Page 56 - WTP Vol. IX #2

Oak Ridge (continued from preceding page)
and what he let me glimpse was the outline of a job for him to complete. When I asked him how he felt about the complications, what to do with nuclear waste, the hazards of working with something so dangerous, he said all of that was on someone else’s plate, but if everyone did their job, there was no cause for worry.
Dutch
“Dutch” VanKirk became the last surviving member of the Enola Gay crew. He was 93 when he died in 2014. Included in his obituary were details of that famous mission:
In the predawn hours of Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. and carrying a crew of 12, took off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands with a uranium bomb built under extraordinary se- crecy in the vast Manhattan Project. Captain VanKirk spread out his navigation charts on a small table behind Colonel Tibbets’s seat. From that spot, at the end of a long tunnel atop the bomb bays, he took the plane’s bearings, using a hand-held sextant to guide with the stars.
At 8:15 a.m. Japan time, the Enola Gay reached Hiro- shima, a city of 250,000. The bombardier, Maj. Thomas W. Ferebee, said, “I got it,” announcing that the Enola Gay was over his aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge. Captain Van Kirk, who had familiarized himself with Hiroshima’s landmarks, leaned over Ma- jor Ferebee’s shoulder and confirmed he was correct. His navigating skills had brought the Enola Gay to
when they have traveled thirteen miles, not after the careful arrangements for permission to exam- ine, first hand, where the world changed. Half of the girls love Frank Sinatra; half have been raised on Hank Williams. Four of them have televisions with snow-plagued channels in their houses, and one has a father who tracks the frequency of A-bomb tests in Nevada, the site remote as Mars. Russians, he’s said, know the end-time secrets. For Christmas, her
“The story ends, they all know, the summer before
they started school, the final year August didn’t swirl toward apprehension.“
mother gave her dancing lessons; for her birthday,
she renewed them like a subscription. When water covers her ankle, she leaps and squeals like science.
Oak Ridge Trivia: After the war. Oak Ridge residents watched a film of its story, “The Beginning or the End?” at the city’s own Grove Theater.
One of the brochures I carried home with me features a walking-tour that I followed for more than an hour, the paths pleasantly landscaped. The brochure touts how Oak Ridge’s leading-edge technology continues to earn the United States the title of “Super Power.”
Dutch
One version of “Dutch” Van Kirk’s obituary ends this way:
“The plane jumped and made a sound like sheet metal snapping,” Mr. Van Kirk told the New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima raid. “Shortly after the second wave, we turned to where we could look out and see the cloud, where the city of Hiroshima had been. I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar.”
Fincke’s latest collection of essays, The Darkness Call, won the Robery C. Jones Prize for Short Prose (Pleiades Press, 2018). Earlier nonfiction books are from Michigan State and Stephen F. Austin. Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction and the Wheeler Prize for Poetry, he has a new essay, “After the Three-Moon Era,” appearing in Best American Essays 2020.
its target only a few seconds behind schedule at the conclusion of a six-and-a-half-hour flight.
Oak Ridge Tour Fact: The gates to the city reopened with a parade on March 19, 1949.
Westcott Photo #8: The Girl Scouts Visit Oak Ridge, 1951
In full uniform, neckerchiefs and hats, the Girl Scouts enter what’s billed as sacred, but the roads are unpaved, and though it’s June, they’re muddy from recent rain, the ruts filled with standing water, the ridges gooey. The story ends, they all know, the sum- mer before they started school, the final year August didn’t swirl toward apprehension. Their leader, this morning, has related how, during her junior year, the high school closed over Christmas vacation, saying, “Just like that. No warning. Disappeared. Gone.” Look, right now they are afraid for their shoes, or worse, the misery of sudden slip. The tour is just begin- ning, and Miss Spatz would never excuse anyone, not
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