Vox Meditantis

Rural Route 2, Box 47
Cameron, Arizona

15th October 1947

My Dearest Emma,

I write to you by the flickering light of my camp lantern, the desert wind carrying the scent of sage and something else – something that makes my Geiger counter whisper its electric secrets. Three days I’ve been following this particular geological formation, and each step takes me further from the last town, further from civilisation, and yet somehow closer to understanding why I cannot bring myself to tell you everything.

Your last letter reached me at the trading post in Kayenta, and I’ve read it so many times the paper has grown soft as cloth beneath my fingers. You write of the pharmaceutical plant’s new production lines, of the miracle antibiotics that will save countless lives, and I’m struck by the terrible irony that whilst you help create medicines to heal, I dig for the very substance that might one day destroy us all. There’s something I haven’t told you, my darling – something that gnaws at me during these long desert nights when the stars seem close enough to pluck like wildflowers.

The uranium I seek with such passion, the ore that promises our future together, it’s the same material they used in those bombs that ended the war. I’ve read the scientific papers, studied the reports from Los Alamos, and I understand what I’m really hunting out here amongst the red rocks and ancient seas. Each time my counter begins its urgent clicking, each time I chip away samples that glow faintly in the darkness, I wonder if I’m helping to forge mankind’s salvation or its damnation.

But then I think of you, Emma, and the doubt transforms into something else entirely. You see, I’ve made a discovery – not just of uranium, though there’s that too – but of something far more precious. Last week, following a formation that spoke to me in the geological language I’ve taught myself to read, I found it. A vein so rich it made my counter sing like a mechanical nightingale. I’ve marked it carefully, told no one, filed no claims yet. It’s our secret, yours and mine, though you don’t know it yet.

This find could change everything for us. I’ve calculated the value, run the numbers until my pencil wore to a stub, and if I’m right – if the samples I’ve hidden in my pack prove as rich as I believe – we’ll have enough to build that house I’ve promised you. Not just any house, but one with a proper library where you can spread out your Scientific American magazines, where we can discuss atomic theory whilst watching the sunset paint the desert in colours that have no names.

Yet I’m torn, my love. Part of me wants to stake the claim immediately, to begin the process that will lift us from our separate struggles into shared prosperity. But another part – the part that reads your gentle letters and remembers your Catholic upbringing, your faith in the goodness of science – that part wonders if I should tell you first about the weight this discovery carries. The uranium that could secure our future might also fuel weapons that could end the world.

I know I’m being secretive, perhaps unfairly so. You deserve to know that the man who writes you these romantic letters about desert sunsets and geological formations is the same man who lies awake calculating the destructive potential of his discoveries. You deserve to know that your uranium prospector sometimes feels more like a tomb robber, disturbing ancient secrets that perhaps should remain buried in the earth.

But then dawn breaks over the canyon walls, painting the world in shades of copper and gold, and I remember why I’m here. Not for the bomb-makers or the weapons programmes, but for us. For the dream of your gentle hands in mine, for conversations that span from pharmaceutical chemistry to nuclear physics, for the possibility of showing you this magnificent desolation I’ve come to love almost as much as I love you.

I’m sending you a small sample with this letter – just a pretty rock, nothing more. Don’t mention it to anyone, not even your boarding house friends. Hold it whilst you read my words, and know that it represents everything I hope and fear. It’s our future, Emma, glowing softly in the darkness like love itself.

The wind is picking up now, and I must secure my equipment before the desert claims it. But know this, my darling – whatever moral complexities surround the work I do, whatever secrets I’m forced to keep for both our sakes, my love for you remains the one pure thing in my complicated world.

Write soon. Your letters are the compass that guides me home.

Forever yours,
Albert

P.S. I’ve been reading Jeffers’ poetry again. “The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty will remain when there are no hearts to break for it.” Sometimes I think he was writing about uranium, about you, about the terrible beauty of loving someone across impossible distances.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate