July 1976

I was a kid the summer the country turned two hundred. We were driving south out of Santa Fe, the New Mexico kind of nothing on both sides, heat coming up off the asphalt like the road was trying to remember what water looked like. Then there were people. Just sitting in the dirt by the highway, a little crowd of them, like they'd grown there.

We pulled over. Asked what the hell they were doing out in all that sun.

They were waiting on a train. A nuclear missile was coming through on rails. It happened to be coming through on the Fourth of July, and they had decided the only thing to do about it was sit down in the dirt and watch it pass. Bear witness. Protest, if you can call sitting still a protest.

So we sat down too. In the desert. By the highway. And the train came, slow and heavy and indifferent, hauling the end of the world past a bunch of strangers in the weeds and dust. The grown-ups got quiet and started talking the way grown-ups do when they think the kids aren't listening, about two hundred years of this place, what it had become, what it was hauling down the tracks on its own birthday.

No fireworks. We watched the sun go down instead. Big and red and going.

It felt right. I didn't know why then. I think I do now.