So it is also for Alamogordo, the town pictured here, latterly named in Spanish for a great cottonwood tree that grew near some hills in southern New Mexico, distinctive enough a mark that travelers once met there. It is gone now, cut down probably to feed the railroad in the days of wood-burning engines, just as the rivers and streams were long reserved for the boilers of the Southern Pacific line. Then in the Fifties came Diesel powered trains, and the railroad sold the water rights to the town. And the townspeople said, Now we can grow, as we should have been able to grow these last few years if we had had that water. For something had happened at the end of the second war, something that changed the world, and from the tiniest of seeds had sprung a new reason for the town to be there: a reason that could be neither comprehended nor ignored.
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