Radioactive Beachcombing

“Did you know that all bananas are slightly radioactive?” The young woman picked up a banana lying on the table between a clock with a radium-painted dial and an old Fiestaware saucer tinted orange with uranium oxide. Her Geiger counter rattled away, click-click-click, as soon as she held the piece of fruit to it.

My mind raced from thoughts of banana splits to bananas splitting the atom. Forget yellowcake, was banana bread the new nuclear threat? “One out of every ten thousand potassium atoms is naturally radioactive, and bananas are high in potassium,” the woman explained, to my and my husband’s relief.

Too late for us to be spooked by a little radiation, anyhow. We had come to Trinity Site precisely because it is a landmark of the nuclear age—where the first atomic explosion occurred in July 1945. During World War II, scientists working on the Manhattan Project raced to build an atomic weapon before the Germans could. They tested one such bomb successfully in this remote patch of desert in central New Mexico before two more were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But during our early April visit, the pinkish earth gleamed underneath a cloudless sky, mushroom or otherwise, and the mood was as festive as a county fair. Booths selling hamburgers and hot dogs, books and t-shirts, greeted us outside the site’s entrance. The banana, Fiestaware, smoke detector, and other mildly radioactive household items sang their clacking duets with the Geiger counter just beyond the gate.

We trekked on to Ground Zero, a football field-sized oval separated from the rest of the dusty desert plateau by a barbed wire fence. People snapped photos of one another next to the rough stony obelisk marking the precise site of the test blast. But I was drawn to the aerodynamic profile of the white Fat Man bomb displayed nearby. Despite being the weapon that flattened Nagasaki, this Fat Man replica looked rather cute – as far as bomb casings go - with its plump egg-shaped body and delicate fins. Too bad that it was too tall and too off-limits for the souvenir picture that I wanted: posing astraddle á la Major Kong in “Dr. Strangelove.”

So my husband and I wandered about the corral, looking among the tufts of grass and desert wildflowers for pieces of trinitite, a greenish, glassy, ever-so-slightly-radioactive residue formed when the energy of the blast fused the desert sand together. Trinitite originally coated an area over a quarter mile in diameter—far beyond the 600-foot-diameter blast crater—in a green glass sheet up to one inch thick. The Army later filled in the crater and plowed most of the crust underground to abate the radioactivity.

Nearby, a young boy showed a piece that he had found with his father and older brother. “You can look at it for now, but we’re not supposed to take any home,” said the father. It is against the law to remove trinitite from the national historic landmark these days, but it’s not hard to buy. Driving through the small town of Carrizozo on our way from Alamogordo we’d seen large hand-painted signs advertising it for sale in several shops along the road.

Having completed our atomic pilgrimage I could do only so much radioactive beach combing, especially since it wasn’t for keeps. After finding and tossing back several hot green pebbles—and waiting for twenty minutes in line for an underwhelming peek of more trinitite inside a low-lying shed—I took the wheel to drive on to Socorro for a lunch of New Mexican food. It wasn’t until Albuquerque the next morning, during a pre-rental-car-return purge of the accumulated maps, brochures, and wadded candy wrappers of a ten-day road trip, that I saw it in the passenger-side door pocket. A tooth-sized green glassy nugget of trinitrite. The filcher confessed. I tsk-tsked at my husband. When he starts stockpiling bananas, then I’ll worry.

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How to get there

Trinity Site is located within White Sands Missile Range and is over two hours’ drive south of Albuquerque via I-25 and US 380. It is open only on the first Saturday of April and October each year. Directions and more information can be found on the official website.

Where to eat

El Sombrero, 210 Mesquite NE, Socorro, NM. (505) 835-3945. It’s not far off the main exit for Socorro along I-25—look for the sign along the highway. Tasty New Mexican food served in a festive atmosphere of saturated colors and folk art, especially if you get seated around the fountain in the airy back room. Entrees $5 to $12.