Notes on Los Alamos: Santa Fe resident Sylvie Baumgartel's essay chosen for 'The Best American Essays 2023' anthology

The film “Oppenheimer” mesmerized viewers worldwide with its intense drama about the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the project.

He is considered the father of the atomic bomb. Los Alamos was the main site of the project during World War II.

A written work deserving wider recognition was an essay that mainly discusses the life, the history and the landscape on the Pajarito Plateau where Los Alamos is home.

Notes on Los Alamos: Santa Fe resident Sylvie Baumgartel's essay chosen for 'The Best American Essays 2023' anthology

The essay, chosen for the anthology “The Best American Essays 2023,” is titled “Fat Man and Little Boy.”

The title happens to be the nicknames for the American bombs dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) and Nagasaki (Fat Man) in August 1945.

The essay was written by Sylvie Baumgartel, a longtime Santa Fe resident known for her poetry, rather than her essays. Baumgartel bridges the two literary forms by calling her essays “poetic.”

It’s an essay written with an ironic, incisive hand.

It opens with a reference to a pair of earrings, bizarrely shaped liked tiny silver bombs, she received as a gift from a friend who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“I didn’t work on the essay very much. It just came out. It really was inspired by the earrings. I found (the earring bombs) to be a horrifying, disturbing, unnerving, callous, inhumane, terrifying. And violent,” Baumgartel said in a phone interview from her home in Santa Fe.

“Yet here are these tiny silver objects made to be beautiful and made to be an adornment.” One represents Fat Man, the other Little Boy.

The earrings, she said, are for sale at the science museum in Los Alamos.

Another oddity on display inside the museum, Baumgartel said, is a wedding dress made from parachute nylon on display. Manhattan Project physicist Albert Bartlett got the material from an explosive testing site and had the dress made for his wife.

She also writes about the history, the natural beauty — the superb views of mountains and cliffs in all directions — and the friendliness of the town. Baumgartel tells of she and her son picnicking at Ashley Pond when her sun hat is blown off her head and into the water. A man on the other side of the pond takes off his shoes and walks into the water to retrieve the hat for her. How’s that for small-town charm where scientists still work secretly?

She also relates some of Los Alamos’ prehistory. A nearby volcano erupted a million years ago, spreading debris as far away as Kansas; various Native American tribes lived on the plateau for thousands of years before Europeans showed up.

“This is one of my first essays,” she said. “During the pandemic, or right before it, I was supposed to be in Italy for a year; in Venice for a poetry residence.”

But the residence was canceled.

“So I was stuck in Santa Fe, unexpectedly,” Baumgartel said. “I grew up here, but I had never been inspired to write about it. A writer-friend in New York suggested I take this as an opportunity to write about Santa Fe. I was reluctant at first. … Then I started driving around and taking notes about buildings that interested me, about trees, nature. … I started learning more about the city.”

Subsequently, she and her son went to Los Alamos to visit a friend. “I find Los Alamos incredibly fascinating. I hadn’t been there since I was a girl,” she said. “I wrote a few pieces on the land. ‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ was one of those.”

Baumgartel estimated that she’s published seven of her poetic essays; five of them, including “Fat Man and Little Boy,” first appeared in Subtropics, a literary magazine at the University of Florida.

Baumgartel enjoys visiting Los Alamos. “I get excited every time I do. There’s something very powerful and dry, settling about that place” she added.

She said she didn’t like how the movie “Oppenheimer” portrayed the protagonist as a martyr. She wrote that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize three times but did not win one.

Baumgartel felt the film “could have done more on what Los Alamos was like during World War II.”