by Karen Piper
A strange brew of companions had been stuffed into my father’s bomb bays, which were converted to hold passengers. Some were headed to war, some to prison, and some to refuge in Palestine. The flights out of Sweden were allowed to leave only in bad weather so the Germans could not find them, and the crews flew without parachutes so they could not be captured and tortured by Nazis. The mission was that secret. From Stockholm, my dad would have had to navigate north, through the clouds, above the Arctic Circle. Only then, in that place where war and radar had not penetrated, could they cross over German-occupied Norway to the North Sea. They had to fly higher than the Luftwaffe planes, which meant their wings would slowly ice up while over Norway. My dad had to calculate that moment between certain death and safety, no matter who was on board, that moment it was finally safe to turn south.
Maybe my dad left me this gift, moving his “spy passport” to the top of his box, knowing I would be daring enough to open it when the time came. I still do not know what he did at Normandy beach, in Italy, or in Africa. But I had learned enough to understand, and at just the right time, that some people are willing to carry others out. That was all. Someone would always want to sell the ball bearings, no matter who the highest bidder was, and others would always want to carry those in danger to safety. To open the doors and let them in, no matter the personal risk. I learned enough to have hope again.
“When all else fails you,” my dad used to say, “you still have dead reckoning.” Intuition. For navigators, it means there are no stars or land in sight with which to navigate. It means you are floating free in the clouds, with no ups or downs or here or there. “Dead reckoning,” he would say, “that’s when you know you’re in trouble.”
Then you tune in to your instinct and try to fly straight.
PART SEVEN
Life without Weapons
Missile Guidebook:
Find a new language that is not written with missiles. There are very few surviving languages left. If you can learn that new language, you will learn joy. It is a language that is past E=MC2, after the wrong turn, out beyond the carvings in the rock. It is where you can find me, lying in the sun, smiling.
Chapter Thirty-One
Petroglyph Targets
It was only when I said I wanted to visit the base petroglyphs that my mother paused. “The base petroglyphs?” she asked, and for the first time ever, her voice did not have that ready-to-go-anywhere excitement.
“Yeah, Mom, it’s where you live, remember?” I replied. It had been three years since my father died. She was still living in Ridgecrest, and I thought she would be excited to hear I wanted to come home. Usually when I mentioned some new place to visit, she would reply, “I have my passport. Let’s go!”
“Patagonian wilderness?”
“I’ll stay in the hotel while you hike.”
“Egypt?”
“We can see that mummy there. Sure.”
“I want to take a drive along the Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish border, Mom. Do you want to come?” That region really got messed up by ISIS later. But at the time, I was writing a book about transboundary water disputes and water privatization, so I was fascinated by borders. I had just received tenure and a sabbatical with funding for research.
“It’s always an adventure with you,” she would say, though partly I think she was afraid I would get myself into some dangerous situation. She was afraid I might need her. So we would get on a plane, thinking all we needed was a credit card, rental car, and GPS. We were not rich, but we patched together my travel grants with her Social Security and our willingness to sleep on anyone’s couch.
Only China Lake made her pause.
This was surprising to me. It was as cheap as it gets, after all. And it wasn’t Syria.
Then she said, “I think you have to take a tour to get out there now. I don’t have my badge anymore, remember. There’s no sticker on the car.”
“I know, I know. I looked it all up,” I reassured her. “I found the tour. It’s a four-hour hike in and out to the petroglyphs. I think we went there once, when I was little. Do you remember? It was back when anyone could drive right in.”
“Oh, maybe your father took you,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been there.”
Then she added, “Remember, security is terrible out there now, since 9/11. You better be sure you have everything you need to get on the base.”
“I know, I know,” I replied. “I looked it up.”
Then she said she thought she might go with me on the tour.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “You better think about it.”
I was thinking of her shoes. I knew she did not have the right kind, which she would never concede. Besides, she was seventy-four years old and could fall and break a hip. Yet she seemed to have an endless amount of energy left in her, as if my father had simply moved into her body and given her whatever energy he had left. If she could survive the Himalayas, I figured she could survive China Lake.
We arrived at the carpool site at five o’clock in the morning, where my mom and I were to ride with the tour leader, Todd Gunnison, in his SUV. “Got your passports or birth certificates?” he asked as we left the parking lot. We did.
At the first checkpoint, we were directed to a “holding area” surrounded by concrete blast walls. It looked like Iraq. There, we handed over our passports and stepped out of the car so it could be searched. “You used to be able to drive right through,” my mom said, marveling. “I almost reached for my badge and thought we would be waved through.” There were no barricades back then, but there were also no “terrorists” either, only “Communists,” whom we all thought lived far away. So we waited as four guards searched our cars, entered our names in a database, and finally handed us our “visitor” badges. I tried to attach the badge to my T-shirt, but it kept falling off, seemingly designed for people with lapels and collars. That had always been a nuisance. I shoved it into my purse instead.
Back in the car, Todd said, “Ready for the next one?” We drove past a sign that read “What you see here, What you hear here, What you do here, Let it stay here.” At the second checkpoint, Todd turned in all our information to the military police, then said, “One more to go. It’s sure not like before September 11th. You’re lucky to be here at all. Who knows how many checkpoints there will be tomorrow.” Nothing remained of the haphazard, devil-may-care attitude of the base, when it was a place that felt dwarfed by the desert at every turn, a kooky jackrabbit ride on a missile.
Finally, we got in line behind fuel tankers at a guardhouse with a gate labeled “North Range.” Todd complained, “They’ve just got to count every drop in every truck, now, don’t they?” I knew by then that the U.S. military uses more oil than whole countries and is the biggest oil consumer in the United States. Ironically, the Pentagon now states that climate change “poses immediate risks to U.S. national security.” Another catch-22.
“Interesting hat,” I said to Todd as we waited. “You like the B-2?”
“Used to work on the B-2,” he replied gruffly, “out at Northrop in San Diego.”
“How’s the B-2 bomber working these days?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Oh, it works okay, but it’s only our ‘strategic option’ now.”
I knew that meant it carried only nuclear bombs, which meant that no one really used it anymore. In fact, the B-2s were housed a short distance from Columbia at Whiteman Air Force Base and would fly over our homecoming game every year for a little added excitement. The noise of them rattled me, as did their presence in general. When I heard they were stationed nearby, I looked up how far a nuclear blast wave would travel, since those bombers would be an obvious target. I discovered that the biggest nuke tested was the fifty-megaton Russian Tsar Bomba in 1961. It was determined that people sixty-two miles away would get third-degree burns. Damn it, I thought. Whiteman was forty miles away.
Those B-2s were following me everywhere.
“Didn’t they find out the old Soviet radar systems could detect the B-2?” I asked Todd.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” His voice stiffened. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to. I’m just here to show you some petroglyphs.”
We soon found out that Todd was much more than a tour guide, having served in three wars before his job with Northrop. Now he was retired. He once led troops into Basra in Iraq and now led tourists into the Coso Range. “It’s a hobby,” he said. “I volunteered.” No wonder I liked him. I tend to get along with veterans.
Todd handed each of us a brochure about the base’s main points of interest, then informed us we were passing the first one: the navy’s eighteen-hole golf course. He laughed and said, “You can go anywhere in the world, and wherever the navy is, there will be a golf course.” I thought of what my sister once said, that she would never vote for a golfer. “It’s like a men’s conspiracy,” she said. “You see the president teeing off with all these important people around the world, and there’s never a woman there.”
Slowly, I realized I was looking at the golf course I had grown up next to, where navy guys came to shoot jackrabbits at night. My mother warned me not to go there at night, but I did sneak out once to see a field of bunnies munching away under bright overhead lights. But now, in Todd’s SUV, it looked backward. I’d never had clearance to drive on this road so had never seen it from this angle before. The whole base was backward, as if I were seeing it in a mirror.
On the other side of the road from the golf course were piles of scrap metal and what looked like leaking barrels of hazardous waste. All that debris, so close to my house. The brochure said only that we were driving by Lark Ramp, one of the first guided missile launchers on the base, which was shut down after a missile fired from it almost landed on Ridgecrest. Afterward, Lark Ramp clearly became a dumping site, where now a greenish pool of water held a lonely wading egret.
As we started the long drive across dry China Lake, my mom pointed to a couple of buildings that looked like heat mirages in the distance. “Hey, that’s my office!” she said.
“Oh yeah? What’d you do out there?” Todd asked. “I mean, I’m curious ’cause I’m not from around here. I’ve always wondered what they do here.”
“I etched circuitry,” she said, typically circumspect.
“It’s something to do,” Todd replied. I remembered driving to the lakeshore when it rained to collect fairy shrimp, which would come alive by the millions when it flooded. At home, we put them in a jar and watched them swim, before realizing we could buy them in an aquarium kit called “Sea Monkeys.”
Then Todd pointed to a notch in the hills. “That’s where we’re going,” he said. “It’s only a quarter mile away, but we have to go the long way around unless you want to drive through the missile-testing sites.”
On our left was a simple concrete wall and a couple of railroad cars stacked on top of one another. Targets. I noticed the backside of the railroad cars had already been blown up, then turned around to shoot at again. Recycling. The logo on one side read “Hyundai.” I turned to look over my shoulder again, disoriented by the view, when the car suddenly swerved. My mother grabbed her seat belt and laughed from the back seat. “What was that?” I asked, turning forward again.
“Lizard,” Todd replied.
“Man, you’re a softie!” I kidded. “I would never go out of my way for a lizard.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.
The road narrowed, heading up a canyon and finally over a ridge, where an enormous poppy field opened up in the middle of a Joshua tree forest. Black-and-white mottled horses dotted the landscape, grazing on the orange poppies. They looked like unicorns in a perfect fantasyland.
“Take a picture!” my mom said, handing me her camera from the back seat.
“I can’t,” I replied. “We’re not allowed.” Todd looked at me and nodded in approval before staring intently in his rearview mirror.
“If I see those photographers stop and pull out a tripod,” he said, “I’m going to shoot them.”
“Have you seen any bighorn sheep out here?” I asked. I knew the navy was trying to reintroduce them to the ranges and wondered how they kept from getting shot.
“Nope, and I hope I never do,” he said. “Just the paperwork would be terrible. There are ninety biologists waiting for us to see a bighorn sheep. We’d have to shut down the whole tour and go report it.”
Finally, we pulled into an unmarked dirt parking lot, where Todd gave a little lecture: “If you see any ordnance or missile parts around, don’t touch it. This is a military base. Be sure not to leave the canyon.”
My mom and I giggled, and he looked as though he wanted to hush us.
As we started our walk into the canyon, my mother began to worry. “I don’t know about this,” she said, looking down at her feet. The trail of desert rubble and rocks led down into an even rockier canyon. But I did not want to turn back.
“You can probably make it up to there,” I encouraged her, pointing to a bend ahead. “I’ll help you.” I held out my hand, as I had so many times before, walking ahead of her like a human cane, step by step. I wanted her to see at least one petroglyph.
Suddenly, the petroglyphs jumped out at us from around every corner, white chalklike drawings on black rock in all kinds of fantastic shapes and forms. “But what are they supposed to mean?” a photographer asked.
Todd replied, “No one knows. The Shoshone etched most of them as early as sixteen thousand years ago, but no one knows what they mean anymore. And it’s not only Shoshone that used to come here. There are petroglyphs here by Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, Kawaiisu, Paiutes, and Kiowa Sioux Indians too. They came from all over to this place. It’s the largest collection of Native rock art in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Do Native Americans still come here?” I asked. I knew they lived on tiny reservations nearby, even though technically they had never signed away their rights to this land. There are cup-sized holes in large boulders where the women used to grind acorns.
“Sure, they can come out whenever they want,” he replied, “except when the road’s closed for bombing. They can book a tour like anyone else—but they don’t know what the petroglyphs mean either.” Or maybe they do not want to tell you, I thought.
I noticed my mom was lagging behind but had found a friend, an elderly man who was helping her with the tricky spots. I heard them laughing, so I hurried to catch up with Todd. “So what happens in the rest of the Coso Range?” I asked him. “I mean, why can’t we see the other petroglyphs?”
“You tell me,” he replied. “Secret stuff.”
Finally, we approached a rock chute that we had to slide down. My mom stopped and said, “Okay, that’s it for me.”
“Can you get back on your own?” I asked, worried that I would have to turn back.
“Oh, don’t worry, Karen. Evan wants to go back with me.” In a white short-sleeved shirt with green suspenders, Evan looked about eighty years old, even older than my mom, but he nodded happily and took her hand.
Meanwhile, Todd was pointing out the figures carved in rock, which were predominantly bighorn sheep, but also humans, dogs, and rows of people linking arms. There were also many figures that were half human and half animal and many others that looked like aliens. “Some of these animals are now extinct,” Todd said. “Gone for eleven thousand years.” I thought I saw a saber-toothed tiger.
“Shamans used to come here to get power from the rocks,” Todd said. “They sat in rock shelters all night without food or water and smoked tobacco until they had hallucinations.” Spirits lived in the rocks, it was said, so they waited for cracks in the rocks to open up and let them in. Meanwhile, women ground holes in the rocks and covered themselves in rock dust, clothing themselves in
the world of spirits.
Today, some psychologists claim that the shamans were “seeing things,” explaining that our minds will create patterns out of partial images to make sense of them in darkness. Blind people also see things this way. What the shamans saw were bighorn sheep with three heads. Upside-down people. Footprints of “water babies,” who are mischievous newborn spirits that live in the water. People climbing out of cracks in the rocks. The spirits going back and forth.
Then, after the California governor offered a bounty in 1856 of twenty-five cents per scalp for killing Native Americans, the drawings began to change. By 1860, it was up to $5. Around then, numerous flying shamans appeared. They did not fly Superman-style but had spiraling lines in their faces to show that a whirlwind was carrying them away to safety. They had helicopter faces. There were also shamans with bulletproof shirts, provided to them by animal helpers. The spirit helpers in the rocks were practical, it seems, and adapted to the changing times. Some say the shamans’ trances were caused by extreme fatigue. They called this place pohaghani, which means “the house of supernatural power.”
Then, suddenly, the drawings ended.
“Why do so many bighorn sheep have squiggly lines above them?” I asked Todd.
“That’s rain,” he said. “The Indians thought bighorn sheep brought rain because they would come streaming down the mountains when there was a thunderstorm up there, which usually meant that rain was on its way.” Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, all these etchings were certainly done while on drugs, so who knows.”
On the way back, I noticed “E=MC2” carved into a rock.
“Was that done by people on drugs too?” I poked Todd with my elbow and pointed.
“Oh, that,” he said. “That was done by some scientists in the early days, when they could come out here anytime. There were sometimes crazy parties, I’ve heard.”
“Ah, so it was done on drugs!” I chuckled.
