BY CHRIS ALTROCK

From ages seven through ten, my twin brother Craig and I spent the dying moments of each daylight on our living room couch. In front of us was the brick fireplace that burned from October through March. To the left stood a freezer-sized television with a large aluminum antenna, reminiscent of the recently launched Skylab. To the right, a bookshelf held some of Dad’s scientific books and a boomerang from our year in Sydney.

But what lay behind us brought us back to that couch each evening. Turning around, we’d kneel on the cushions and press our noses to the large living room window. That window sat at the peak of our hometown—Sunspot, New Mexico—overlooking a backyard that rolled away, down to jade forested mountains and then to a cinnamon desert far below. A hundred miles to the southwest, the jagged Organ Mountains pierced sand like the pipes of a monstrous church organ. They stood at 9,000 feet above sea level, the same elevation as our sofa.

Between our perch and those peaks stretched the Tularosa Basin, 5,000 feet below us. It held 6,500 square miles of desert, including White Sands National Park, where wind-sculpted dunes shimmered like snow; the Trinity Site, where the first atomic blast had fused sand into glass; and White Sands Missile Range, the largest military installation in the U.S.

Each evening, with this vast landscape framed in our window, Craig and I watched the salmon sun descend toward the Organ Mountains. The desert below traded its beige and milky clothes for fabrics of tangerine and apricot. Purple shadows stretched toward us like an incoming tide. The wind stilled in the aspens and pines surrounding us. Clouds glowed like slow motion fireflies, emanating crimson hues. Sometimes, we caught a glimmer of green as the sun’s final light turned mysteriously emerald. And then the sun’s fireball vanished behind the Organ Mountains. We gazed through breath-fogged glass until only a few streaks of color remained. 

This was our nightly ritual. No matter what chaos had filled the day in our troubled home, the sunset always arrived—quieting the chaos, softening its edge; salve for the wounds of abuse. Whatever torment the day held out, it ceased when the sun went out. This was true not only for Craig and me, but for the whole town. Sunspot’s sole purpose was to study the sun. So, at sunset, work stopped. No night shifts. Sunset marked a shared ending. A power-off. A moment to breathe out what had been held in. It invited pajamas, television, and sleep. The sun was done, and what was done to us was as well. In Sunspot, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth, sunset was a collective exhale. A “Finally!” sighed in relief. Eventually I learned that every single sun, no matter the heat or the horror or the haste it brings, sets.