Snow in July

When I was small, I was awakened one morning in the dark with the windows in the bedroom rattling loudly.  It subsided and I lay half asleep wondering about it, then heard my parents talking in the kitchen.  I stumbled in to see them turning on lights and making an early pot of coffee.  I asked what had happened.  My dad, who had been awake but still in bed, said the whole house had shaken, and that a moment before the sky had lit up like dawn before dawn, and then the light faded out.  Our house was on the northern outskirts of El Paso, perched on the lip of a vast desert that seemed rather friendly to me, with tumble weeds and horned toads and scorpions.  The house had shaken, they seemed shaken.

That afternoon the El Paso Times ran a story on the front page that explained that a huge ammunition dump at Fort Bliss had exploded just before dawn.  Ft. Bliss was a center for artillery training, and store-housed lots of munitions.  In 1945 war raged, but the explosion was thought to be an accident, and sabotage was not suspected.

The next day a strange and wondrous thing developed in the sky above El Paso.  On that July morning, an eerie warm snow fell in silky flakes.  It dusted the cars, covered roads, melted into the languid Rio Grande, frosted  mesquite and yucca with pure grace.  I don't remember if I tasted it, as I liked to taste normal snow.  It was impossibly gentle and slick between the fingers. 

Just over two weeks later the papers shouted about another explosion, that obliterated the city of Hiroshima, and confessed what had really lit our sky and shaken our houses:  the first atomic bomb at White Sands, just over the brink of desert.  And what had the snow been?  It was a new form of soot, the litter of atoms.  What had fallen that day everywhere was the pure dead remains of everything in a very large area, hundreds of acres of gypsum and sand, sagebrush, snakes, greasewood, hills, stones, shacks.  And it was the ash of the very air, cubic miles of it, the molecules burned and disassembled, drifted lightly to our feet.

Even that young, I was not a complete stranger to explosions.  There had been great private bombs loaded with flash and silence that had obliterated our house sometimes.  These arguments seemed to vaporize our bodies,  shredded the molecules of walls and floors, and left our disembodied hearts racing like Geiger counters in the crazy air.  Still, I could not add 6 and 7, and could not begin to add explosion to explosion.

But everyone was just beginning to try to add this new thing up.  After Hiroshima quickly Nagasaki was lifted off the earth in fire and soot, then the end of World War II. There was great jubilation and relief of victory, but beneath that an uncertain pondering was trying to take shape everywhere.  What had we done, we human beings?  What would we do now?  We didn't know to wonder what that snowy fall-out might have done to us.  There was a cancer that sprouted 25 years later inside my dad's bones, and grew into an animal, and ate him. Would it have happened without that snow?  I'll never know. 

There was a new equation for rage.  We began to wonder how to think it.  Before we could blow up our own house, and we could blow up the other person's house.  Now we could blow up almost everything.