July 8

Los Alamos was one of my favorite places on this trip so far. Which you might say tells us something about the measure of various sensory pleasures next to cultural significance in one’s own culture. But Los Alamos also had a Starbucks and a bunch of evocative mountain cliffs in a stormy sky. So it was really cultural significance and delicious green tea frappe and views that would have really been something on their own (though not to die for—attention whoever is in charge of highway signage).

But I really do like it for the atmosphere of what it was. The exciting parts of history I know of are mostly fierce warriors conquering exotic empires for alien reasons. Which is interesting, but doesn’t feel like part of the same world that I live in, so it doesn’t feel like our real past. 

World War II is also pretty far from my experience in general. But the part where thousands of smart young nerds leave their normal lives to work on an absurdly ambitious and speculative project—to defend against a newly apparent technological risk to civilization—feels much more like an extreme and epic entry in the genre of story we find ourselves in. 

And the other parts, where someone was running a successful school for sickly youths which had to be acquired by the government, and where Robert Oppenheimer used to go walking near here and so suggested it when they needed a location, and where Leslie Groves was pretty good at making things happen, are familiar enough kinds of details—I can imagine my own acquaintances doing those things.

I also enjoy that many of the buildings there are log cabins fairly reminiscent of where I grew up, and not at all reminiscent of where one expects cutting edge physics to go on. One Los Alamos building and one Gowrie Park building:

I have always liked the city, but imagining Los Alamos as an isolated vista of concentrated intellectual activity and concomitant socializing, in these surrounds, made me imagine something like that might be pretty nice.