Fifty years ago, the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church published The House at Otowi Bridge, a biography of Edith Warner. Born in Philadelphia, Miss Warner left for Los Alamos in 1922 when she was 30 years old. Ill-suited to the demands of the city and yearning for the freedom that the West provided, she hopped a train and headed out to the Pajarito Plateau, upon which Los Alamos is situated.
Warner was invigorated by the natural history of the region, and she became friendly with the nearby Indians of the San Ildefonso Pueblo. The stark landscape of the plateau, with its deep canyons and volcanic remnants, inspired this city girl to embrace the sacred space the Tyuonyi Indians had deserted 500 years prior.
She was offered the job as caretaker of the train depot along the Rio Grande, at “the place where the river makes a noise” (34). This place was the Otowi Bridge, and as the years progressed, the river noise became a song.
Miss Warner lived alone at the train depot for many years (cue the spinster music) and enjoyed the community of the Pueblo Indians – attending their weddings, funerals, and ceremonies. Within a few years, she had befriended one of their outcasts, a Puebloan who had traveled the world and in doing so, had lost his connection to his people. Warner and the lost Indian Tilano made a home, bringing together the Anglo and the Indian world.
Life was peaceful there by the river-song, and the inhabitants of the train depot built a cozy adobe that always had hot tea and chocolate cake ready for visitors and friends.
But the peaceful plateau was literally shaken up by the US entrance into WWII. Warner’s biographer tells of a particular spring day in 1942 when she was out trailriding northwest of Los Alamos:
Trees lay scattered as though spilled from a giant matchbox. Great roots had been flung upward out of pits of earth. Picking my way through the ruined landscape I lost all sense of direction…At the peak of despair I stumbled across a shattered root. Exposed in the gaping earth shone a black piece of carved obsidian. That unexpected pattern of symmetry could only have been formed by the hand of man (82).
The uprooted forest, and the growing presence of low-flying airplanes and military uniforms, meant that the war effort was coming to the plateau.
It meant that Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr, the fathers of the atom bomb, sought respite at Warner’s train depot. In fact, Oppenheimer and his wife made a weekly trek to Warner’s peaceful adobe home – with its Navajo rugs and San Ildefonso Pueblo black pottery – to enjoy her chocolate cake, homemade bread, chokecherry jam, and tea. And to hear the river sing.
Bohr wrote to Warner in 1945, telling her how the canyon and her company had comforted them while working on the Manhattan Project:
We learned to watch the snow on the Sangres (de Cristo mountain range) and to look for deer in Water canyon. We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture…Evenings in your place by the river, by the table so neatly set, before the fireplace so carefully contrived, gave us a little of your assurance, allowed us to belong, took us from the green temporary houses and the bulldozed roads. We shall not forget (98).
Let us not forget Edith Warner, the woman who fed the souls of the men who built the first atom bomb. I’m guessing they needed it.
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October 18th, 2009 at 9:39 pm