I stood there for a while gazing into the water and watching the massive trout rising below to sip insects from the surface. The sound of falling water was in the background and the pungent scent of old river water filled my head.
Nearby is an old power station. There used to be two of them that competed to provide power to the nearby town. They sat on opposite sides of the river and occasionally the operators would take pot shots at each other with .22 rimfire rifles leaving bullet scars on their stone walls. Now the area is overshadowed by a huge dam with massive turbines the likes of which those old boys never could have imagined.
Today I took the day off and then took another drive. I went in a different direction and ended up on back roads I had never seen before. A sign warned "rough road" which seemed to be a signal to the roads department to just let the potholes be. I dodged around them swinging wide from one side of the road to another.
Occasionally out here you take a turn and find an old homestead. I can't help but think about the people who built them, their desire to make a good life for themselves, and then they left it all behind. Sometimes it's obvious that the old house was the original homesteader and there's another place built right next door in the 1920's or so and then another next to that built even later. This one though sat all alone in a valley.
Clearly they had put some time into it. That was a nice place back in the day and it's held up pretty well. Someone put a lot of extra work into making those gables and extra windows. But they left, so I did too.
Eventually I found myself on a long lonely road that crosses the northern edge of the Snake River plain. I had intended to go another way, but this was good enough. Eventually I saw a sign for Atomic City and hit the brakes.
It's an odd place. It quite literally sits out in the middle of nowhere. Nearby is the Idaho National Laboratory where nuclear power was first investigated by the U.S. government. It was there that the nation's first nuclear reactors were designed and built. It was there too that the first nuclear submarine was designed and tested in a huge tank some 600 miles from the ocean by Admiral Rickover. It's also the area where the first ever fatal nuclear accident occurred. That was on the Army's watch, Rickover never would have let it happen.
Atomic "City" was the first town in the world lit by nuclear power as a test by the finest engineering minds in the nation. There's almost nothing there now despite its brush with history. A race track was built for some strange reason. There's a fire station to deal with range fires and it seems that there are a couple decent houses for the folks that man it. The rest is dilapidated, empty, eternally for sale.
Things are looking a little up though. The 2010 census showed that population had increased over the last decade. The number of families in town had increased 30% to 9 and overall population had risen 16% to 29 souls. Still, it's clear they have a way to go to get back to the heydays of 1950 when 250 people lived their lives here.
To get to Atomic City you take the turn at the old Quonset hut that's been turned into a bar. It's easy to find, someone made an attempt to make it look Irish by painting a couple shamrocks on plywood. There's a paved road into town, but all the others are still dirt just as they were back in 1950 when its name was changed from Midway to the more ambitious label it still bears today.
The only thing ambitious in town today was a large turkey vulture eating dinner on the road. Some rabbit had hopped it's last.
There was at one time the Twin Buttes Bar named after the two buttes that rise to the North. I suppose that in a place like Atomic City all you could do was get well lubricated and try to avoid the burning summer heat or hide from the biting winter winds. I can't imagine how depressing it would have been to walk into that place for a cold one and then step back outside and realize that things hadn't improved.
Mysteriously a couple cars and an ancient RV are now parked in the gravel that serves as a parking lot. Where the two Fireside Pizza signs came from I couldn't guess. As with all old towns some things just kind of show up, stay, rust, and soon nobody thinks about them anymore. A few decades later they're still there.
Apparently your car could get well lubricated too...
By the time I snapped this picture someone in a fire district truck was keeping an eye on me. I guess I looked kind of suspicious. After all, who comes to visit Atomic City today?
I turned back onto the road and frightened off the giant bird again on my way back to the old highway. In my mirror I could see the vulture return happily to its meal. By tomorrow there will be nothing left.
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