The Cottonwoods

Taken apart the name of this particular tree brings visions of a strong hand capable of a warm gentle touch.  Sinewy wood and wisps of soft cotton are blended into one majestic creation that sways but stands firm against the wind.  Its branches offer shade to the walker who passes under its branches.

Cottonwoods love to be beside a stream or a lake but have found the fortitude to live on inhospitable soil.  They can grow on slopes or flatlands and can withstand extended periods when rain is scarce.  They are low-tech organisms - water, sun, soil and seed - they survive and regenerate.  With a lifespan of a hundred years, their height in feet can match their age and the canopy of shade they cast forms a circle from sixty to a hundred feet in diameter.

These trees are dioecious.  The females produce the cotton covered seeds and males make the pollen that rides the breeze searching for a welcoming seed.  Along the way in the season for pollenating, the pollen spores might touch us humans and leave us with some sneezing or drippy eyes.  The resolute power of each tree, male and female, is confirmed as roots toss away concrete or stone walls. Once a cottonwood tree begins to grow it annexes territory like a sprawling city.

There was a time and a place when cottonwoods were clear cut.  They were made to give their space for buildings - buildings that housed a team.  The team needed a place to work and a place to hide.  This place had no name but it did have purpose.  The people who assembled there meant to end a world war.  The brightest among them knew that they could not predict the final results.  Some believed their gadget might set the earth’s atmosphere afire.  If so, life could end upon this planet and the blood of thousands or millions would flow upon their consciences forever.  But so long and costly had been this war that ending it became the sole focus and all energy was given to creating a tool that intended to render war unthinkable.  They proceeded.  

They made a bomb - actually two.  They calculated that the power unleashed in their explosions would clear swaths of earth destroying every tree or structure or animal for miles in little more than an instant.  The cloud that formed in its aftermath looked like a giant mushroom.  It became a symbol.  For some it symbolized power, for others fear; for some it was the end of war, for others the end of humankind; for everyone, this mushroom cloud dominated the relationships of nations for the next seven decades - so far.  This mushroom cloud was the smoke and dust sucked up from the ground in the tempest a thousand times more powerful that any tornado or hurricane.  This tempest was man made. 

The place had no name.  It was secret, a secret city that was a hidden home for the Manhattan Project.  For three years scientists, physicists, engineers, craftsmen and hundreds of families gave their lives to the project.  Only an inner circle, a tiny cadre of scientists and soldiers, knew the gamble that was afoot.  On July 16, 1945, the device was detonated at the Trinity site.  Located in the Tularosa Basin of the Jornada del Meurto Desert that stretched a hundred miles from north to south and was bordered by the Andres mountains on the east and the Fra Cristobal Range on the west, the site was chosen in the hope that the gadget’s fury could be contained.  Every cottonwood tree within range of the shock wave was turned to ash and spun upward into the debris filled cloud.

The gadget worked.  The atmosphere was not set ablaze.  The power unleashed resisted being contained.  The bomb did bring the war to an end; victory was achieved; but war has not become unthinkable.  Fat Man and Little Boy, as the bombs were known, took lives and saved lives.  This place, so secret that it had no name, was only officially acknowledged as a post office box in Santa Fe.  The gateway through which every scientist and technician passed to get to the secret city was a nondescript store front at 109 East Palace in the capitol of New Mexico.  On a mesa in the mountains northwest of Santa Fe, the cottonwoods had been cleared so that the bonds of an atom’s particles could be severed releasing the energy of an exploding star upon the earth.  

If you walk among the cottonwoods when the cotton covered seeds are soaring, the song made by fluttering leaves can sound like a loving mating call.  Lying flat under the branches and watching limbs dance as the sun imbues the leaves with a jade-like glow, the random moves look like a ballet.  If an elephant’s trunk were stationary, it might feel like the damp bark of a cottonwood tree with every ridge or gnarl a wrinkle earned through life’s vicissitudes.

When the project was complete, some decided to stay.  They saw this as the proper place to build a laboratory where work could be done to subdue the genie they had summoned out of his lamp and released upon the world.  Some hoped the cottonwoods might reclaim the grounds.   

This place is named Los Alamos, “The Cottonwoods”, the city of my birth.

--td