On The Destruction Of The Deep Earth As A Destruction Of The Self

It originates arsenic a debased rolling rumble, for illustration a train disconnected successful nan distance.

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My begetter sits connected a woody chair extracurricular nan ranch house, pulling connected cowboy boots, whistling Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings tunes. Colorado sun lukewarm connected his cheeks, his quadrate chin.

The rumbling stirs nan horses; nan dogs whimper and cower beneath nan porch, for illustration erstwhile a wolf stalked nan property, months before.

Seconds later it reaches him for illustration a insignificant earthquake, for illustration subsurface thunder.

My begetter stands.

My mother’s inside, holding her pregnant belly while sitting connected nan separator of nan bed, which by now rocks violently, astir throwing her to nan floor. She calls retired my father’s name, “Roger?”

“Roger” tin beryllium utilized arsenic an affirmative, arsenic successful Roger that. My mother’s usage is conscionable nan opposite.

*

On screen: a small, earthy mound rises from nan ground, a slow-motion birth. A antheral sound pinch a smoker’s timbre and crisp enunciation narrates nan documentary film, changeable successful nan 1960s arsenic a propaganda run for Project Plowshare. “To execute a multitude of serene tasks for nan betterment of mankind,” nan narrator explains, “man is exploring a root of enormous, perchance useful energy: nan atomic explosion.”

On screen, nan mound expands into a steep, swollen hill.

Plowshare: an cultivation instrumentality for turning soil, for gouging a cleft successful nan earth. The archetypal thought of nan plowshare derives from nan Bible, successful which nan prophet Isaiah urges nan group to hit their swords into plowshares.

On screen, nan elevation grows into a mountain, and past nan mountain—which is not a mountain—erupts, a hulking achromatic wide edged pinch feathery projectiles, a pyrotechnic finale of ungraded and shale.

Under nan auspices of Project Plowshare, scientists, engineers, miners, and subject unit detonated twenty-seven atomic warheads successful subterranean shafts of various depths crossed nan continental United States. The task lasted seventeen years, from 1965 until 1973—the twelvemonth of my birth. “For nan use of all nations,” nan narrator explains.

Lewis L. Strauss, president of nan United States Atomic Energy Commission, supervised Plowshare. Strauss was nan man responsible for stripping J. Robert Oppenheimer, co-inventor of nan atom bomb, of his information clearance. In Strauss’s opinion, Oppenheimer’s expanding concerns astir atomic proliferation and radioactive wastes were pedantic, alarmist.

Strauss and his Plowshare operatives had colossal ambitions. They envisioned large-scale atomic excavation and quarrying: canals, railroad cuts done mountains, reservoir construction. They hoped to blast a harbor-sized spread successful Cape Thompson, Alaska, and hack a transmission done an oceanic reef successful nan Marshall Islands, each to heighten commerce and transportation.

Their grandest plan: to supplement aliases moreover switch nan Panama Canal. Four imaginable routes crossed Central America were selected and studied. In nan Plowshare film, a crude animation illustrates a zipper of atomic blasts from nan Atlantic to nan Pacific, to excavate a sea-level transmission up to 2 100 feet wide and 1 1000 feet deep, an oceanic superhighway crossed Costa Rica aliases Nicaragua. Here are Le Corbusier’s and Robert Moses’s visions for unimpeded business proscription writ large—a freeway successful nan sea, a tainted slash crossed nan American continent.

Another Plowshare exertion progressive underground engineering and extraction of earthy state and petroleum. Nuclear fracking, successful different words. Operation Rio Blanco was designed for this purpose, to frack a immense pouch of earthy gas, conscionable 30 miles from my parents’ house.

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The Christian conception of hell has origins successful nan New Testament, wherever it’s described successful nan Greek arsenic hades aliases pinch nan Hebrew connection gehenna. The existent gehenna was nan “Valley of Hinnom,” a garbage heap successful a debased valley connected Jerusalem’s outskirts. A spot wherever garbage was burned. Bodies of suicides were thrown in, to smolder pinch nan muck and char. Authors of nan New Testament usage gehenna arsenic a metaphor for nan last spot of reward for nan damned. A linear narrative: hellhole arsenic perpetual destination, endpoint, a fiery conclusion. The spot wherever Dante formed endless sinners, upside down successful hellholes of their ain carving, aliases successful nan tangled wood of suicides, aliases pinch nan fratricides successful nan ninth circle, each of them eternally condemned.

Our Western inheritance, then: nan conception of nan heavy underground arsenic wasteland, dump, terminus of nan unredeemable.

*

Western Colorado towns named for their mineral wealth: Crystal, Marble, Redstone, Gypsum, Silverton, Silt, Copper Mountain, Leadville. New Castle, Colorado, was named aft New Castle, England—a historical coal-producing city. On my father’s side, Hocking ancestors originated from Cornwall, England; immoderate were fishermen, but astir made their surviving arsenic ember aliases tin miners, successful nan epicenter of industrialized mining.

Four years aft they married, my parents bought a mini ranch extracurricular Silt, crossed nan Colorado River and southbound of New Castle. My begetter wasn’t a miner himself, but arsenic a civilian technologist he made structural plans for tunnels and sewers—underground work. And for illustration generations of Hockings earlier him, he pursued mineral wealth. In his case, nan early 1970s roar successful nan lipid shale manufacture connected nan Western Slope attracted him. He performed surveys for infrastructure astir section lipid operations; he engineered sprawling man-camps to location shale miners. Eventually he launched his ain successful patient and named it El Dorado Engineering, aft nan mythical metropolis of golden that enticed Spanish conquistadors to nan caller world.

My parents fixed up nan humble ranch, mended fences and corrals. They raised horses and an Australian shepherd pinch 1 brownish and 1 crystal-blue eye. Regular visitors to nan ranch: coyotes, elk, foxes, crows and hawks, and once, a wolf. The wolf kept his distance, but drove nan dogs half-mad pinch fear.

They looked guardant to their first child—especially my mother, who worked shifts arsenic a maternity ward caregiver astatine Valley View Hospital. By April of 1973, they’d decided connected my name. My mother was a observant parent. Avoided alcohol, ate carrots and lettuce and tomatoes from their plot plot. At nan mini diner successful Silt, she sometimes asked ranchers and miners astatine neighboring tables to extinguish their cigarettes. This embarrassed my father, a man who prided himself connected not letting things fuss him.

No 1 had thoroughly informed my parents astir nan atomic testing, but among nan residents of Silt, Project Plowshare was communal knowledge. The Rulison test, successful which nan authorities detonated a azygous forty-three-kiloton atomic explosive beneath crushed conscionable 20 miles from town, took spot 4 years earlier, without fanfare. The Rio Blanco trial of 1973—wherein Plowshare operatives planned to ignite 3 atomic warheads a mile beneath nan surface—was conscionable different subterranean exploration successful an area developed mostly for nan purposes of mining.

Everyone knew it was coming.

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Linear versus cyclical narratives: successful immoderate Indigenous cultures, hellhole is an intermediary play betwixt incarnations aliases stages. Many person nary conception of hell; they position nan underground arsenic a spot of ritual, transformation, and moreover genesis. Modern Puebloans—whose forebears whitethorn person hunted connected nan precocious deserts astir nan Rio Blanco atomic trial site—believe their ancient ancestors first emerged from nan underworld. They commemorate nan emergence pinch a mini spread successful nan level of their kivas called a sipapu—a symbolic portal to nan birthplace of their people.

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In nan Project Plowshare film, nan narrator acknowledges nan problem of radiation, and problems different than radiation: nan groundshock, nan airblasts, nan dustcloud. Fundamental distinctions: world arsenic a womb, aliases world arsenic a tomb of eternal punishment. The underground arsenic an root point, a ineffable realm, versus nan underground arsenic a tract to exploit, carve up, burn. James Watt, caput of nan Interior nether Ronald Reagan, was a fundamentalist Christian known for his extractive boasts: “We will excavation more, drill more, trim much timber…” He believed large-scale strip-mining of nan West was acceptable because nan Rapture was imminent.

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Craig Hayward was eighteen erstwhile he witnessed nan Rulison atomic shot. He was nan grandson of nan rancher who leased nan onshore to Project Plowshare. The U.S. authorities promised nan Hayward family a stock successful revenue, should nan atomic method beryllium viable for fracking earthy gas.

“When they touched that point off, I saw shale cliffs crumbling,” Hayward said. “After a while, I saw nan crushed rolling. It was for illustration a activity coming through. Cars were parked there. They were rocking backmost and forth.”

A mini group of protesters gathered adjacent nan detonation zone. They feared polluted groundwater, contaminated earthy state seeps, radioactive nucleotides pinch a half-life of a 4th of a cardinal years. As existent landowners adjacent nan Rulison tract still worry, 50 years later, erstwhile power companies drill for earthy state conscionable miles away.

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The 1959 movie Hiroshima Mon Amour, by French head Alain Resnais, explores nan entangled quality of individual and humanities memory; it’s changeable successful an experimental style that cracks isolated nan genres of fabrication and documentary and smelts them into a ghostly, shimmering amalgam. Jean-Luc Godard described Hiroshima arsenic “Faulkner positive Stravinsky.” The mostly impressionistic crippled centers a French female visiting Hiroshima to movie an anti-nuclear warfare film—a postmortem effort astatine documenting Japan’s holocaust. There she has an matter pinch a Japanese man; some are married, some still traumatized by war. Though she attempts to comprehend nan Hiroshima bombing by visiting a depository and interviewing survivors for her film, her Japanese person tells her many times that she “saw thing of Hiroshima.” Susan Sontag dubbed Resnais’s activity “the cinema of nan inexpressible.” Other critics constituent to Hiroshima Mon Amour arsenic nan epicenter of postmodernism. It’s astir nan hopeless inability of a museum—or immoderate conventional, linear narrative—to convey nan lived acquisition of specified cataclysmic trauma.

But what of nan 3 atomic bombs buried and detonated adjacent your family’s home, 2 and a half months earlier your birth? There were nary wide casualties, nary contiguous quality casualties astatine all, truthful possibly communicative is up to nan task. But wouldn’t nan detonation origin nan communicative itself to stone and fracture for illustration those crumbled shale cliffs?

*

The Rio Blanco atomic changeable stimulated a travel of earthy gas, arsenic hoped, but nan merchandise was contaminated pinch radioactivity. Unusable. Just arsenic it was successful 1969, aft nan Rulison test.

After twenty-seven atomic shots, Project Plowshare began losing celebrated support. Activists deemed nan blasts and their aftermath an biology catastrophe. Among politicians, nan thought of utilizing atomic weapons to build a amended Panama Canal was seen arsenic progressively preposterous.

Seventeen years aft Plowshare’s genesis, Rio Blanco marked nan very past underground detonation. The endpoint of nan project’s linear narrative.

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I want to judge that, during nan Rio Blanco test, my mother felt an soul rocking—the kid wrong her increasing restless, uneasy. Perhaps successful guidance to her ain physiological accent response. Elevated bosom rate, adrenaline spike arsenic nan crushed shook beneath her—the consequence of a atomic blast six times arsenic powerful arsenic nan Hiroshima bombing.

I was still successful nan womb; I saw thing of Project Plowshare. But was I funny and disturbed, moreover then, by what took spot beneath nan surface?

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Excerpted from A Field Guide to nan Subterranean: Reclaiming nan Deep Earth and our Deepest Selves by Justin Hocking. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by support of Counterpoint Press.