Toana Vista, Wendover, Nevada (or is it Utah)
It's Utah.
I'd never heard of the town till this past week, when I published this note in my column ("Reed M.N. Weep" is a regular contributor; I'm "Bulletin Board"):
There's nothin' like a simile!
Reed M.N. Weep: "I just finished reading 'Shockwave' by Stephen Walker. This is a truly excellent, moving, riveting account of the first atomic-bomb test in New Mexico and the subsequent use of the weapon in Japan. Walker has a novelist's gift for narrative and detail, and the story is told from the perspectives of dozens of people involved in the Manhattan Project as well as Hiroshima survivors. The reader inevitably shares the author's simultaneous admiration for what an extraordinary intellectual, technological, military and logistical triumph the bomb was, while being sickened by the consequences it had.
"Anyway, I laughed out loud at the colorful way Wendover, Utah, was described at one point in the book. The crews selected for flying the B-29 bombers did their training at a base near Wendover, in the desert on the edge of the salt flats — by all accounts a miserable place to spend much time. One of the crew members said: 'If the North American continent ever needed an enema, they would insert the tube at Wendover.' "
BULLETIN BOARD MUSES: We can hear it now: "Bend over, Wendover!"