After the ugly incident in the auto parts store, I was more than eager to hit the road and put Santa Fe behind me. I headed north on a beautiful day, up the wide highway northward in the Rio Grande Valley, detouring past a couple of the Indian pueblos until I got to the cut-off westward towards Los Alamos.
About a half later I was up on top of the mesa, visiting the famous "Atomic City" for the first time in my life. For a physicist like me, it was somewhat of a pilgrimage to go there. I'd read the history of the Manhattan Project in college and was familiar with most of the famous scientists who worked on the project. I spent the first couple hours at the nice museum in the middle of town, then strolled around some of the historic buildings nearby, the ones that had been part of the original boy's camp in the 1930s, and had been converted to the living quarters and the mess hall for the scientists during the war.
Of course the lab is still in operation, bigger and more extensive than ever. Back in Austin, a visit to Los Alamos was a common junket for many of the scientists and graduate students in the physics department.
It was easy for me to imagine some alternate universe where I wound up working there. In another time, if I'd been born a little bit earlier, I might have pursued something like that quite happily. But by the time I was in graduate school, I'd lost my desire to that kind of physics. I'd already worked in a federal government lab outside Chicago and had no idea to do any more of that kind of work. I knew it wasn't for me.
Besides it would have cut into my nomadic experiences. You can't have it all, as they say.
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