By Kelle Groom
[See links to photographs in Emmet Gowin’s The Nevada Test Site, Princeton University Press, 2019, below]
In Emmet Gowin’s photographs, arroyos could be leaves, veined. Concave fingerprints. Slaughter-mist. A moonscape AI might make: each crater a dark eye with a gray dusty lid strewn across hard flats.
The largest is Portmanteau, a heavy suitcase of isotopes, plutonium, uranium. The crater can fall into a chamber, create a chimney for radioactive fallout to rise.
Portulaca here too: ephemeral flowers, fuchsia, pink, buttercup. And Liptauer a soft Slovak cheese.
Within a tiny oblong square: a white building, parking spots where men test a bomb that could kill us all and name it after cheese.
Blurry sagebrush like clumps of dust blow in one direction from helicopter gusts like cancers downwind.
A circle road on the flats as I might have drawn with my compass in eighth grade geometry.
Pressing the anchor, adjusting the arms. Twenty underground explosions inside the ring: cratered, crisscrossed like messages from outer space etched into the ground.
The emergency siren is on.
I hadn’t paid much attention in class. After all, how many circles would I draw in the life ahead, the one I was preparing?
A faultline runs across a mirror of silver. Scar ridged from belly button to pubic bone on a body cut open.
Troop placement trenches are scratches in basins, valleys where men crouched, covered their eyes.
Alluvial wash is the fan of a river ending at a lake that evaporated. Imagine all of Nevada underwater once. Imagine the quiet. Then 921 explosions underground as if we wanted to break ourselves apart.
A dry lake is still a lake. The Mercury Highway runs toward it.
I was six years old, seven hiding under my desk as if plywood would save me from a nuclear attack, vaporization of my red sneakers, grass-stained white tights, my hands covering my face.
To understand if a nuclear explosion would kill a forest, they decided to import and cement 145 Ponderosa Pines into the valley, which were destroyed in an explosion. My first question is why cement? Would the trees run away?
Minute Steak and Milk Shake tests, fun names that left melted craters like a face burned beyond recognition.
All the darkened places we touch are illuminated.
The Sedan Crater has a bird drawn on flying down into blackness. Even the sun is hiding in Area 3 with no horizon, sinking into earth.
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Kelle Groom is the author of two books of nonfiction, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster) and How to Live (Tupelo Press).An NEA Fellow and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, her nonfiction has appeared in AGNI, Bennington Review, New England Review, Orion, Ploughshares, River Teeth, StoryQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, West Branch, and Witness, among others.
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Links to photographs in Emmet Gowin’s The Nevada Test Site, Princeton University Press, 2019
1). A look inside The Nevada Test Site | Princeton University Press
2). https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/emmet-gowin/
3). Atomic Photographers & Artists Emmet Gowin
4). Witness to the Cold War in the desert – High Country News
5). Emmet Gowin’s Intimate Photography of Nuclear Destruction | The New Yorker [subscription required]