It’s 1973 and I’m driving across eastern Colorado. The sky is a big blue robin egg scratched white with jets streaming by. Ahead is a roadblock, a black Highway Patrol car noses in from each side. I check the back seat. It’s filled with two weeks of getting away because Doris wants me to “make some decisions.” The floor and seat are buried under chip bags, juice cans, and crumpled newspapers with small town headlines about crops and calves and crime in far away places.

I slow to a stop. The cop smiles in the shade of his big smoky hat. The hat has a rattlesnake skin band that quivers copper and green as he leans in to roll an eye over the mess. He nods and tells me the “road’s blocked.” We both look down the long black track of asphalt tapering into nothing as it drives toward a sharp western skyline. The Rockies. He points with his nose to a side road pealing off to the south. “Nice little cafe two miles down. Road’ll be open at three, after the test.” The shade moves off his brown face as he stands, stretches his back, looks away at something big about to happen far to the west.

I point the hood south, watching the sun spark off bits of roadside quarts, hoping for a payphone so I can give Doris the good news. The cafe comes into sight under a sign saying “Good Eats, Sweet Treats.” It’s a bit sticky getting out after weeks on the road thinking about marriage.

Inside, ranchers and pig farmers stir coffee and fork away at quarter chunks of pie. Everyone is watching the TV hanging high in the corner. The announcer, in jeans and a kaki camouflage shirt, stands with the high plains behind him. “We’ve got two minutes to detonation and everything’s a go,” he tells us.

The cafe murmur picks up. In the red booth beside me, a round man and a skinny woman, probably just in from castrating pigs. You can see her blood splashed burlap apron in the parking lot, hanging on their truck mirror. On two stools, elbows on counter, nametags Bob and Bill, twins from way back, talk about washing machine repair.

The announcer catches everyone’s eye with a wave of a clipboard as he picks off stats about “megatons” and no worries about “escaped radiation.” With his hands he shows how the sand and sage will slowly rise up with the tremendous power of an atomic blast designed to create a huge cavern beneath the ground. His hands shake as he fights to contain the great swelling of a new sun growing beneath him. “But it’s completely safe,” he assures us, his hands still holding the imaginary earthrise in place. Hawks spin above his nearly bald head. Rabbits rush between his feet. He looks up and smiles his best birthday smile. “Bombs for peace.” The camera zooms in close on his face. “Bombs to collect God’s good natural gas so that all we have to do is put in a tap.” He shakes his head slowly at the holiness of it all, then turns to look at the test site floating quietly in the desert heat 20 miles behind him. The camera pans out to take it all in. “Can you believe it?” he asks, looking up into the heavenly blue.

The round man looks at the empty pie plate in front of his skinny wife. His good eye moves from the empty plate, with just a smudge of pie filling left on the edge, then up to his wife, hardly stick enough to hold her clothes. She’s got her eyes locked on his pie, licking her lips. The announcer holds one hand over his heart and says “It’s time,” takes a deep breath, checks the official clock in front of him and counts “ten… nine…eight.

The man in the booth gives his wife a cautionary look, reaches his fork out, then slips it under his untouched piece of pie.

The cook, probably a Shelly or Barb, comes out, wiping her hands on her spattered white apron, looks at the TV, counts along, using her spatula to direct them to join in: ” six… five… four… three… two…one….and shouts “Hang on everyone.”

The TV goes blank, then turns to a 70’s psychedelic pattern – pink and green and blue swirl slowly, pulsing, then taking the shape of a peace sign. The twins look at each other and shrug. Two, three, four, five seconds go by in absolute quite. Using his thumb to steady the crust, the man lifts his whole piece of pie up to the cave of his mouth. And then the first tremble reaches us. It rattling dirty dishes in the sink. It lifts the ashtray quivering and clattering, as if all that smoking is finally going to kill it. Shakes a thorny curse out of the cactus on the window sill. It flashes by below us, a ghost, filling our leather boots with xray white bones. The man, arm raised, elbow bent, pushes the wobbling pie at the darkness of his mouth. Ripples rise up though his butt, across his rolling stomach, out his arm around the elbow and into the pie hanging at his lips. It quivers and threatens to fall, but he reaches his face out, a turtle, opens wide and closes his pink lips… and the big piece of pie disappears, leaving the fork handle sticking out, a silver thermometer pointing at his wife. His cheeks wiggle in a wide chipmunk smile. She swipes a finger over her plate, touches the last trace of peach filling, waits for the rattling and shaking to die away.

A few miles outside of Denver I finally find a phone that works and call Doris in Vancouver. I tell her about all the driving and thinking and the bomb. “Can you believe it?” I ask again, thinking she didn’t hear, looking through the phone booth glass at a bright red dust devil blowing, twirling bits of sage brush up into the sky.

She says “No, I don’t believe any of it.”

I pause a minute, moving the phone to the other ear, and then ask her “Did you feel anything?”

“No,” she says . “I haven’t felt anything for a long time.”