Discovery 
A Beautiful Mind 
Cities
Up and Atom
Four years after the U.S. House first voted to cancel the superconducting supercollider, Waxahachie is bouncing back.
(Page 2 of 2)
The state has already leased nearly 6,000 acres of land for agricultural use, and the first sale of land controlled by the TNRLC will take place next month, with more than seventy parcels totaling more than 700 acres to be offered up by closed bid through the General Land Office. In an ironic twist, Bratcher and others may be able to buy their land back at less than they were paid for it. Most of the houses and farm outbuildings are gone, however, and they will have to bid like everyone else.
Other than the land deals, everyone is curious about the giant wind tunnel that NASA wants to build in the area sometime in the future, although no funds have yet been appropriated for the project. Jordan hastened to explain that the wind tunnel would be above ground and would have nothing to do with the excavated collider tunnel. People have been curious, too, about the status of the collider tunnel. There have been plenty of jokes about what it might be used for—there was even a serious proposal by a local entrepreneur to transform some of it into a mushroom factory. But the tunnel is history. The shafts leading to it have been capped with concrete, and the sump pumps that kept the tunnel from filling with water were turned off last year, like life-support systems to an expired hospital patient. The tunnel has been gradually filling with water, and eventually the ten miles of tunnel that were not reinforced will collapse.
Then there is the collider headquarters, which the DOE has agreed to vacate so that the state can sell it. “They’ve got to get out before we can do any marketing,” Jordan said, noting that a high-tech company and a trucking firm have made inquiries. Inside the beige metal building, which is bordered by a ramshackle farm on the edge of Waxahachie’s industrial zone, a skeleton crew of 100 or so, the last of a work force that once numbered around 2,500, has been working frantically to clear everything out by September. Last fall, the collider operation formally ceased to be a laboratory, and the remaining workers were designated a “termination team” and put under the command of former Army general George Robertson. (“We declared victory and changed the name,” he said wryly.) Robertson, who did similar work after the Vietnam War and the Mount St. Helens eruption, preferred to use the military euphemism “drawdown” for his cleanup work. Whatever it’s called, he said his team could have had it completed by now, except for all the lingering disputes between Texas and the feds over the division of property. State officials, for example, couldn’t decide whether to keep the separate magnet lab known as N115—for which such uses as a cancer treatment facility had been proposed, using a modified version of the linac to carry out proton-radiation therapy—or take a cash payment of $65 million. They finally chose the cash.
As I toured the gigantic headquarters, I felt as though I had entered a disaster area. The front sections, which had once held mazes of work cubicles, were now eerily empty. The back was still littered with tools and stacks of furniture, though, and I had to dodge forklifts that were zipping around at lightning speed. Most of the equipment had already been crated and labeled with the names of universities or DOE laboratories around the country. When I came to the main storage area, filled with shelf upon shelf of equipment, I was reminded of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the crated ark joins a seemingly endless storehouse of government surplus. Among the collider leftovers were six thousand computers, and the state bought five hundred of them for 25 cents on the dollar. A load of office supplies went to a local school. Two planeloads of furniture reportedly went to the U.S. refugee center in Guantánamo Bay for use by Haitian refugees. Roy Schwitters, the former director of the lab and now a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that one of his students had managed to locate his old desk and send it to him.
For Robertson, however, the displacement of people was even more of an issue than the disposal of property. The collider had brought together a remarkable group of physicists, perhaps as adventurous and dedicated a group of scientists as the U.S. has seen since the early days of NASA, and Robertson helped organize an outplacement center to help them find jobs, which are scarce for physicists these days. A few of the physicists were able to use their mathematical knowledge and computer-simulation skills in new jobs on Wall Street. Others had to learn new skills. George Yost, like many of his colleagues who grew fond of the area and wanted to stay, retrained and is now working as a computer-programming consultant. “At least we got some good citizens out of this,” one Waxahachie resident told me.
As I was getting ready to leave the collider headquarters, I noticed a small sign on a bulletin board that gladdened my heart: the Busy Bee in Maypearl, a tiny town located along the southwest curve of the collider ring, was open for business again. When I first visited the Busy Bee just after the collider was announced, I imagined the quaint cafe as a kind of canary-in-a-coal-mine measure of the collider’s effect on local culture. In the heyday of the collider, the Busy Bee prospered: Ann Heath, its proprietor, presided like a mother hen over a motley crew of regulars that could have come straight from the set of Mayberry R.F.D. She also adopted the collider employees who came to lunch and took it upon herself to learn all about the tiny particles, or “quarts,” as she called them, that the collider was going to explore. She started a chamber of commerce in Maypearl in anticipation of the town’s growth. She even arranged for Monnie Bratcher to take a trip into the collider tunnel, hoping that seeing it with her own eyes would ease her bitterness.
I headed over to the Busy Bee around lunchtime, and when I got there it was packed. Heath told me she had had to close when business took a dip after the collider shut down, but she was able to reopen two years later. While she still tries to keep abreast of news about the collider, she said, “it’s almost as though nothing ever happened.” She shook her head at the “wishy-washiness” of the government. “The people around here finally accepted the collider,” she said, “and then it was gone.”
Later that afternoon, I paid a visit to the vanished community of Boz with retired Waxahachie teacher Dow Anna McGregor. “These futuristic people didn’t respect history enough,” she said as we surveyed the area. “They needed to step back and see where they came from before they tried to figure out where they were going.” No one had to tell Dow Anna about respecting history. She had managed to rescue her family farmhouse, a state landmark built in 1855, by moving it to safe ground away from the collider. Along with the old house, she had also salvaged a lilac bush planted at the farm, she thinks, in 1850. She replanted it near the new location of the house, and it began to sprout. Dow Anna knew that it would bloom again, as true a symbol of resilience and renewal around these parts as you could hope to find.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
