Road Diary: Socorro, New Mexico

(CNN) -- In the words of one local, Socorro, New Mexico, is "a nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit." Right along I-25, the town looks like a string of fast-food outlets and chain motels like those along any interstate in the country.

At dinner at a local steakhouse, our waiter asks what brings us to town. When we tell him, he tells us his grandmother's story. She worked at the Trinity site, he said, and was there the day a physicist read a gauge wrong, saw the faint blue glow, and knew that he did not have long to live. He died hours later of radiation poisoning, the waiter said.

We should check out the town square, where there's a fragment of the atom bomb, he said.

In fact, there's no record of an accident at the Trinity site -- though the waiter's description sounds a lot like a couple of incidents at Los Alamos after the war. And the town square has a fragment from "Jumbo," the cast-iron safety device that was never used.

Cold War folklore is part of the landscape here, as the legends of Pecos Bill might once have been. Everyone was touched by The Bomb, or has a friend-of-a-friend who was. A local let us know that he and his wife were from "back East," like us; it's always "back East" and "out West," a linguistic relic of the frontier days that are still part of the Western mindset.

The landscape still hasn't gotten old, though we're beginning to wonder how many times one car can cross the Rio Grande.