From bombs to Bandelier

I am suddenly fascinated by a mailbox. PO Box 1663, to be specific.

It was the mailing address in Santa Fe, New Mexico that was used by everyone who lived “On the Hill” 35 miles away at “Site Y” during the early 1940s. Yes, everyone who lived in the secret enclave called Los Alamos had “PO Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico” on their drivers' licenses and other important documents. All mail filtered in and out of that mailbox for over 6,000 people who were busy doing their part to invent the atomic bomb. Site Y babies born during the Manhattan Project had that mailbox listed as their place of birth. Those must have been some awfully small babies!

Not really sure what to expect, Rob and I were both intrigued by the secret history of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Town That Never Was (and lab) were created by the US government in the early 1940s in an effort to consolidate scientific know-how and win the race to invent nuclear weaponry. The remote area was chosen for exactly that reason: it was in the middle of nowhere and unlikely to be discovered. The government co-opted the land from a man who had been running a private boys camp for sickly sons of well-to-doers (Gore Vidal was a graduate) and went to work setting up a community behind fences. The scientists who were recruited for the project were told to report to an office in Santa Fe's historic center. Office 109 still stands, totally non-descript, in no way commemorated as the door many brilliant minds walked through...once...and left out the back door with new identities and a ride up the hill to their new hastily constructed homes.

Today, Los Alamos is still a company town but there are no gates requiring badges (except for the lab itself) and it now has its own post office with a myriad of different addresses. We spent the morning in two museums, both free (?!?) and mostly dedicated to the history of the invention and construction of Little Boy and Fat Man, the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. The Los Alamos of the '40s was a young, vibrant, exciting community of people forced to live together in secret and make the best of it. The average resident was 24 years old and the town reportedly knew how to throw a party. I bought a book at one of the museums, written by the wife of one of the scientists. I read the first chapter last night; Rob is starting on Chapter 4 as I type. Guess I'll have to wait awhile to learn more about the sequestered life in PO Box 1663.

The second half of our day was spent in a totally different historical realm. We stopped at Bandelier National Monument, an area dating back over 10,000 years that was settled in the mid-1200s by a culture preferring to be called “Ancestral Pueblo people.” We'll call them Apps.

Remnants of the Apps' life here have been expertly excavated and restored and made easily available to the public, resulting in Bandelier National Monument now ranking in my Top 5 Favorite National Parks. We took an easy 1.5 mile walk into a canyon, viewing kivas (community centers) and cliff dwellings along the way. We even got to climb some ladders to peer into the tiny caves that once housed some very tiny people. As I stood at the top of one ladder and thought wisely against ambling into the cave despite all the athletic shoe footprints enticing me to, I wondered how the Apps dealt with all the back pain they surely had from climbing up and down ladders, using their roofs as doors, and having to hunch down to go from room to room. Our handy-dandy $1 walking guide provided something of an answer: the Apps were indeed small (average woman was 5ft tall; average man was 5.5ft tall) and didn't live very long (average life expectancy was 35). They also very commonly suffered from arthritis. No information was provided about their pain medications, which is a shame because I am open to suggestions.

I loved walking through the warm, breezy canyon, breathing in the piñon and juniper air, gazing at the salmon-colored stone cliffs whose Swiss cheese holes once housed a population of reportedly young, lively, resourceful people. In some ways, people not all that different from those who lived in PO Box 1663.