According to Hindu philosophy, humanity is entering the Age of Kali Yuga. It's predicted as a time of chaos, death, and purification. If things are not up to snuff in the universe, it prophesies, we can expect the revenge of the deities. And we can expect the specialty of the age's own deity, Kali herself, and that specialty is fire.

Friday May 5: The wind picks up over New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument that flanks Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) where nuclear weapons were first developed during World War II and are now researched, tested, and stored. The U.S. Park Service is nursing a nine-hundred -acre "prescribed burn" to clear dry brush from the forest floor. It flares up.

Saturday-Tuesday May 6-9: Fire fighters battle the blaze with helicopters, air tankers, bulldozers, shovels, and rakes. The fire is dubbed the Cerro Grande, after the nearby peak, and it is growing: 3,700 acres of park service and now national forest are incinerated.

Wednesday May 10: Winds gust chaotically at fifty miles per hour. The fire leaps over containment lines and flies toward the weapons lab. At the western edge of the city of Los Alamos, the blaze bursts into a firestorm in the treetops. Firefighters hurl down their gear and flee for their lives, their hoses bouncing wildly behind the escaping trucks. Houses ignite. Some, the ones with propane tanks, detonate like bombs. Loudspeakers blare: residents are given fifteen minutes to evacuate. The fire reaches three LANL research areas, including the weapons-engineering tritium facility Technical Area 16, also home to an enormous underground waste dump called Material Disposal Area R.

The cloud of sometimes white, sometimes red smoke has been streaming northeast of Los Alamos into the Chicano farming village of Chimayo, up the mountain to the forest pueblo of Truchas, and into southern Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas. It's three p.m. I'm at home in Chimayo conducting a psychotherapy session with a client on the phone, and she is rapping away about her problems at work. The tube is on in the background, soundless but shrieking black and white images of hundred-foot ponderosas bursting into flame. The smoke outside my window is blood red, and suddenly a caption appears on the screen: the voice of senator Pete Domenici. I butt in: "I'm so sorry. Los Alamos is burning down. I have to end the session." In all my years of practicing psychotherapy, I have never done this.

More red smoke wafts by the window. Another tree explodes, and the senator says something to this effect: The wind is blowing at sixty miles per hour, the fire's headed for the lab, we are grounding the slurry bombers, the firefighters are retreating, there's nothing more we can do-except pray. Pray? There are 2,100 potential release sites in Los Alamos. There's radioactive stuff the scientists just threw into the canyons back in the 1940s. There are toxic dumps and decontamination facilities, incinerators and radioactive waste pits, shops for machining radioactive materials and decommissioned reactors. There's Tech Area 55, where weapons-grade material is fashioned into radioactive batteries, and a storage facility where nuclear weapons are shielded in concrete bunkers. There's Tech Area 15, a firing range where, over the years, 220 tons of depleted uranium and high explosives have been dispersed onto the open ground. And there's Tech Area 54, where 50,000 fifty-five-gallon drums containing chemical and radioactive waste are waiting aboveground for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico, and another one million drums waiting underground.

Strangely, as if in slow motion, I get up from the couch. I take out a nylon suitcase and, without emotion, place in it three pairs of jeans, three shirts, three sets of underwear, and my cowboy boots. I do not pick out a meaningful photograph. Not even a teddy bear. Nothing meaningful. Then I walk out the door, climb into my 1977 Honda Civic, and drive into the smoke.

The wind is hurling itself toward the northeast. The evacuees have been sent south to churches, high schools, and hotels in Santa Fe. I aim toward the presumably clear air of the northwest. I have to penetrate the worst of the smoke plume to get there. Things are eerie out here. Silence and a fog of ash hover over the Chevy pickups and lowriding Grand Ams creeping along Highway 76. I get to Espanola, the Chicano-Indian town immediately down the mesa from Los Alamos. A red-hot sun is just dropping behind the Jemez Mountains. Then I drive a few miles north and look back. I gasp.

The entire valley, from Los Alamos in the west all the way up the Sangre de Cristo mountains to the east, is blanketed in black smoke. The faces of my friends in Chimayo and Truchas pass before my eyes. Linda Pedro. Max Cordova. Orlando and Mary. I do pray. I pray they have gotten out. In all, eleven thousand people from Los Alamos will evacuate. Another estimated forty thousand from White Rock, Espanola, the villages, Indian pueblos, Santa Fe, and Taos will pack up their jeans and cowboy boots and bolt for some semblance of safety. I am one of those people.

The Abiquiu Inn lies one hill beyond the smoke. The sign-VACANCY-cackles fire-red, and I stop. An unshaven scientist type stands like a battered alien at the front desk. The clerk asks his address. "I don't think...I...have one," he spits out. I tell her I'm on the run too, and she gives me a room for free.

I try to turn on the tube. In some unkempt stab at bringing modernization to New Mexico, the Abiquiu Inn has inserted Primestar where rabbit ears used to sit. You have to be a rocket scientist-which is what most of the other guests are-to operate the thing. I squint at the instructions, fumble with the buttons, and finally achieve a high-definition picture: but it's the news from...oh Lord...Atlanta, Georgia. At least the headline is the fire. I see the same exploding ponderosas and now, in addition, hundreds of houses going up. For my purposes of dodging the plume, though, I need news about the wind, the kind they broadcast out of Albuquerque, pinpoint doppler. There is no Albuquerque news. And as befits American television reporting, it seems that suddenly, miraculously in fact, there is no nuclear weapons lab in Los Alamos. There are apparently only pine trees and private homes in Los Alamos now.

Thursday May 11: The wind is back at sixty miles per hour. John Peterson of the Santa Fe National Forest announces that the fire is "zero percent contained." Twenty-five thousand acres are now gone-old-growth ponderosa and fir forests become stands of blackened skeletons; countless deer, elk, turkey, and owl burned to death or sent into terrorized flight. Two hundred and thirty-five homes in Los Alamos have been incinerated, three hundred others are damaged. Everywhere cars are melded into pavement. LANL deputy director Dick Burdick survives when the fire blazes right over his underground communications bunker. Reemerging to a scene of char and embers, he says, "This is what Hell looks like."

It's a catastrophe. A fire, yes. A terrible fire. But it also holds the possibility of being a technological disaster, maybe on the order of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. I spent fifteen years in the antinuclear movement, along with the likes of Drs. Robert Jay Lifton, John Mack, and Hank Vyner, focusing our expertise as mental health professionals on the psychological ramifications of the arms race. I protested the weapons build-up of the Reagan years and later worked with Navajo and Laguna Pueblo uranium miners to gain compensation for cancer deaths. For my book, When Technology Wounds, I interviewed people made ill by exposure to health-threatening technologies: asbestos workers, Love Canal residents, Dalkon Shield Intrauterine Device users, electronic plant workers, downwinders, atomic veterans.

For survivors of invisible contaminants, I learned, outrage and uncertainty are the two predominant emotional ordeals. Outrage because the harm was human caused; it didn't have to happen. The Cerro Grande fire didn't have to happen: the park service didn't have to set it, and the Department of Energy (DOE) didn't have to neglect its contaminated sites all these years. Uncertainty because it is near impossible to know what has happened or what will happen. Has exposure taken place? To whom? Where? To what extent? Will future health be affected? Are the land and water contaminated? Uncertainty is attended by fear and hypervigilance.

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