In sixth grade history my history teacher asked us to make a list of our biggest fears. My choices from a pre-selected list were:

1. Nuclear war

2. My family dying

3. Getting cancer

When we shared our lists, my classmates giggled. It was the nineties now. We had Sony Walkmen and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on cassette tape. We wore flannel shirts, Converse sneakers, and white Gap jeans. The Berlin wall had come down. The Cold War was over. 

But the specter of nuclear explosions haunted me. For summer reading in elementary school I checked out a book on famous nuclear disasters from the public library, reading with horrified fascination about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the debate about whether to store nuclear waste deep inside a place called Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. The terror I felt about nuclear war, and nuclear power, was that we had created a force that could destroy us both at once and slowly and painfully, and we had no idea what to do with it or how to control it.

“The end of the world” proclaims the blocky, silver letters, two stories high, marching across the desert floor. An installation made of plywood that’s painted to look like welded metal, they broadcast what outsiders must think if they happen to pass through Wonder Valley, California. The terrain at the foot of the Old Woman Mountains is a mixture of sand, waving creosote bushes, salt flats, and tar paper shacks. To an outsider, the desert, indeed, feels closer to the end of the world than other lush landscapes. Before you know the desert, it looks dead, uninhabited, a wasteland. 

On multiple flights across the country, looking down at the desert I used to wonder, “What possibly could be in all that nothingness?” 

As I spent time in the Mojave desert its aliveness sharpened into focus. Along with the iconic Joshua Trees that stretch their spindly branches towards the sky, on my desert walks I was delighted to encounter ephemeral wildflowers that appear for mere weeks after winter rains, sandy-colored hyperactive ground squirrels, and jewel toned hummingbirds feeding on the riot of violet desert willow flowers. There are also the desert residents who blend into the landscape, an encounter with whom is a blessed reminder of our own aliveness and mortality: The rattlesnake whose tail sounds like the hiss of an angry cat, the desert tortoise who moves at a pace akin to the glaciers that shaped this landscape, and the coyote, the secretive, scruffy survivors that often slip past me on the trail at sunrise. In the desert the cycles of life hang in a fragile balance. To bear witness to them feels like an invitation to the sublime. 

California, and its deserts, are home to some of the richest and most imperiled biodiversity in the world. Quietly, the Mojave desert contains the history of humanity and of our planet. Dinosaur tracks, petroglyphs from human ancestors from time immemorial, and the oldest known living organism: The king clone creosote, over 11,000 years old, witness to the glacier’s retreat and the dawn of the holocene.

“Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you,” wrote Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain, published in 1903. “Here in the silence, voices that cannot be heard elsewhere, the voices of one’s own fears and dreams and the voices of the geologic earth, the sky, the wind, and death, murmur to the traveler,” wrote Rebecca Solnit nearly a century later in Savage Dreams as she traversed the same parts of Nevada and California as Austin, protesting nuclear testing. In this land that puts life and death in stark contrast, the U.S. government has been engineering death for the better part of a century. Living in the desert brought the military industrial complex to my doorstep. 

What makes a place a national treasure and what is a wasteland? 

• Death Valley National Park

• Joshua Tree National Park

• Mojave National Preserve

• Mojave Trails National Monument

• Sand to Snow National Monument

Bumping up against: 

• Edwards Air Force Base

• Nellis Air Force Base

• Fort Irwin National Training Center

• Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake

• Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms

• Nevada National Security Site

• Bicycle Lake Army AirField

In the desert, the military is my neighbor. The United States’ largest Marine’s base, the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, is the next town over, in 29 Palms. Shock waves from bombs rattle my windows and my sense of peace, causing a friend and I to text each other, “Was that an earthquake?” Commentators on the local Facebook group call the artillery blasts “sounds of freedom.” At night, the sky lights up with the incandescent glow of battlefield flares that tourists mistake for UFOs. 

When I look east at sunset, a series of blank, boxy structures glint in the peach gold light at the base of the mountains. At first, I could not place them. Were they a strange rock formation? An abandoned city? On the map I found this strange geometry was Hue City, a MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain), which sprawls across 274 acres of desert. Built in 2011 to the tune of $70 million according to a report in NBC news, it was as part of a push to create simulated Afghan cities at bases across the country so units could train in “realistic” situations before shipping off overseas. Hue City and others like it were staffed with actors so soldiers can practice, combat, police work, and humanitarian relief. Military units come from all over to practice live fire training exercises. Always training and preparing for the next annihilation.

As if trying to make up for the destruction around me, I’m working to create a haven for wild birds in my small patch of desert yard. I want a place that invites them to rest, congregate, and sip nectar from native plants. Bird populations in the Mojave are in decline due to climate change, as they are unable to find enough water to keep cool as the temperature rises. I put out a bird feeder and a water dish that I refresh daily directly in front of the window I look at from my desk. I delighted in the string of visitors. During some pandemic days they were the only other beings I saw besides my cat, who switched her tail as she watched them out the window, dreaming of prey. 

I bought the Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America and proudly placed it on the desk. It is reminiscent of the worn copy of the Birds of Eastern North America that sat on the rough hewn wooden counter in my family’s coastal Maine cabin while I was growing up. My parents would thumb through it religiously, trying to identify whether that was a Downey or Pileated woodpecker. When I told my mother proudly about my bird book she responded, “They have an app now.” 

The birds that have visited my backyard include: 

• Crissal Thrasher

• Cactus Wren

• Costa’s Hummingbird

• Greater Roadrunner

• Ash-throated Flycatcher

• Black-headed Grosbeak

• Pinon Jay

• Cooper’s Hawk

• Prairie Falcon

At home in the desert I also identify military aircraft as if they are rare and exotic birds, getting to know the desert flora and fauna around me. 

• Osprey

• Fighting Falcon

• Whitehawk

• Chinook

• Apache Longbow

• Lakota

• Super Stallion

• Hercules

• Pegasus

• Minotaur

• Stratofortress

• Globemaster

Their names are a mixture of wildness, history, and myth, a combination of what was or could have been. As they pass overhead they rattle my rooftop and regularly send me running outside, squinting into the sun, trying to catch a glimpse. I look them up on my flight radar app, though they rarely appear. Phantom planes. 

My childhood fears of nuclear annihilation came back to life when Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2022. As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine I lay awake feeling like the past thirty years of my adolescence and adulthood without the specter of nuclear war may have been a pause, not an end. “Divider,” the final test at the Nevada Test Site was performed in September 1992, the same time I identified nuclear war as my biggest fear. I had missed the duck and cover drills of my parents’ generation, though a fading, metal yellow and blue “Fallout Shelter” sign was still attached to the side of my former six story brick, New York City apartment building. That building didn't survive the most mundane of emergencies: a fire started by a candle burning near a fabric curtain on a windy day. 

I visited the Nevada Test Site on a cloudy day in mid-November as part of an officially sanctioned public tour hosted by the Department of Energy, formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission. I stepped on the sleek, air conditioned tour bus in downtown Las Vegas, leaving behind my cell phone, camera, and bluetooth watch. We glided out of the city and its ever increasing sprawl and were soon headed north on 95. Our tour guide explained that it used to be known as the “widow maker” because of the number of crashes that tired test site workers had gotten into commuting in the pre-dawn or dark of night. We glide past two prisons, a gunnery and bombing range with fake convoys that serve as practice targets, and Creech air force base where they fly the Raptor and Predator drones. One hovered eerily in the sky above, a silent, windowless, white wasp. Lives and landscapes that are told they are only worthy for the sacrifice they give.

Sooner than I expected, we turned off at a sign reading “Mercury” and approached the boundary of the test site. The boundary is marked by a simple white line on the pavement. A familiar figure surprises me as we draw near the line: An inflatable rat nearly two stories tall. I nearly greet the rat like a friend until I realize I am about to cross a picket line for the first time in my life. The pipefitters union is on strike. Our bus slips past, tinted windows hiding my shame. A contradiction of the test site already highlighted: skilled union jobs and advanced technical knowledge, working with a world-ending technology.  

We cross the line, from go to no go land, all the same land.  

We stop at “News Nob,” the wooden benches once sat upon by famous reporters and VIPs to watch the blasts from the first atmospheric tests in the 50s and early 60s. I’m struck by the grandeur of this landscape I have held in my imagination as a mythic, forbidden, blank space on a map. The natural beauty of the site rivals any National Park: dry lake beds gleaming silver in cloudy half light, multicolored mountains shimmering on the horizon, and alluvial fans dotted with Joshua Trees. A seamless desert. The landscape is sculpted by faults, volcanoes, glaciers, centuries of wind and rain, wells and underground aquifers. Forces that create and destroy in their own geologic time. A place that has been home to Indigenous people since time immemorial. And I am looking at something very familiar: This desert looks like the desert I have come to call home. 

Looking more closely at the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat, I can see scars from where the atmospheric tests were conducted, the site lines for the airplanes that dropped the bombs still carved into the desert floor. We explore a metal bridge warped from the heat of a blast, observe posts where pigs were tied to test the impacts of radiation on their skin. Wild burro tracks wind throughout the slumped concrete and twisted metal. Our guide points out a cratered vault where they tested how money - gold, silver, and paper currency - would withstand a blast. The paper vaporized. What is the currency of a post-fall out world? 

Deeper into the test site, at Yucca Flat, the ground is pockmarked with gaping, perfectly round craters from 828 underground tests. The craters formed when the rock, thousands of feet below, was vaporized during the explosion. All that radiation is still just stewing in the earth, our failable technology trying to contain that force with concrete plugs and containment chambers. We visit testing sites on wooden and concrete houses. On troops in trenches not even two miles from the “shot.” On mannequins. On tinned food. On furniture. On cars. How many ways to destroy ourselves? 

At a drilling shaft for a test that would have taken place a few weeks after the test ban treaty was signed in 1992 we shifted from foot to foot on the concrete floor. The inside of the white, sheet metal tower smelled cool and earthly. Giant bunches of fiber optic cables stretch down into the 2,000 foot shaft. It looks like the workers on the site just walked away yesterday. The “Icecap” test would have studied the impact of the deep cold of space on nuclear bombs. They were going to pack the bomb with two weeks worth of dry ice to keep it at negative forty degrees centigrade.

“Goofy,” is somehow the only word I can consistently think of to capture the absurdity of it all.

I fought off sleep as our bus headed back to Las Vegas in the twilight. The test site didn’t feel so isolated. While the National Nuclear Security Administration constantly refers to its size as “bigger than Rhode Island,” Rhode Island is actually, not that big, about 48 by 37 miles, compared to the approximate 35 by 55 miles of the test site. I couldn’t stop thinking about the pigs. The terror. The pain. The troops in the trenches, who are not mannequins in a house. The logic of the US war machine, that land, people, civilians, animals could be collateral damage to keep those same land, people, and animals safe from our own world-ending power. 

For weeks before and after I went on the Nuclear Test Site tour, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs, many funded by the United States, rained down on Gaza from Israeli warplanes. The Israeli “heritage minister” ​​Amichai Eliyahu said that dropping an actual nuclear bomb on Gaza could be an “option,” as if an artificial boundary imposed by a colonial power could keep a certain few safe from indiscriminate fallout. As the threat of nuclear war, or at least the invocation of its power, looms again too large and too real. I ask, would someone actually destroy the world for their own power? As we witness a genocide in real time, the answer is too close to being yes.

At my home in the Mojave when the wind howls for days, gusting angrily down from the mountains and turning the horizon into an indistinct, dirty brown, blocking the view of the mountains and any sense of perspective, the desert indeed feels like it is the harbinger of the end of the world. One one of these windy days I went out with a geiger counter leant to me by a friend, curious about the level of ambient radiation in the desert. Each gust sent the counter spiking to an average of 0.26 microsieverts an hour. The “safe” limit is deemed to be .3 per hour. Of course we are exposed to ambient radiation on a daily basis, but I keep wondering, how much of the radioactive dust in Nevada is caught up in these winds? How do we continue to live with this fallout? 

As the U.S. intervenes in conflicts around the world, many of our own making, I wonder how many of these units have trained at 29 Palms or the other nearby bases. The United States ships Howitzers to Ukraine, the same types which are used in exercises at 29 Palms. Marines were deployed to airlift people from Afghanistan in a bumbling, bloody withdrawal in those same C-17 Globemasters I’ve seen overhead. Every time my house shakes from a “practice” bomb, I shudder to think of the citizens of Gaza, of Iraq, of Afghanistan, who have been the actual targets of these bombs. Thanks to the United States’ military empire, the desert which seems so far away, is intimately connected to the rest of the world. 

The Mojave desert is famous for its dark night skies. These skies are now deemed worthy of protection by a 2021 San Bernardino county ordinance, which limits the use of outdoor lighting. One of my favorite parts of being in the desert is staring into space, while indistinct, high clouds sharpen into the Milky Way as my eyes adjust to the night. I’ve become more fluent in the language of constellations and planets, which rises higher in the skies as the seasons slide into one another. Thousands of pinpoints of faraway light from distant nuclear explosions. The thousands of bombs we’ve made are also stars, exploded over and under the desert to both hasten and supposedly protect us from our own destruction. The end of the world looms, but I try to find hope in scaling back and listening and learning from the desert. We can’t control our way out of annihilation as we have tried to force our way into it. The desert pushes us towards a different vision, a longer view of time. A constant reminder of the brevity of our lives, our delicate morality, and the folly of our sense of control.