In 1939, Einstein wrote to the President, "I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over." It was one of the first realizations that the world had the knowledge to build a bomb that could be "exploded in a port (and) might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."

Five years later, a U.S. army captain, positioned on a mountain range just west of us, wrote,

"My first impression was of sudden brilliant lighting of the surrounding landscape, accompanied by a momentary flash of heat...After raising the dark filter to protect my eyes, I looked in the direction of the light. Although the filter provided was designed to eliminate over ninety-nine percent of the light, the intensity of illumination was such that there was a momentary sensation of blinding similar to that following a close flash of lightning on a dark night."

The world changed that day, but no one would know until Hiroshima. I wondered if the army officials standing on that mountain understood that man had just solidified himself as the most significant biological factor on Earth. But my interest in the development of the atomic bomb always centered around the fact that it wasn't just that the United States had developed this weapon, but rather that the world had come to the collective knowledge to do so, and the United States just had the resources to do it first.

We stopped in the evening in the White Sands, a protected field of dunes, in the middle of the old trinity site. A female hiker once told me that to coax some women into the pains of travel, you have to make it appear fashionable, like a center spread from Wallpaper Magazine. Walking in the gentle gypsum dunes, I could have asked Jane what a Louis Vuitton hiking backpack might look like. But I held my tongue and commented on how nice her hiking shoes looked in the white sand.

The pepper has become one of those occasionally obnoxious adopted symbols of the over-symbolized Southwest - a long, red fruit with a little green stem. But where did they grow these things? What does a field of chilis look like? And why do they grow them in New Mexico.