Failed Trip Report

Trinity Site, New Mexico
By David Sky

New Mexico? Where to even start this story? Such a weird place overall just gives off these Alien vibes, this very strange energy. If a flying saucer were to rise up over a craggy, red rock cliff, would almost seem like it belonged there ... hard to explain but you stand around alone out in that high desert for a while and you might see what I mean.

So I'll start here kind of zoom in past wilderness areas mostly in the high mountains as sublimely beautiful as any location on earth to the south central area of the state a vast high desert with nothing much standing higher than sagebrush and where to this very day there are precious few humans as you drive for hours sometimes before noticing a driveway leading to a ranch. The mountains here are treeless and barren in their beauty. Six to nine inches of rain per year is all that stands between life in death for the entire ecosystem. While for sure possessing a rugged beauty, the landscape yet wore on me in ways I never would have anticipated. Walking out anywhere meant coming into contact with a flora and fauna always to me appearing on the verge of dying from thirst and I found that this just made me uptight constantly setting off the alarm of that unfortunate childhood gift, “hyper-vigilance”. It made me look up at the sky expectantly even though I knew that it had not rained in a month or more and likely wouldn't be raining for another month or more. The constant clear blue sky such a sharp electric blue that it almost hurt my eyes to look at actually began to get on my nerves after a while.

“Dammit man, hang in here, Everybody, it's got to rain eventually” I'd often mutter aloud, a nervous tic and a kind of incantation - “Everybody” being an inclusive handle covering a lot of ground like every barely living thing out there.

But I made some peace by buying a place up at 7,000 feet on the eastern side of the 12,000 Sierra Blanca mountain on a steep mountainside surrounded by pine forest this oasis of green on the edge of the million acre Lincoln National Forest only 130 miles north of the Mexican border. The various mountain ranges rise up like little islands of green punctuating the vast sea of near-death high desert nothingness that dominates so much of this state, the 5th largest by landmass in the USA.

My ex wife now read about how the historic Trinity Site a national monument to the first test of an atomic bomb (only in America) has an open house for visitors only twice per year and it was coming up the following weekend. My first thought was, No. Hell no. But then a plan blossomed up from the desert of my unconscious rising up verdant and beautiful to me like the high mountain forests of New Mexico and I said, “O yes that sounds interesting”. It was only about a two hour drive to the northwest of where we lived in the little vacation village of Ruidoso.

The next Sunday we were off on a very interesting trip winding down out of the high mountains through the Lincoln National Forest – home of the real Smokey the Bear. Driving northwest away from the 12,000 Sierra Blanca that involved losing 3000 vertical feet in elevation over about twenty miles and when you look back up to the mountains above, it looks to me like something worthy of worship under the nearly always bright auspices of a New Mexico sun. Here in the flatland down below some hedonists maniacs with tons of cash had built a sprawling suburban infrastructure of paved streets with street lights and infrastructure of electricity, water wells and septic areas all on twenty acre plots out literally in the middle of nowhere with a green golf course in the middle of it appearing about as out of place as I feel most of the time trying to sell the lots for preposterous sums this land that the BLM can't honestly give away. There were exactly two rather large homes within the huge development all visible since there is not a solitary tree in sight.

“You get a 20 acre lot!” a sign bragged. 20 acres all practically gasping their last gasp, I thought. No thank you never was much into golf it's a bourgeois sport.

About 15 minutes out from the gate into this Trinity Site Nuclear National Monument, I take out of my shirt pocket 3 dried grams of Psilocybin Cubensis mushrooms that I had grown myself – this a strain called Amazonian – and begin chewing on them.

“Seriously?” my wife asks, shaking her head, never a fan of my mushroom experiments.

“I told you about this last week. It's a dirty job but by God it's got to be done. We'll be at the gate in fifteen minutes and I won't start tripping for 40 minutes and it's a small dose, anyway, so it's not like I'll be getting out of hand. I'm sure a lot of people marvel religiously at this wondrous monument. I anticipate this being a highly internal process. Not like I'll flip out and embarrass you,” I promise as reassuringly as I could trying to exude confidence reassuringly , never an easy thing for me.

“So what then you can through some psychic alchemy or something, you were saying transform the negative energy from the bomb into positive energy? … it's that fantasy you we're talking about, just to be clear? Jesus I thought you were joking. I should have known by now you weren't,” she says with practiced incredulity.

“That's the one.” I insisted a little indignantly, “It's an honest plan of noble intent”.

So I chew the three grams slowly allowing them to dissolve as much as I can in my mouth as Jana' drives on toward the gate. The government only opens this monument twice a year for public visitation of the site.

When the gate finally comes into view, she says, “you know you're insane, right”. It isn't a question and I ignore it.

I am now starting to feel excited about the plan and look forward to channeling the power of an atomic blast, praying silently for strength and protection. “This is not insane. This is history we are making, you should be psyched”.

Then we drive up to the gate to find it closed and locked not a soul in sight, a drab outbuilding inside the high, barb wire topped fencing a couple hundred yards away with a lone car that appeared to have government plates parked outside. Big Signs in enormous block letters have very intimidating warnings about trespassing.

“Damn,” Jana' says. “ Apparently, the open house was Saturday, not Sunday”. She looks at me laughing. “I'm kind of relieved, I have to admit. Sorry though. Can you draw your psychotic energy from out here?”

I ignore the psychotic energy remark but it is kind of funny looking around at nothing realizing that this really and truly is the middle of nowhere and back when the bomb was exploded in 1945, was no doubt even more so. I think, of course, of Oppenheimer's, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds” and how he got that from the Bhagavad Gita and the thought strikes me that this wasn't likely the first hydrogen bomb exploded on earth – and the mushrooms aren't even coming on yet. One thing the mushrooms had already taught me is that everything always happens for some good reason even if I can't fathom what that might be so I shrug it off.

“Let's go down to that restaurant near 25 by the Rio Grande that has the micro-brews on draft, what do you think?”

“Sure,” she says, turning around in the dry dust of nowhere, “it's only another 50 miles or so.” Distance in New Mexico is a relative thing for sure.

The three grams hits me about half way to the restaurant a lot harder than I had anticipated and I make a mental note to nail the opening day at this Trinity Site next year and give this another shot.

But I don't.