License to Thrill (8 page)

“It looks like a big pistachio nut,” Pep said.

“It
is
a big pistachio nut,” said Coke.

“Not only is it a big pistachio nut,” reported Mrs. McDonald gleefully, “it's the biggest pistachio nut in the
world
!”

“Here we go again,” groaned Dr. McDonald, slapping his forehead. He stepped on the gas, hoping that if the car was moving fast enough, maybe he wouldn't be asked to stop.

“Oh, come on, Ben!” Mrs. McDonald said. “It's right off the road here. How could we go to Alamogordo, New Mexico, and
not
visit the world's largest pistachio nut?”

“Yeah, lighten up, Dad,” said Coke.

Dr. McDonald rolled his eyes and stamped on the brake. As a distinguished history professor at San Francisco State University, he had little regard for the tacky roadside attractions his wife and children found so fascinating. It was one of the few things they argued about.

“I need to use the bathroom anyway,” he said, skidding off the highway just before he would have passed the giant pistachio.

“Cool!” the twins shouted as they hopped out of the car and ran over for a close-up view.

At thirty feet tall, and covered with thirty-five gallons of paint, the giant pistachio sculpture was undeniably cool. Its tan shell was partly open, and the nut inside had been painted bright green.

“You don't see one of
these
every day,” Mrs. McDonald said as she snapped photos and took notes for
Amazing but True
. The twins debated whether or not the pistachio was bigger than the world's largest frying pan or the world's largest yo-yo, both of which they had seen earlier in the trip.

As it turned out, the giant pistachio is the calling card for the McGuinn Pistachio Tree Ranch, a working farm with 12,500 trees and 6,000
wine-producing grapevines. It has become an institution in the Alamogordo area.

A few minutes later, Dr. McDonald found the rest of the family in the McGuinn gift shop, examining the dizzying selection of pistachio-themed treats and knickknacks.

“It's a tourist trap,” he grumbled. “They just want you to buy their stuff.”

“We know,” Pep said, offering him a bite of Atomic Hot Chili Pistachio Brittle. “We did.”

The town of Alamogordo sits at the base of the Sacramento Mountains; its name means “fat cottonwood tree” in Spanish. The smell of roasted nuts triggered hunger pangs, so the McDonalds got back on the four-lane road and drove a mile toward town to the first restaurant they saw, the Rustic Café. The Rustic Café's claim to fame is a sixteen-ounce hamburger. If you're counting, that's a
pound
of meat. Anyone who can eat the whole thing gets a T-shirt and their picture up on the wall. None of the McDonalds attempted such a feat.

After lunch, Mrs. McDonald instructed her husband to turn left on Scenic Drive for three miles, then another quick left up a hill. Soon they came to a huge
modern glass building with a rocket ship mounted in front of it. A sign read . . .

New Mexico Museum of Space History

“Now,
this
is more like it,” Dr. McDonald said as he found a parking spot. “Maybe you kids will actually
learn
something here.”

“Not another museum!” Coke whined.

“Oh, I didn't bring us here for the museum,” Mrs. McDonald said as she got out of the car. “I brought us here to pay our respects.”

“Pay our respects? To whom?” asked Pep.

The family walked to the front of the museum. On the grass near the flagpole, they found this. . . .

“You gotta be kidding me,” Coke said. “A monkey grave?”

Not just
any
monkey. Before NASA was willing to risk human lives in the space program, they sent animals. Ham the Astrochimp was the first American in outer space.

A few other families came over to look at the gravesite. Mrs. McDonald pulled out her camera.

Ham blasted off from Cape Canaveral in January of 1961. He traveled 155 miles in 16.5 minutes and splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean. Three months later, Alan Shepard (the astronaut/golfer) became America's first
human
astronaut.

“I wonder what happened to Ham after his flight,” Pep said.

“He retired,” a guy looking at the plaque explained. “He lived at the National Zoo in Washington for seventeen years. Then he died in 1983 at age twenty-seven.”

“Let us have a moment of silence in honor of Ham the Astrochimp,” suggested Mrs. McDonald.

“Are you sure it shouldn't be Ham Astrochimp?” Pep asked. “Like Smokey Bear?”

“I guess in this case Ham's middle name really was
the
,” said Coke.

After paying his respects to “the flying monkey”
(as Coke put it), Dr. McDonald wasn't about to leave. He insisted that the whole family go inside the museum, and they were glad they did. The New Mexico Museum of Space History was full of displays that everyone in the family enjoyed: Robert Goddard's early rocket experiments near Roswell. A mock-up of the International Space Station. A moon rock. A space toilet. A memorial garden tribute to astronauts who had died. The International Space Hall of Fame. Even Coke learned a few things he didn't already know.

By the time the McDonalds had seen everything there was to see in the museum, it was getting late. They stopped off at a fast food drive-through window for dinner and drove down White Sands Boulevard to the White Sands Motel to sleep for the night.

All in all, it had been a good day. To the twins, of course,
any
day in which they hadn't been attacked, set on fire, lowered into boiling oil, frozen, kidnapped by aliens, or thrown off a cliff was a good day. Their tormentors—Dr. Warsaw, Evil
Elvis, Doominator, Mrs. Higgins, and the bowler dudes—seemed to be a million miles away.

“Maybe they forgot about us,” Pep said as she turned off the light for the night. “Maybe they'll leave us alone from now on.”

Or maybe not.

A
t this point, you're probably starting to feel a little angry that Coke hasn't been thrown into a volcano yet. I mean, I promised back in chapter 1 that Coke was going to get thrown into a volcano. And here we are in chapter 11, and the twins are nowhere
near
a volcano. Do they even
have
volcanoes in New Mexico?

Again, I ask you to show a little patience. Trust me, by the end of this story Coke will get thrown into a volcano. You can take that to the bank.

Dr. McDonald put the Ferrari in gear and headed
north out of Alamogordo on Route 54. Coke already had his earbuds in and was nodding his head, oblivious to the world around him.

“Where are we going today?” Pep asked from the backseat.

“We'll tell you when we get there,” her father replied.

“Is it a surprise?”

“Let's just say we're going someplace that
everyone
should see,” he said.

“I love a mystery,” Pep said, rubbing her hands together.

“It's not that kind of mystery,” said Mrs. McDonald mysteriously.

The two-lane road cut through the New Mexico desert on a straight line for mile after mile. The most interesting thing to look at was the occasional
SPEED LIMIT
55 sign at the side of the road. Pep dozed off for a while, waking up in time to see her mother telling Dr. McDonald to slow down and turn left onto an unmarked road.

RESTRICTED USAGE ROAD
, a small sign said.

About two hours after they had left Alamogordo, another sign appeared, announcing that they were approaching
WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE
. Dr. McDonald continued down the road for a few miles until
he came to yet
another
sign. He stopped the car and instructed everyone to get out. Coke turned off his music.

“This is the Trinity Site,” Dr. McDonald said solemnly. “After years of working on an atomic bomb, this is where we dropped it. Nobody knew if the thing was going to explode, because it was the first time they had ever tested it. But it did. It blew up with the force of eighteen kilotons of TNT. Two hundred miles away, windows were rattling.”

“Wow,” Coke said, not just pretending to be impressed, but genuinely impressed. “And it happened right here?”

“Not
exactly
here,” his father said. “It was a few miles down the road.”

“Can we go to the actual site?” Pep asked.

“It's still radioactive,” her father replied. “Seventy years later, and it's still radioactive. But I wanted you kids to know about this. It was the birth of the atomic age. A few weeks later, we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and you know what happened there.”

“Eighty thousand people died right away,” Coke said, remembering an article he'd read, “and something like a hundred and forty thousand died later, from radiation.”

Mrs. McDonald took a photo of the sign for
Amazing but True
. She opened her guidebook and read a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the mastermind behind the first atomic bomb: “‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'”

For a few minutes, none of the McDonalds said anything. There were no snarky jokes or wisecracks from the twins. It didn't seem like the time or place.

“Why did we do it?” Pep finally asked. “Why did we build such a horrible thing?”

“It was during World War Two,” Dr. McDonald told
her. “If we hadn't built an atomic bomb, Hitler would have built one.”

“You can imagine what would have happened if he did it first,” said Mrs. McDonald.

“I always wanted to come here,” Dr. McDonald said, “and I wanted you kids to come here too. Hopefully, in your lifetime, nobody will
ever
use an atomic weapon again. Okay, let's go.”

Back on the road, it was obvious why this part of New Mexico had been chosen for the first nuclear test. There was
nothing
around as far as the eye could see. Or maybe it was the opposite—there was nothing around because there had been a nuclear test here. Nobody wanted to get radiation poisoning.

In any case, it was a good thing they started the day with a full tank of gas. There was no place to fill up.

Everyone seemed lost in their thoughts when Dr. McDonald suddenly announced, “I think I've got it!”

“What, Ben?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

“This could be my book! I could write a novel about the Trinity Site!”

The others had almost forgotten about Dr. McDonald's recent interest in writing a novel. As a university professor, he had written several nonfiction books in his field of technology. But they were only read by the
academic community and had not sold many copies. He wanted to write something that would find a wide audience. He yearned to see his name on the bestseller list.

“What
about
the Trinity Site, Dad?” Pep asked.

“Maybe I could write about a family like ours that was on vacation in 1945,” Dr. McDonald suggested. “What if they were driving through New Mexico at the moment the first atomic bomb detonated? What would happen to them? How would it change their lives? That might make an interesting story.”

“They would have been incinerated,” Coke said.

“That would depend on how many miles they were from ground zero,” said his mother.

“Hey, there's my title,” Dr. McDonald said. “
Ground Zero
.”

The family continued brainstorming ideas about Dr. McDonald's novel, which helped make the endless New Mexico miles seem to roll by just a little more quickly. After an hour, they stopped for lunch in the town of Socorro at a Mexican place called Armijo's.

At that point, the plan was to continue up the highway eighty miles to Albuquerque. But after looking through her New Mexico guidebook, Mrs. McDonald said to turn onto a smaller road—Route 60 West.