by Karen Piper
Also by Karen Piper
The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos
Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A.
Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity
VIKING
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Copyright © 2018 by Karen Piper
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Photograph credits
1, 2: J. R. Eyerman/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images; 3: U.S. Army Air Corps; 4, 5, 6, 7: U.S. Department of the Navy
Other photographs courtesy of the author
ISBN 9780399564543 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780735220386 (ebook)
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For Mormor and Sis,
and those who survive before and after us,
especially
Earl Marwin Piper
(1922–2005)
Twelve thousand inhabitants, mostly Ph.D.s, entirely air conditioned, in the middle of the most howling of wildernesses. The whole directed exclusively to the production of bigger and better rockets. It was the most frightening exhibition of scientific and highly organized insanity I have ever seen. One vaguely thought that the human race was determined to destroy itself. After visiting the China Lake Research station, one feels quite certain of it.
—Aldous Huxley, 1950
Contents
Also by Karen Piper
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Becoming China Lakers
Part Two
A Teenage Weaponeer
Part Three
Dynamic Instability
Part Four
The Cold War at Home
Part Five
Anything Can Be a Weapon
Part Six
Off Target
Part Seven
Life without Weapons
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Works Cited
About the Author
PART ONE
Becoming China Lakers
Missile Guidebook:
Do not become enamored with missiles. A missile does not make meaning. It destroys meaning.
Chapter One
Born into Missiles
Don’t touch any ordnance,” the guide said. “If you see any lying around. It could explode.” Fiftyish and portly, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and might have passed for a truck driver if not for the B-2 bomber on his cap. Above the plane, the hat read “Northrop,” where I assumed he must have worked, maybe even on the B-2. The group of twenty or so tripod-toting tourists, there to photograph the largest collection of petroglyphs in the Western Hemisphere, looked around warily. A few people laughed, others fidgeted. Only my mom and I knew that we really could explode.
“Ordnance, what’s ordnance?” the woman next to me whispered with a plaintive smile as we began our walk into the canyons. One glance at her tripod made me worry. It was almost as tall as her, and she looked wobbly already.
“Missiles, bombs, that sort of thing,” I said. She stopped and stepped back, her smile dropping. What did she expect? I thought. We were at China Lake Naval Weapons Center, after all. Things were supposed to explode.
I had grown up here, but now only my mother remained behind to keep watch over my father’s body in the warm earth. My sister and I had left long ago, and only an old black-and-white photograph of my family in front of some petroglyphs had drawn me back. In the photo, we are all together and happy: my dad, Earl; my mom, Mary; my sister, Christine; and me. I could not remember if the photo had been taken here or during one of our family road trips, hopping from one desert to another. So here I was, trying to remember something about a childhood locked behind the base gates, my memories in files that would never be declassified. I had lost my security clearance, and after my mom retired, our last access was stripped away with the sticker on her car. My family had once roamed these desert ranges freely, but now we were in exile, tourists to our own pasts. The only way we could visit the base was on a petroglyph tour.
“Don’t pick up a missile, Mom,” I whispered, leaning over conspiratorially. She just shrugged. She was seventy-four and impish as ever, slightly plump but ever ready to go. With her wispy gray hair, bare face, and polyester pants, she was quintessential China Lake. Not a place for fussing over hair and makeup.
“I’m not the one I’m worried about,” she said, chuckling. I knew she was right. Though once prone to hide behind her skirts, I had become the kind of person whose feet would make a beeline to what I needed to know. Nothing could stop me. I would pick up ordnance just because I had to read the fine print. My mom followed me around as if I were a toddler, hoping to keep me alive.
Our giggling and whispering brought a swift glance from the man in the B-2 bomber cap. We both looked down, feigning invisibility, and he continued after a pause. In the wispy dead desert grass, I noticed a stinkbug startled by our shuffling feet. It raised its behind into the air, awaiting predators with a different kind of explosion, a stink that would go unnoticed by the giants towering above. I tapped my mom on the arm. “Stinkbug,” I said, pointing. She nodded and smiled.
* * *
—
Located in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, China Lake had been built so rocket scientists could design and detonate weapons in the same place. The spot was chosen for both its emptiness during World War II and its proximity to Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology. The United States Navy claimed to have found the perfect “desert wasteland,” a place with nothing there to kill. Caltech’s rocket scientists could drive two to three hours and blow things up at a safe distance from LA’s suburban sprawl.
At first, it was all about making rockets better than Hitler’s. But after the war, a strange thing happened: China Lake kept growing. It was built to be temporary but had slowly developed a life of its own. Before long, it expanded from a cluster of Quonset huts to an area the size of Rhode Island, more than a million acres in all. Soon seventy-five percent of all “free world conventional weapons”—the non-nuclear, non-communist kind—would be designed at this odd inland navy base. My home.
The center of the base, where everyone lives, is at the bottom of Indian Wells Valley, though the navy also owns the small desert mountain ranges on three sides—all used as testing sites. On the fourth side, to the west, are the highest peaks in the “lower forty-eight,” the Sierra Nevada mountains. Owens Peak is our peak, the tallest we can see. It determines when day and night begins at China Lake. Next to the base town is a large desert playa, the base’s namesake: China Lake, named after the Chinese laborers who once mined borax from the lake bed. Outside the dry lake’s edges, the valley is blanketed by creosote bushes, which over time form rings of clones to
protect the “mother” at the center from the bracing wind. Test pilots say the pattern looks like a bull’s-eye, but they’re the only ones who get to see the base from above since even the airspace is restricted. There are aerial photographs that show the valley littered with bomb craters and targets like white-painted Xs, fake houses, and old military airplanes, tanks, and railroad cars. Almost anything can be blown up. There is even an old Vietnamese-style bridge left over from that war, half-exploded in the rolling brown hills.
I grew up in the age of missiles, which are essentially rockets with brains. They can hunt you down and will not just fly off willy-nilly to who-knows-where. If you’re lucky, that is. China Lake is famous for its target-tracking missiles, dubbed “smart weapons,” though it can be hard to get those missiles to hit their targets, to be as “smart” as they should be. More often than not, they are like errant children. This is why the base’s first logo was a cross-eyed jackrabbit riding an out-of-control missile. Nevertheless, the right mixture of a successful missile test, perfect desert blooms, and blue skies will bring a smile to any China Laker’s face.
China Lake is a strange ship in the desert, but it was also my home. Every morning at seven fifteen, my family would drive through the main gate, showing our badges to a U.S. Marine standing outside a closet-sized guardhouse. My dad went to work on the Sidewinder missile—it was his job to make sure it hit its targets—and my mom on the Tomahawk. My sister worked on base inventory, counting circuit boards and bombs. I worked as a secretary as soon as I could drive. Of course, we could not talk about anything we did on the base, even to one another. We lived in secrecy.
* * *
—
My mom and I walked down into Renegade Canyon as basalt walls closed in on us, blackened with the lichens and molds of age. Into this dark surface were etched images of two-headed bighorn sheep, men with helmet-sized heads, and women with giant earrings and spears.
“And remember, this is an active bombing range,” the bomber man said, as if reading my mind. “Do not get lost.” My mom glared at me. Then he added, “But don’t worry—they don’t bomb the canyon . . . or at least they try not to.” He chuckled again. I liked him already.
As sunshine, desert wildflowers, and cacti flooded my senses, memories came rushing back. The incongruousness of the place made me want to laugh out loud, to become delirious like a Paiute on drugs. I started a skip-run like my father’s into the canyon and felt that desert elation seep inside me, the living wilderness embracing me. The guide faded into the distance. The ordnance was forgotten.
I knew where I was. Home?
Chapter Two
Journey to the Lake
We made the trip from Seattle to China Lake in our sky-blue Plymouth Valiant, which had more than two hundred thousand miles on it, though we proudly made it last to four hundred thousand. Christine and I sat in the back seat, where I clutched a stack of desert postcards that my dad had sent from China Lake. He had moved there several months before us, while my mom stayed behind to sell the house. Now we were all together again, my dad having flown back to collect us after the house sold. The highway signs read “Fifty-Five Saves Lives” as we began our twenty-hour trek to our new home, my dad in the driver’s seat. All I knew about where we were going was from the postcards in my hand. One was covered with paintings of desert animals—jackrabbit, antelope, tarantula, coyote, horny toad—and the other was a photo of a desert tortoise eating small yellow daisies.
Christine was nine and precocious, with stringy blondish hair and always a bit too skinny. No matter how much she ate, she would not fatten up. I was always bigger and taller, with a twisted brown mop of thick hair. “All you needed to do was shake your beautiful curls and you looked so nice,” my mom once told me. “Christine looked nice too, but it took more time.” It was enough time to make her hate me, it seemed. She counted the minutes it took to become beautiful, while I grew up effortlessly.
To counter those unfair minutes, Christine told me I was adopted. She said the proof was my “green” skin, which others might call “an olive complexion.” To her, it was absolutely alien, leading to far-reaching ancestral explanations from Gypsy to Italian to Sami. Luckily, my thumbs were flat and wide, like my mother’s. They were proof I was not adopted. Even though I had to walk around with my thumbs tucked inside my fists to avoid mockery, at least I knew I belonged. I would not be sent back to the Gypsies or Italians or Laplanders.
I always knew I was my sister’s “usurper,” the one who took her place. As my friend Meli, a psychologist, once explained to me, “A child can only survive without constant attention around age three. If a new sibling arrives before then, the first child can feel that her very survival is at stake.” Unfortunately, no one told my mother that. Sis and I were two years apart, so I was fit for nothing but murder. “Stine hit me” were my first words, recorded forever in my baby book.
My dad kept us from fighting in the back seat of that Plymouth by leading us in endless folk ditties. You could stop Christine midpunch with, “Singing, ditty-ah, ditty-ah ding . . .” Outside, the world gradually turned drier and more brown, as if someone had taken a straw to the plants and sucked the water out. “I am going to miss watching our cherry tree bloom,” my mom said, sighing, from the passenger seat. Just outside our front door in the Seattle suburb of Newport Hills, that tree had bunches of blossoms so big that they hung down like lanterns. Yet even those blooms were smaller than the giant orchids my mom would wear as corsages on special days such as Easter or Mother’s Day. She would look striking with her jet-black hair, pink or yellow tailored suit, and matching pillbox hat with a tiny veil. Her dark pink lipstick would offset the pink of the flowers as she leaned down to me to brush the blossoms on my face. I would giggle at the tickling feel of petals and their rapturous scent. I always associated my mother with the mingled fragrances of cherry blossoms and Chanel No. 5.
Then, suddenly, her suits were all packed for China Lake and that world was abruptly taken from us, fading into emptiness on our long drive into the desert. Seattle was to be a beautiful cherry blossom–scented ghost. Gone were the glistening, raindrop-covered trees of my childhood and the cloudy days on the beach digging for clams. As we skirted the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, which towered over us with their snow-covered peaks, the sun stunned with its ferocity and miles of open desert lay ahead of us like a giant pancake. We were left in a daze.
“Listen to this—” My mom began to read from a guidebook: “‘The region surrounding China Lake is rich in the scenic beauty of desert valleys and majestic mountain regions.’” She sounded happy, which made me happy too. “‘Death Valley is about ninety and Mount Whitney about eighty miles away, and on every hand are the historic sites of the Old West.’” The base had sent us this little booklet with a picture of Michelson Laboratory on the cover, where my dad had already begun working.
“Why do they call it Death Valley?” I asked.
“Pioneers used to die from the heat while trying to cross it in wagon trains a long time ago,” she explained. “There are no roads across the Sierras from China Lake. I guess we’ll be cut off from the world.” My eyes got big, while my sister, who had the practical mind of a scientist, nodded in excitement.
“It describes why the navy chose this spot. . . .” Her voice rose with piqued interest. “‘This nearly uninhabited desert valley, the clear skies and good flying weather, the ample water supply, the accessibility of highway and railroad, and the proximity to the Los Angeles manufacturing area all combined to provide a setting that ideally suited year-round weapon development and testing operations.’” Despite the few details in the guidebook, it felt as if we were heading into the complete unknown when we finally turned off Highway 395.
“Antelope,” I said, looking down at the postcard to calm myself, reading the labels printed beneath the animals one by one. “Coyote. Tarantula.”
We started down a ten-
mile side road straight into a sandbox. In the middle of the box was a big dry lake, which looked like snow. My dad said cheerily, “Sure is nicer than the first time I came here,” not noticing that even our black-and-white cockapoo puppy, Patches, wanted to hide, tucking her head under my leg and shaking.
After a pause, my dad retold a story we all had heard before. “I flew in on a tiny twin-engine plane from LA,” he started. “It was really bumpy.” We looked around for an airport, seeing only sand.
“Hey, I see it!” I pointed off to the left, where a single airstrip sat next to a white box of a building, not much bigger than my old bedroom.
“Yes, imagine flying into that and having no one there to meet you. No air-conditioning and not a soul inside. There was only the kid who had flagged in the plane and then busied himself putting brakes under the plane’s wheels.”
“It was really hot!” I piped in.
“A hundred and ten degrees, in fact. The first thing I noticed was that the pavement squished beneath my feet. You’ll see. There was no taxi in sight, so once the pilot got in a car and drove away, I started to worry. I thought about hitchhiking the ten miles to the base—”
“Earl, don’t encourage them,” my mom interrupted, thinking we would start hitchhiking immediately.
“—but I hadn’t done that since the war. And I was in my best suit.”
“The gray one?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s the one.” He sounded pleased.
“So I went inside and sat next to an old rusty fan and waited. The kid—he looked like a teenager—was still unloading cargo from the plane. Finally, he came inside and stood behind the counter like no one was even there.”
I could picture my father fretting about whether to approach him. I knew he did not like to bother people. At Boeing, he brought flowers to his secretary every week but was afraid to talk to his boss. “Ahem . . . Any chance I could get a ride into town?” he must have finally said.
