expressed my apprehensions to Francis, he merely recited another of the interesting facts he’d learned on the Internet while still in France.
“I read,” he replied, “that Carlsbad has 109 caves, including the deepest in the Western Hemisphere. Over 490 meters.”
Our starting point was my mother’s flat, adobe-style house in Kachina Hills—an upscale, Indian-themed subdivision sprawled at the foot of the Sandia Mountains. Francis and I would take I-40 east to Highway 283, leading down towards Roswell and Carlsbad, then head on to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Two hundred seventy-five miles. Approximately four and a half hours. On the eve of our departure, my mother, Francis, and I were up late, chatting about the proposed route south, when Francis suddenly realized that he’d forgotten to buy a digital camera before leaving Paris. “Don’t worry,” my mother said, “the Wal-Mart on Eubank and Central is open twenty-four hours.”
“You’re kidding?” I said, unable to believe Albuquerque actually needed twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart service.
“You never know,” my mother said dryly, “when the government might declare code red. In which case we can still get duct tape in the middle of the night.”
The next morning we were on the road at six-thirty. Though I was glad to be reunited with Francis, I was tired and still apprehensive about the trip. Our midnight excursion to Wal-Mart had lasted well over an hour because Francis had become obsessed with finding the perfect digital device to take pictures inside the Caverns, in case there was only limited artificial light. Now, on the open road, I was driving and he was clicking away under the bright New Mexico sky. Many of those first photos show abandoned gas stations, crumbling adobe houses, empty roadside diners, and the distant convergence of two pastel planes: mesa and sky. Others show a twenty-two-year-old Hispanic waitress with an exhausted smile, a tribe of four elderly drunks sitting on the porch of an abandoned motel lounge. Three children jumping in a puddle of stagnant water and me looking slightly sullen, staring out toward the distant horizon.
Driving south of Albuquerque, through small desert towns with names like Encino, Ramon, and Vaughn, I was reminded that my childhood had been contained inside an economically secure bubble, afforded me by my father’s membership in the scientific elite. New Mexico consistently ranks as one of the poorest states in the nation. And as we neared Roswell, I felt surprisingly relieved.
Roswell is a clean, quiet town of approximately forty-five thousand inhabitants. Although a center for irrigation farming, ranching, dairy, and petroleum production, it is best known for the so-called Roswell Incident, named after a supposed UFO crash nearby in 1947, and the subsequent rumors of alien visitation. The original sighting was most likely linked to government high-altitude experiments that were being conducted in the region at the time. On Main Street, Francis and I were greeted by a billboard of two big-headed waif-bodied aliens. We drove past several alien parking lots, the UFO museum, the Alien Zone Cosmic Ice Cream Parlor, the Alien Resistance Headquarters. The memory stick in Francis’s new camera was already full and he needed a replacement, so we once more pulled into a Wal-Mart, where the sign welcomed both “Humans and Alien Beings.”
The store was cluttered with alien paraphernalia: alien balloons, watches, sunglasses, toilet plungers, towels, umbrellas—the works. Francis paid for his new memory stick and quickly inserted it inside the camera.
“Wasn’t that a military academy we passed along the road?” he asked.
“The New Mexico Military Institute.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. As a reflex to the current resentment aimed at the French, Francis had become increasingly condescending when discussing American idiosyncrasies. “Institutes,” he continued. “Intelligent people everywhere. Your father, for instance—scientists… How can so many people in this country believe in that! ” He pointed his camera at a six-foot, cardboard cutout of one of the ubiquitous, big-headed aliens, this one aiming a blue deionization gun directly at us.
Had Francis asked me that same question a month later, I might have explained my theory that the entire Roswell myth is quintessentially New Mexican, a convergence of superstitious temperament and scientific secrecy. At the time, however, I was too embarrassed to respond. Instead, I shrugged, suggested we backtrack to try a scoop of green Cosmic Ice Cream—it was approaching noon, getting hot—and hurried back out to the car.
We arrived at the Carlsbad Caverns at one-thirty. We were too late to take one of the ranger-guided tours that lead down the longer, more difficult paths: into Spider Cave, perhaps, which would have involved some crawling, or Slaughter Canyon Cave, or The Hall of the White Giants. But we were still in time to take a self-guided tour, leading directly down into the Big Room, the word’s largest underground chamber. Entering the cave’s enormous limestone mouth, I felt a surge of excitement, just as I had as a child. Unfortunately, I also felt a childish need to prove myself to Francis. As much geographical distance as I’d put between me and my home state— from attending college in California to living in France—I was experiencing a defensive kind of local patriotism in response to the poverty and weirdness Francis and I had witnessed thus far.
“A stalagmite,” I explained enthusiastically, “from the Greek stalagma, meaning ‘drip’ or ‘drop’, is a mineral deposit—like that one there—that rises from the floor of a cave. They’re created by dripping mineral solu- tions and calcium deposits. The formation on the ceiling there, just above it, is called a stalactite. Columns are formed when stalagmites and stalactites meet.” I’d learned these classifications from a cave guide when I was six years old, during my first visit to the Caverns.
“Yes,” Francis said, responding to my short lesson in Greek. “I read about cave formations on the Internet.”
I felt slightly deflated. But the Big Room was more impressive than I’d remembered, with its undulating columns and curving walls. The lime- stone formations all around us, like grounded clouds, provoked visions of castles, giants, women, and beasts, all glistening with the faint mist that clung to the air throughout the cave. Above our heads, thousands of icicle- like stalactites hung, their watery white sheaths dripping cool water into the dark pools below. The Big Room’s natural grandeur dwarfed that of any manmade interior I’d ever seen—including, as I made a point of telling Francis, Notre-Dame and the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Francis and I surfaced from the Big Room by elevator. We’d taken seats in the concrete amphitheater facing the Caverns’ natural entrance and were waiting for sunset, the hour at which a fluttering black mass of Mexican free-tail bats was due to exit the caves, when the woman sitting in front of Francis began talking about the war.
“Our son is in the Air Force,” the woman said, speaking to the entire group of early retirement aged couples that surrounded us. The languid manner in which she employed the word air—two breathless syllables— betrayed a distinct Southern bent. “And he says we have enough miss-iles over there to end this thing in a few short weeks.”
The woman’s words jogged a dormant image I had of the White Sands National Monument, which was only an hour away: a glimpse of the smooth white dunes rising in the distance, and a military patrolman telling my father to turn the car in the opposite direction because the government was currently conducting missile tests. I’d never been back.
I tapped Francis on the shoulder. “We should go to White Sands,” I said.
He snapped a picture of a black bird flying overhead. “Pourquoi pas?”
The man sitting next to the woman touched her arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll be back soon.”
“I’m not,” the woman replied, with forced conviction. “Not worried at all.”
The bats’ frenzied exodus impressed Francis more than me. There were fewer bats than I’d expected, maybe due to seasonal breeding habits. The sunset, however, was sufficiently dramatic: a darkening envelope of crimson and burnt orange that slowly folded into the deep blues of night, sealing off the once endless horizon.
The next day, on US 70 West, ten miles from the entrance to the White Sands National Monument, I was stopped by the New Mexico Hig
hway Patrol. History, it seemed, was repeating itself. Unlike my father decades before, however, I was speeding. Francis had warned me several times about the degrees by which the speedometer had continued to climb, but we were in my country, in my state, and I was feeling a cocky sense of entitlement, having been culturally redeemed from the folly of Roswell by the majesty of the Carlsbad Caverns. Unfortunately, Francis had no compunction about saying I told you so. Not only did he say it, repeatedly—“Je t’ai dit, hein. Je t’ai dit”—but he punctuated each repetition with curt puffs of air pushed forward through pursed lips, an infuriatingly French expression of annoyance. Though we hadn’t experienced a single unpleasant incident since we’d started our trip, I was nervous and cautioned Francis against speaking French in front of the approaching officer.
“Driver’s license and insurance, please.” The patrolman made the request without the slightest hint of hostility, which prompted me to ask, before driving all the way to the Monument entrance, if the grounds were actually open that day. “It’s clear,” the patrolman said. “There haven’t been missile tests in over a week.”
As the officer sped off in his patrol car, Francis decided it was, once again, safe to speak. “How often does the government test missiles here?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“As long as they’re not testing now.”
“If they were, they wouldn’t let us enter the grounds.”
Francis hadn’t envisioned the need to factor government missile tests into our travel itinerary. He was quiet for a moment, then, suddenly invigorated by an imagined proximity to danger, he quickly unfolded the map. “While we’re at it,” he said, “let’s visit Trinity.”