This one is true.
When I was in middle school, my grandma took me to Carlsbad Caverns. This was a trip that she had been wanting to do for years. Any time my mother and I visited her, one of the first things she’d say was always “when are we going to Carlsbad?”
I wasn’t a very big traveler at the time, and I often danced around the question by mentioning homework or an imaginary friend’s birthday party. To be clear: I always wanted to see the caves. However, my grandma wasn’t the kind of person I could handle one-on-one. That’s not to say I didn’t love her, I did, but tolerance is a different element altogether. There are certain people who you would cover grenades for, but the idea of having dinner makes you want to pull the pin yourself. Of course I’d invite you to my wedding, what a silly question. A weekend together? I don’t know, my schedule has been murder lately. It’s an impossible contradiction that can’t be explained to anyone, but explanation is never really necessary. Most people can see the paradox in your eyes when you’re in public with them, your left eye is kind but your right just wants to go home.
The bats were another reason this trip was so delayed. More than anything else, she wanted to see the bats. She didn’t want to see them down below, she wanted to get the timing just right and catch them as they erupted out of the entrance and into the sky. There were many quiet points as we drove towards Carlsbad, and neither one of us much cared to fill it up with chatter. About an hour away, the silence got to my grandmother, and she began to speak about the bats.
“It’s not the kind of thing you can just pray will happen. Faith doesn’t work like that, you don’t will things into happening. When you pray, you’re asking for an opportunity. You get chances with God, you don’t get guarantees. He’s only ever going to meet you halfway, you can't call it free will if things are just given to you. Even a lucky penny on the sidewalk, you still have to pick it up yourself. It’s from God’s own wisdom that these creatures leave their home on a regular schedule. They come out every night just before early autumn, it’s all laid out right there in the open. He’s telling you: They fly now, why aren’t you here? He’s saying: Here is what you want, here is when it happens.”
We toured the caverns while we waited for the sun to set. I took a pamphlet from the gift shop before our descent, and on one side was a map of the whole cave system. All across the map were notable landmarks with vivid names like Mirror Lake and The Three Little Monkeys. I held the map at all times during our descent, trying to pinpoint all of the landmarks as best I could. I was surprised to see all these shocking names for such banal objects. The King’s Palace was a big room with rocks, something we’d been actively walking through for the past hour. The Rock of Ages, named after the moment when a touring baritone gave an impromptu performance of the hymn upon looking at it, was quite literally just another stone of no particular intrigue. I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that these people saw in these caves. Maybe it was simply my young age, my mind being too young to understand the real beauty that was going on. I’ve never gone back to Carlsbad, so this very well could be the case.
The sun was going down when we got back to the surface, my grandmother held my hand as we headed for the seats of the amphitheater. I pleaded for the front row, but she insisted that we take the highest row instead, so as to get a better view once they truly hit the sky. While we waited, I saw her leg jitter. I don’t think I ever saw her as antsy as she was on our stone bleacher. A small finch flew out of the cavern, which surprised me as I didn’t think they could live in the desert. After a half hour, two bats flew out to go hunting. By that time, the sun had already set completely. Another hour later, and no other bats followed them. The park rangers politely asked us both to leave. It was quiet again on the car ride home, I stared at the changing leaves before the telephone poles outgrew the trees.
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In my sophomore year of high school, I decided to spend a weekend camping near the Trinity Site. I couldn’t actually sleep at the Trinity Site due to our government locking it up behind barbed wire fences and security clearances, so I pitched my tent a handful of miles away in White Sands. I’d always known that the site was off-limits, but I always figured it was because of the radiation. I used to think that White Sands was white because the bomb literally nuked the color out of the ground.
A few months prior to my visit, I was informed that this belief was incorrect. It turns out that the real reason the site is banned isn’t because of any diabolical radiation at all, in fact, the location is actually rather healthy. So healthy, even, that people work at Trinity every day. Some of the nation’s top minds are hard at work in the white sand, building and devising the cutting edge of tactical warfare at the White Sands Missile Range.
Did you know about that? Were you aware that, in the exact same place the world’s first nuclear bomb scarred the planet, there’s a military facility whose sole job is to keep bombing that patch of the Earth? Their job is to do this forever. It will literally keep exploding forever. In Hiroshima, they built a park. The powers that be feel a little guilty about what they turned Trinity into, and for but one day a year, that guilt manifests. On the third Saturday of October, for less time than a 9-to-5, the Trinity Site memorial becomes open to the public. Pets allowed!
Naturally, I decided to camp on the week of the big ceremony. For your reading pleasure, I’ve compiled the highlights of this once-a-year experience:
The Obelisk. This is the one monument to the bomb (not the bombings) in the entire facility. It’s made out of lava rock, and the only name on it is J. Frederick Thorlin, the man who happened to be the general at the time The Obelisk was built.
Photos displaying the tests, zip-tied to a steel fence.
A replica of Fat Man, sitting atop a tow truck.
The original soil of Trinity, kept preserved in a large subterranean bunker. The viewing window is no longer accessible.
Official Trinity Site merchandise being sold out of a van in the parking lot. Most notably, a t-shirt displaying the bomb, pointing down.
It felt like a mockery, and in certain aspects, it felt like a celebration. Year-round, there’s comically large missiles propped up right outside the parking lot. Those missiles stand taller than the monument does. This place isn’t in memory of anything, it’s merely another reminder of who has power. I went back to my tent like a deflated balloon. I just couldn’t comprehend that there were people in charge of this place. Such a pivotal part of the world’s history is still under the lock-and-key of people.
I thought about the baritone that sang underneath Carlsbad. White Sands is only three hours from the caverns, you could visit them both in a day if you wanted. I wondered if the singer did, and if he did, I wondered which one he saw first.
When night fell, I sat outside of my tent with a pair of binoculars. I tried to look at The Obelisk, but it was too deep into the facility grounds for me to see it from my location. The closest thing that I could make out was one of the many, many steel fences that surrounded the land. I was about to throw my binoculars down in frustration, but something caught my eye. Popping out of a burrow on the other side of the fence was a desert cottontail, and two more just like it followed. There were guards on watch, as there always are, but they seemed not to care. All these men with guns, making sure nothing interferes with the dirty work of war, and not a single one of them had an issue with these rabbits, not in the slightest.
They ran out of my sight, but from the direction they were headed, I could tell they were going to the monument. I put down my binoculars, crawled into my tent, and I thought about the cottontail family for the rest of the night. I figured they could do this every night, couldn’t they? Every single night, these rabbits could see the monument. They might even live underneath it. Imagine that. A family living underneath damaged earth. Finding comfort despite the vibrations.
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