By JAMES RICKMAN
Los Alamos

With regard to Ron Roybal’s mystery photograph, back in February 1855, news accounts in England reported the strange overnight appearance of “The Devil’s Footprints” in east and south Devon. These hoof-like prints appeared in the snow overnight, spanned 40 to 100 miles, and continued through and over myriad obstacles, including buildings, haystacks and drainpipes. Locals attributed the unsettling tracks to an overnight romp by Satan himself.

It’s no surprise that such an occurrence would be seen here in Los Alamos. We are a community that, like Beelzebub, loves the lie. Lying has become second nature to our community.

We lie about constructing “workforce” or affordable housing, when all we are really doing is transferring public lands into the hands of a few favored developers to enrich a small cabal of realtors and bankers with dubious and temporary effects on local housing and rental prices.

We lie about our support for local business. While folklore attributes our dismal business landscape to a host of invisible Boogeymen, the simple fact is that the root causes of our retail and service-sector desert are our community’s pathological cheapness, our resentment of non-technical business success, our passive-aggressive approach to settling petty disgruntlements with business owners, and an overreliance on government entities to provide for our population.

But perhaps the biggest whopper we tell ourselves is that Los Alamos National Laboratory is a “science lab.” LANL has always been a weapons lab that does use science to accomplish its core mission of ensuring that our nation’s nuclear weapons will perform as intended if used. The laboratory is now transitioning into a pit manufacturing facility.

Hopefully our own local occurrence of The Devil’s Footprints will remind us to be honest with ourselves, lest we face eternal damnation.