Went to the beach last weekend. This is going to be the photo for the story...

Oh Quiet.

It's been fine recently, tapping through the days, slightly stuck on parma ham and asparagus. Last Tuesday though, a few days after ordering a book about William Laurence, a New York Times science writer who was whisked off secretly during 1945 to be the chronicler of the Manhattan Project, I typed Manhattan Project into Google. And I came across a reunion of atomic bomb veterans coming up that weekend in Elmira, upstate New York. I zipped the news to London and at 5:30 on Saturday morning woke up went downstairs got in a cab, fell asleep again, and flew to Elmira Corning Regional Airport via a four hour delay at Philadelphia Airport.

If you're planning to have a heart attack, have it in Philadelphia Airport. I spent my Saturday morning in Terminal F, a long place of gently rounding corridors and white rocking chairs under tall interior trees, consistently finding de-fibrillators in every unlikely place. I only recently learned the word de-fibrillator, I had seen them frizz-humping away at the heaped chests of the hopeless in Casualty and ER, but I had never thought that it was up to me to learn about them or how to use them. Surely one for the hands of professionals, these devices - but not in Philadelphia. The place was festooned with red boxes mounted on walls with the de-fibs neatly packaged in grey, as accessible as telephones. The place reminded me of the sort of rural crossroads where you see an odd neat patch of colourful flowers in the shape of a motorbike and a set of lonely traffic lights - acknowedgements of the danger of the place. Perhaps the airport is a cardio-cluster, a place where Philadelphians fall. I was also worried that with the ubiquity of the de-fibs, people might break them out at the slightest sign of ill-health. Wheezy are we? Have you some volts. Saw a woman with a limp, let's crack her.

Elmira - a place of valleys and trees. The conference of old nukes was at the Wings of the Eagles museum, a desperate looking aeroplane exhibit right next to the airport. So I decided to walk. I happily turned in the wrong direction and started hiking along a flat green valley under an even blue sky. It was Elmira country and soon I was passing a stop-start string of flyblown crusted houses called Old Spill or something. I was sure I was lost and so came to knock on an old springy door. A tiny kitten flittered over the porch and into a hole. Through the ripped netting of the dead door there was the smell of deep catness, and at my feet were two wide shallow metal bowls full of enough dry bits to feed a galleon of the creatures. There was the kind of silence that sits in the afternoon on top of a warm bed of insect chatter.

I buzzed without thinking (the bell played a ditty) and suddenly wanted no one to answer. No one did. I carried on walking and tried to flag down a car. At the next house there was a guy in the yard, standing with two large dogs looking at the horizon through binoculars. I couldn't see what he was looking at. But it looked like a way to spend at least a little bit of your Saturday. He had his back to me as the dogs went barking when they saw me. He ignored them until I was quite close and then swung around. I gave him a Hello, Good Afternoon, in my best English, I was wearing a tie after all, and he said his name was Scot. He gave me a lift back down the road in his red and black truck.

The next morning, after the story-telling at the conference (hopefully it will get in the paper) I went for a walk in a silent suburb, houses fresh with new wood, stars and stripes rich with their reds and blues, basketball hoops above empty drive ways. It was like walking on a film set or a banking advert. I couldn't tell whether it was perfect or dead. That was all I saw of Elmira.