A Bomb in the Desert

All deserts are not alike. The Sahara’s romantic dunes form the great sand sea of desert archetype. The Sonoran is monumental, with its majestic saguaros and towering sandstone buttes. Though both are hot, dry, and unforgiving, these deserts are still compatible with human affairs, among them bearing witness to sublime beauty.

But others are alien and unwelcoming. Within the Chihuahuan Desert in south-central New Mexico, an ancient tectonic drift formed the Tularosa Basin. At its south edge, during the last ice age, gypsum runoff created a lake, which thaw later evaporated into White Sands, an albino desert. To the north, a barren waste of lava field stretches across 150 square miles of the basin—malpaís in Spanish, because the land itself is bad. Nearby, another, smaller flow of sharp, igneous darkness called the Carrizozo Malpais streaks across the earth like a scar.  

Few have ever tried to live on this land. The Spanish conquistadors who crossed it in the 16th century called the passage and the land it traverses , or “journey of the dead man.” But some people did settle here, including Franz Schmidt, a German immigrant who took up residence west of the Carrizozo Malpais a few years before the fountain pen was invented. Decades later, the United States government requisitioned