by Karen Piper
We called the explosives “insensitive munitions,” not because they were insensitive to the people they killed—though they were that too—but to the heat and bullets that might threaten them. When missiles were “sensitive,” you could blow up a navy warship simply by hitting it with sniper fire. All the missiles on board would combust from that one bullet. Now, there were plenty of other ways you could blow yourself up at Salt Wells, but not that one.
Unlike the folks at Payroll, who handled only paperwork and pay stubs, the people at Salt Wells had to be comfortable handling explosives. Every code on the base has its own microculture because of differences like this. Salt Wells felt like an auto repair shop, where people loaded explosives like regular union laborers and walked around with dynamite residue on their hands. I hated that my desk was crammed in the middle of a room that looked like a mechanic’s lobby, but I adapted. The secretary next to me, Sally, was big and loud, wore overalls every day, and used any excuse to smoke outside with the guys. Throughout the day, men and women would wander through the room with soot on their faces, wearing giant padded gloves and machine shop clothes.
Yet secretly, every person in that shop was waiting for lunch. That was when they could watch the kittens from the picnic tables in front of the building. Apparently, the mom stashed them up there to keep them safe from predators while she hunted, since they were too little to survive on their own. She must have thought it a miracle to find those trees so far from anywhere, a blessing from the atom bomb. During the day, she slept up there, too, while we watched her kittens for her. If a wobbly kitten fell to the ground while she slept, it could wander away and get picked off by a great horned owl or coyote. So we were the de facto babysitters while mom got her rest. Smoking reached near epidemic levels, so important was it to keep an eye on those kittens. An injured kitten could make an explosives man cry.
Once, a kitten did fall out of the tree during the night when no one was there. In the morning, we found it scratching at the base of the tree, meowing in desperation to get back to its siblings. An RDX specialist ran for a ladder as if his feet were on fire, then ever so gently lifted it back into place. He sighed afterward and shook his head. “What if we hadn’t been here?” he asked no one in particular.
A buddy patted him on the back and said, “It’s okay. We were.”
At Salt Wells, the bobcats were friendly and the munitions “insensitive.” The only danger we took seriously was flash floods. Salt Wells had flooded the previous year, knocking out the Melt Cast Explosives Loading Facility with its giant tubs for melting TNT or RDX (research department explosive). Employees had to drop everything and dig the facility out of the mud. What bothered them most was that a wall of debris and water had broken through a chicken-wire fence, which would have killed them if it had happened during the day. Neverthless, having survived, people seemed to think a big flood would not happen again.
But disasters are not like vaccinations.
One day, Sally looked out the window and noticed a storm coming. We all went outside to watch. In the desert, you can see a storm coming for miles and gauge its power from the darkness of the clouds. First, it will dance on the hills, changing the scenery in dramatic shifts from light to shadow while pouring rain in the distance. Next, it will hit you with a boom as lightning branches out across the sky. For me, there is nothing more glamorous than a desert storm. But on that day, something went wrong with the formula, the usual slow approach of thunderclouds from the west.
Someone pointed to the east and said, “Hey, check it out. The clouds are coming from both directions.”
“That’s, like, totally weird,” I said, having picked up Cheri’s dialect. None of us knew what was in the east, so oriented to the west were we. A fierce wind kicked in and the sky smelled of creosote bushes, that musky electric smell, which meant it was raining nearby.
When lightning cracked too close, we hurried inside. There, peering out the glass doors, people began to fret about the kittens. They did not seem to know to get out of that tree.
“Get down!” I heard someone whisper.
“Do you think they’re okay up there?” the RDX specialist asked.
No one answered. Then my phone rang.
“Salt Wells, this is Karen,” I said.
“Karen, are you okay? You need to head home—” My dad was talking fast. “Did you get the announcement out there?”
“What announcement? It just started raining!” I protested. My dad was a worrywart.
“Stop worrying about me, Dad,” I said firmly. He drove me crazy.
“Karen, the streets are running with water down here,” he insisted. “Hurry.”
Minutes later, my boss said the same thing. “Remember last year,” he warned. “If the road washes out, they’ll have to helicopter us out. Be careful.”
We all started running out into the rain, which felt like hailstones on my back. I tried to recall my desert safety training, from both school and work. Stay in your car, which is safe in a lightning storm as long as you do not touch the metal. Lie down in a ditch if you are stuck outside. Watch out for flash floods. In the desert more people die from floods than heat. A two-inch flash flood can flip your car in seconds and trap you inside. An electricity pole can fall in the water and fry your brains. While a rattlesnake will normally strike only if you happen to step on it, a rattlesnake in floodwater is adrift and frightened like you.
I jumped in my car and sped away, soon realizing I had forgotten to say goodbye to the bobcats. Later, I would come to regret this, but now the wind was threatening to flip the car. I could barely see out the windshield through the downpour, which fell like buckets of paint, obscuring everything.
The illogic of driving to the bottom of a valley was not lost on me. Nor was the irony of naming the town Ridgecrest. I still like Crumville better. The town apparently got its new name because someone had visited Ridgecrest, North Carolina, and liked it there. They wanted a town like that, even though it was located at the opposite of a crest. The base was built on the valley floor because the navy did not know about desert flash floods when they picked this spot to settle. They simply needed a long enough, flat enough spot for a B-29 to take off with an atom bomb weighing ten thousand pounds.
No one really thought they would stay.
As I passed the turn to Echo Range, I contemplated finding Mitch, who had a Jeep with an elevated intake valve that would not stall in a flood. He was supposed to be working out there that day. I hesitated at that lonely desert intersection, not knowing if I could even get on the range. With boulders now washing over the road, I stepped on the gas.
At the time, it never occurred to me then that I might be leaving Mitch stranded and not the other way around. My family was scattered across the whole base that day, miles from one another. My mom was at Area E, my dad at Mike Lab, my brother-in-law at Echo Range, and my sister God knows where. All I could do was hope the pieces would find a way to fit back together somehow, safely.
As I approached the valley floor, the water began to slow and pool into a giant lake, though it was not as deep as I had feared, not enough to stall the engine. So I drove into it until, turning the corner to our house, I was relieved to see that only our lawn was flooded. I called my sister’s house first, which was easier than getting someone on the base with all its extensions, party lines, and operators.
“Oh, good, you’re home!” I said at the sound of her voice. She had been married almost a year and was living in a ranch house much like my mom and dad’s, except with fewer trinkets.
“Is Mitch there?” I asked.
“No, but he’s on his way.”
Next, I called my mom, but the phone went dead while it was ringing. I could not reach my dad, either, and was afraid he would start walking home through the napalm-filled floodwaters, trying to beat his old time while avoiding the swirling snakes and scorpions. I called
my sister back and soon we were both talking that old familiar twin-talk, our voices singing in perfect harmony: hers soprano and mine the alto. It helped to pass the waiting time as the water slowly crept into the house like a thief.
Finally, Mitch showed up. Christine put down the phone but forgot to hang up. I heard Mitch say, “The Jeep went off the road into the water and—”
“You drove through a flash flood? You idiot!”
She was right to be mad. He had ignored our desert survival training.
“But the Jeep didn’t roll,” he said defensively, “and I got a ride home. I’ll deal with the Jeep tomorrow.”
“How many times have we been told never to cross a flash flood? Huh, Mitch, how many?” she shouted. “Were you not listening?” I felt a little bit glad to not be married. If I’d almost died, no one would have been there to yell at me afterward, which was something.
I hung up the phone and tried my mom’s office again. Still dead. I remembered how crazy the phones were when we first moved to China Lake. When you picked up the phone, there might be people chatting on the line, and you could either wait for them to hang up or try to outshout them. Now, in a crisis, the phones were useless. What if we got nuked now? I thought.
Then I heard the garage door open.
Mom walked in, the carpet squishing where she stepped. “Oh no!” she said, looking down at her feet. No one had flood insurance. It was the desert, right? So new carpeting was out. Instead, people shared shop vacs to suck the water out of their houses.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s right behind me,” she said, looking relieved to find me there. “The main gate was flooded,” she explained. “So they told us to stay at work.”
“You mean you were trapped out there?”
“Some tried to get out, but their engines stalled. There wasn’t much I could do,” she said. “When I heard Mike Lab was flooding, I decided to at least get your dad. I found him in a trailer behind Mike Lab, sitting on top of a desk. The simulations lab.” She took him back to her office, where they waited for the floodwaters to recede at the gate. It took almost two hours, and then the sun burst out like nothing had happened.
“You should have seen the water pouring into Mike Lab.” My dad walked in and said. “I left when the chairs started floating in the hallway. It’s a good thing your mom knew where to look for me.”
Later, when I saw the photos of water pouring through the front doors of Mike Lab, rushing past all the security checkpoints, it seemed miraculous that my mom and dad had walked through the force of that water. They could have been swept off their feet and died. But my mom would not let my dad go without her, would not let him be towed into that dark swirl all alone. Past the front doors, the water had headed straight for the basement, pouring like a waterfall down the steps to where all the base’s historical records were kept. Later, the base would try to freeze-dry the papers to salvage them, which didn’t really work.
The flood also stirred up toxic things that were meant to remain buried, like depleted uranium out at Salt Wells, as well as TNT, RDX, and chloroform. The navy still blows up or burns tens of thousands of pounds of hazardous waste every year at Burro Wash, since it is both too dangerous and too secret to send off the base. We were stuck with it. There is also a large area on China Lake’s map labeled “Open Air Biodegradable Hazardous Waste Experimental Area.” I assume it translates, “Where the Navy Dumps Shit on the Ground and Hopes it Disappears.” Maybe the navy scatters its experimental metal-eating microbes over the hazardous waste there. Hopefully those microbes do not blow away and eat us instead.
At Salt Wells, I learned a whole new set of acronyms: RDX, CFC, TNT, HMX, PBXC-129, and more. I never once considered that all those acronyms might flow down the mountain into our house. Yet in a place where things are constantly spilled, mixed, and blown up, it made sense that they had to go somewhere. After the flood, the Environmental Protection Agency got involved and ultimately declared Salt Wells a Superfund site in 1994, claiming the chance of “inhaling explosives” and thus contracting cancer was too high for anyone to work there. The EPA said it was dangerous to touch the dirt or to drink the well water, which was laced with chloroform. I wondered if your lungs could explode from inhaling explosives.
After the “Great Flood” of 1984, base employees were asked to volunteer as “muckrakers” to dig out the base so we could focus on defending the country again. Mitch volunteered and dug around in all those toxins. Of course, no one really knew the dangers at the time. As for me, after shoveling horse poop the summer before, there was no way I was going to pick up a shovel.
I took it as a sign instead. The desert did not want me there.
Reporters at the Rocketeer tried to make sense of what had happened. One of them wrote, “The Aug. 15 flood of Michelson Laboratory has raised a number of questions such as ‘Why was the laboratory placed on a floodplain?’” Indeed. He explained the navy’s reasoning: “The possibility of flooding at China Lake was not a consideration in siting the Naval Ordnance Test Station in January 1944. . . .The primary concern of that time was winning a war by the quickest means possible.”
I heard the bobcat tree survived, which meant the kittens probably kept coming back, with no one to tell them they were inhaling explosives. No one to tell them they should leave. Unlike the kittens, I knew to go. I found I actually missed the habit of entertaining myself with books—as long as it was not Marx. This time, I chose a college for the scenery. It had to be a Christian one, of course, but also one with a view. So I left for Westmont College, in Montecito, four hours away. They had forgiven my D and even given me a partial scholarship. I fled the way I wished those bobcat kittens could.
PART THREE
Dynamic Instability
Missile Guidebook:
Notice its faults, such as how often it fails to fire. Tell this to everyone. This will take away some of its power, since a missile does not want to be shamed.
Chapter Eighteen
Astral Projection
I would drive the narrow, windy roads of Montecito with the ocean in my driver’s-side window, whizzing through junglelike foliage that smelled of eucalyptus, down to the waterfront city of Santa Barbara. Someone said Michael Jackson kept giraffes in his yard in Montecito, but most of the movie stars’ houses were in well-guarded compounds with high walls and trees blocking the view, so it was hard to say. I knew that Oprah Winfrey lived next to campus. I drove by her house every day.
I was a poor person living in a rich man’s world.
In the coffee shops lining Santa Barbara’s State Street, people talked about “astral projection,” which means catapulting yourself into the stars to meet aliens. Since I still felt that edge of invisibility, I gleaned most of my information from eavesdropping. In fact, that was primarily how I learned to behave in each new world I encountered: eavesdropping and mimicry. I should have been a spy. If you sat still and listened, I found, you could learn most anything. At the State Street Bookstore, a wall was labeled “New Age Books” and dedicated to Zen, Wicca, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and astral projection. It seemed everyone wanted to get out of there, if only in their own minds. I could relate to that.
Westmont was not at all like Cal Baptist, though the doctrine was nearly the same. At Westmont, trust fund kids went sailing on weekends, carried their parents’ credit cards, and dined at the finest restaurants. The campus library lawn looked out over a lush, forested sea of celebrity estates, which took up whole blocks and ended abruptly at the Pacific Ocean. If not for the sea, it could have been the Amazon. Since the estates were walled in, gated, and overgrown, you never saw the celebrities inside. They came and went in cars with tinted windows. Westmont’s campus used to be one of these estates until a rich old lady dreamed of a Christian college among the celebrities.
At Westmont, students signed up for spring missions to Mexico
to help the poor and fall semester trips to Europe for shopping. (I did both.) Tuition was as high as Harvard’s, though average SAT scores were not. I could afford to attend only with the combined help of a partial scholarship, my parents, and a twenty-hour-a-week secretarial job. That was the price for this piece of heaven.
As one of the “scholarship kids,” I was relegated to a particular niche with the foreigners and atheists, which suited me fine. The international students were working hard to assimilate, as I was. They were some of my first friends to whom I felt I really could relate. In the evenings, we would dance to David Byrne, U2, and R.E.M. at someone’s house-sitting gig. Unlike at Cal Baptist, at Westmont dancing was ecstatic but asexual, as if we were whirling dervishes in some mystical David Byrne–style trance. My signature move was uncontrolled jerking followed by falling on the floor and spinning in circles. Or I would twirl through the air and land on my sturdy flat black boots. I discovered I liked this much better than putting dollars down Chippendales dancers’ pants for a kiss.
Westmont was “ecumenical,” and though it was in a distinctly Protestant way, it was enough to give many of us a whole new sense of freedom. We started by debating Methodists versus Lutherans, but before long, we were wondering if we should be Protestant or Catholic, Christian or non-Christian, Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu. Maybe we could try them all. It became a slippery slope, but a slope to freedom, not Evil. When R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” came on, my dancing hive of Koreans, Brazilians, Italians, and poor folks went wild in our collective dancing joy.
