Proof of Life
This Southwestern literary classic is an antidote to "Oppenheimer."
“Oppenheimer” may be nominated for thirteen Oscars this weekend, but in New Mexico, its reception has been fraught.
Those arresting landscape shots of northern New Mexico’s high desert carry an all too familiar implication that the area around Los Alamos was uninhabited. So does the film’s dialogue. “There’s a boys’ school we’ll have to commandeer, and the local Indians come up here for burial rites,” Cillian Murphy’s Robert J. Oppenheimer tells Matt Damon’s Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves. “But apart from that, nothing. Forty miles. Any direction.”
That statement would have come as news to the San Ildefonso Pueblo, the centuries-old Native community that used the Los Alamos mesa for burial rites, located twelve and a half miles away. And also to the Hispano homesteaders living on the mesa, who were given forty-eight hours to vacate their land, sometimes at gunpoint.
When the Trinity Test does not set fire to the atmosphere, Murphy-as-Oppenheimer and his team of scientists rejoice. This scene lands differently in southern New Mexico, where the world’s first nuclear bomb turned desert sand into green glass, and where families who lived in adjacent counties have been reporting higher rates of cancer for generations. Some of the people who lived near the test site and may have been exposed to Trinity’s extensive fallout, known as “downwinders,” are still fighting for aid under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
And in these parts, the reigning literary classic about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project is not “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the Pulitzer-winning doorstop on which Christopher Nolan’s biopic is based, though there are plenty of copies stocked in local bookstores here. Rather, it’s a quiet, unassuming volume usually propped up somewhere off to the side: “The House at Otowi Bridge” by Peggy Pond Church.
At first glance it appears to be a book of nature writing, and in one sense, it is. Published in 1959, the book tells the story of Edith Warner, a Baptist minister’s daughter from Philadelphia who moved to New Mexico in 1928 and ran a tearoom in a remote spot along the Rio Grande for twenty years. Warner’s outpost was situated on the edge of San Ildefonso. To her north stood Black Mesa, a basalt outcropping that towered over the river valley. Extending across the eastern horizon were the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, named for the red alpenglow that colors their peaks in winter. Just below Otowi Bridge, the flow of the Rio Grande grew louder as the river narrowed into a rock canyon flanked by two mesas. To Warner’s friends at San Ildefonso, her location was known as Po-sah-con-gay, or “the place where the water makes a noise.”
For Warner’s first fifteen years at the Otowi crossing, her neighbors up on the Pajarito Plateau, the vast mesa ten miles to her west, were the students and faculty of the elite boys’ school mentioned in the film, the Los Alamos Ranch School. (Graduates include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal.) It was the school’s director who had hired Warner and persuaded her to live by the suspension bridge. All mail and supplies for the school were shipped by train to an old boxcar station next to the little house. For twenty-five dollars a month, Warner oversaw the freight.
There was a hand-crank gas pump at the station, and Warner took to having tea and chocolate cake ready at her house for visitors. She paid acquaintances at San Ildefonso to build tables and an adobe fireplace. One of them, a former governor of the pueblo named Adelano Montoya, who went by Tilano, moved in with Warner, helped her run the tearoom, and became her longtime companion. In 1934 they added a separate adobe house for overnight guests. The stop was listed in the W.P.A. guide to 1930s New Mexico: “‘EDITH WARNER’S TEAROOM’ (overnight accommodations for a limited number arranged in advance), the only place along this part of the route where lunches, teas, and dinners are served.”
Warner was integrated into the communal life of the pueblo. She attended regular rituals there and recorded in her journals the profound effect the ceremonies had on her. She also grew protective of the villagers.
“I remember what a dislike she had, really the only sharp animosity I ever heard her express, for the anthropologists who kept intruding in the village, prying like irreverent children into the secrets of the kiva,” the book’s author, Peggy Pond Church, wrote of Warner. “In all her years at the bridge she allowed herself to learn only a few playful words in Tewa because she wanted the village to keep, even from her, the privacy of their language.”
In December 1942, the U.S. government took over the school and converted it into the secret laboratory that would develop the atomic bomb. With gas rationed and no school traffic, Warner wasn’t sure she could keep her tearoom open. But Oppenheimer persuaded her to stay on, and to turn the tearoom into a private restaurant and sanctuary for the scientists working up on “the hill.”
For the next few years, Warner and Tilano served warm stews, homemade bread, and fresh vegetables from Tilano’s garden to the groups of men and women who came down to eat at the place where the water makes a noise. Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, had a weekly reservation. Niels Bohr was another regular. It wasn’t until the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Warner knew for certain what had been going on up on the plateau. “Much was now explained,” she wrote in her annual Christmas newsletter in 1945.
Oppenheimer and Warner already knew each other. Both had first come to New Mexico in 1922 to recover their health—Warner after a breakdown, Oppenheimer from dysentery—and both had spent time in Frijoles Canyon, a lush haven with a year-round creek and miles of ancient cliff dwellings in Bandelier National Monument. Oppenheimer returned many times over the years and met Warner on one of those trips, in 1937. “Stranger even than the Army’s choosing this locality was that the civilian head should be a man I knew,” Warner wrote in her Christmas letter of 1943. “He had stopped years ago on a pack trip, come back for chocolate cake, brought a wife, and now was to be my neighbor for the duration.”
Church had her own history with Los Alamos. Her father had managed a dude ranch in nearby Pajarito Canyon for a couple years when she was a child. She had ridden her horse around the plateau and hunted for arrowheads in the Native ruins. Drought forced Church’s family to move, but a few years later, in 1917, her father founded the Ranch School. Eventually she married a young teacher at the school and went to live on campus. During Church’s years as a faculty wife, Warner was one of her few women friends.
When the government took over the school, Church was forced off the plateau a second time, along with her husband and their three sons. Warner’s Christmas letters “kept the land alive for those of us in exile,” Church explained. “She wrote us the news of plowing and planting, of the anguish of dust and wind, the blessing of rainfall, pine knots that she gathered each autumn, the ancient Indian rituals continued even while the sound of experimental blasts from the mesas gave notice that a new and threatening age had come upon us.”
Church included the full text of Warner’s Christmas letters in the appendix, and although they are elegantly written and often poetic, reading them back to back is an unsettling experience. It’s a deeply strange mix—the build-up to unparalleled destruction with the neighborly day-to-day. The “Los Alamosers” had skiing until May, Warner reported in her letter in 1944, and they came for dinner five nights a week all through the winter. Heavy snow meant plenty of grass for cattle, water for irrigation, and “a continued life cycle for seeds waiting underground through dry years.” The ground burst forth with wildflowers she’d never seen. Tilano’s garden produced a bounty. Twice a week, they sent vegetables up to Los Alamos.
Warner’s letter of 1945 had a more subdued tone. It’d been a dry, hot summer. She’d searched in vain for Mariposa lilies in June. “There was tension and accelerated activity on the Hill (Los Alamos) with the men ‘going south’ (to the Alamogordo site),” Warner wrote, referring to the location where the Trinity Test took place. “Explosions on the Plateau seemed to increase and then to cease. Men were in the Pacific, leaving wives on the Hill.” She soon knew why: “The climax came on that August day when the report of the atomic bomb flashed around the world. It seemed fitting that it was Kitty Oppenheimer who, coming for vegetables, brought the news.”
In her letters, Warner betrayed little about her personal reaction to the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She did note that she had watched develop among the scientists “a group feeling of responsibility for presenting the facts to the people and urging the only wise course—international control of atomic energy and bombs.” One of the scientists Warner had hosted in her tearoom, Philip Morrison, sent her a letter afterward. “It was a terrible irony that brought the makers of bombs to the quiet Otowi crossing,” wrote Morrison, who’d helped to load the uranium bomb, Little Boy, onto the Enola Gay. “It would have been easy for you to reject our problem. You could have drawn away from the Hill people and their concerns and remained in the compact life of the valley. But you did not. We take from that the hope that people of intelligence and goodwill everywhere can understand and share our sense of crisis.”
Plans for a new bridge at Otowi would soon bring the road to Los Alamos too close to Warner’s front porch. So in 1947, she and Tilano moved. They built a new house on pueblo land half a mile away, near Tilano’s garden. Tilano and a friend from the pueblo, Tony, laid the foundation that spring. More friends from San Ildefonso came to mix mud, make adobe bricks, peel pine saplings and plaster walls. Fifteen or so people from the Los Alamos lab asked to help, and they worked alongside the builders from the pueblo. “Tilano and Tony bossed the physicists,” Church recalled. “No Ph.D. or his wife was ever allowed to set one brick on another; they carried the adobes and handed them, obedient as children helping father, to Tony who laid each carefully in its place.”
In the years after the war, Warner started to write her autobiography. “This is the story of a house,” her manuscript began, “a house that stood for many years beside a bridge between two worlds.” But she didn’t get very far. To her ear, the story sounded too much like a trope best avoided: “White woman moves West. Lives among Indians.”
Church wrote in the foreword to “The House at Otowi Bridge” that her book was an effort to join the broken threads of Warner’s story together, and to weave them with her own. It was also Church’s effort to make sense of a certain haunting dissonance. In her words: “How strange it seemed that the bomb which had created such waste and suffering had been made on the plateau where the ancient people for so long invoked their gods in beauty.”
This is so interesting and so beautifully written. Fascinating but also troubling. Thank you
This is excellent, Abby -- thank you for writing it!