by Karen Piper
Our senses keep us alive, keep us from spinning out of control. My dad was always fighting the spinning, from the times he walked home through Michigan blizzards without wearing a hat to the times he flew through snowstorms over German-occupied Norway to the times he tried to keep missiles on course—right up to the end, when he fought the long, hard years of spinning into death.
Pitch and roll became his way of framing things, which he tried to help me understand.
Chapter Six
U.S. Government Dog
I grew up on Rowe Street, named after the USS Rowe, which was once stationed at Pearl Harbor. Other streets were named after fleet admirals (Nimitz, King, Halsey) or their ships (Hornet, Wasp, Franklin) or their combat arenas (Midway, Leyte, Coral Sea). Living on these streets gave the impression of being in a battle at sea during World War II. I would walk down Nimitz to Midway to Groves Elementary School, named after General Leslie Groves, the military man in charge of dropping the atom bomb. Ironically, Groves chose to test the bomb by dropping it on the USS Saratoga, once the ship of China Lake’s first commander, Sherman E. Burroughs. I wonder how Burroughs felt about his ship exploding in a test at Bikini Atoll. Maybe he had offered it up, glad to be done with World War II. Maybe he was ready for the bright future of atom bombs.
As a child, I did not know what the street names meant. World War II was just my dad’s war, and Nimitz was just a pretty name to me. It was only decades later that I discovered China Lake had supplied all the rockets used in World War II, sending Tiny Tim, Zuni, and Mighty Mouse rockets to the field by the millions. When I told my mom about my new discovery, she squinted her eyes as if to get a better look at the state of my mental health, then said, “China Lake was that war. What did you think?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, we did everything over there,” she replied. “How could you not know that?” But growing up in a war town does not mean you know a thing about war.
Outside, I wandered the streets, getting lost in the unfamiliar sights of war. Inside, my family started acting strangely. Christine began labeling all the books in the house, saying she was using the Dewey decimal system. “You have to check them out from me from now on,” she said one day. “I will mark in my file when you took it and when I need to have it back.” I gave up reading and got a hamster, naming it Snowball, my ball of furry whiteness in the desert heat.
Patches, meanwhile, did not like the sonic booms and could often be found shivering under the colonial maple end table next to the couch. I could hardly blame her for being scared. With all the unexploded ordnance and wild-looking dogs roaming around outside, it was a dangerous place to be a dog. My dad even warned my mom about this before we arrived. “I sure miss the three of you,” he wrote to her, “and the card from Karen kind of made me cry a little. Patches I don’t miss much ’cause we have plenty of dogs around here.” It made me sad to think that Patches, my best companion, was once unwanted. “They have very strict rules about dogs here, but they don’t seem to enforce them,” he continued. “I wonder if you shouldn’t have Patches spayed before bringing her down here. She could be a real problem with all the male dogs running loose.” But we did not, and it was a problem.
We had to drag Patches out from under the table to register her with the navy. They gave her a tag that read “Naval Weapons Center” with a number on one side and “DOG” on the other. “Don’t they know what dogs look like here?” I asked my mom. It seemed everything had to be labeled or stamped now. U.S. Government pen. U.S. Government dog. U.S. Government books. Nothing was ours anymore, not even Patches.
Around the dinner table, my mother would talk about whether my sister was intentionally scraping the fork on her teeth because we could not talk about my dad’s day at work. U.S. Government dad. The fork drove my mother crazy. We talked about whether my sister ate her peas. We talked about whether I had scrubbed my neck properly, since it was turning brown. We talked about the problems with Public Works and how they would not unclog the sink. U.S. Government house. Anything but work and bombs and especially Vietnam. We turned off the news when it came on. We were allowed to watch Little House on the Prairie once a week, but that was all. Then my mom and dad would go to their room to talk about the missiles.
Since we had moved to the base, my sister had started sleeping on air mattresses underneath the dining room table. U.S. Government air mattresses. She took all the air mattresses and blankets she could find and stacked them above and below her until she was squeezed in tight and looked like a Christine sandwich. Then she was ready for nuclear war. Sometimes she took her sleeping bag and air mattresses and slept in the closet instead. My parents would laugh and take pictures. We all thought it was funny. She later told me she found confined spaces cozy, like infants who calm down when they are swaddled.
To be safe from attack, Christine and I built a fort in a bamboo grove in our backyard. It was near the chicken-wire fence separating our neighbor’s duplex from ours. The center of the grove was hollow, so we planned to hide there when things got bad. We put blankets inside and then began to dig a moat so no one could get to us. We took turns chasing each other around the yard with our garden hose gun, which made filling the moat take longer but also made my mom happy since the lawn was getting watered. Once the moat was finished, we went inside and tore down the mud bridge so no one else could get inside.
* * *
—
When there is a secret called “war” hovering in the air, shouted out in sonic booms then pushed down into silence at the dinner table, the body will notice even if the mind refuses to. My heart tuned into those unexpected sonic booms and began to mimic them.
“Bmp, bmp,” it went one night, then stopped. I was lying in my pink chiffon canopy bed. I put my hand to my heart and looked around the dark room, which was rapidly shrinking. There were stuffed animals lining the wall, looking suddenly ominous, and the room seemed so childish for someone dying. Then my heart started racing and skipping again. I held my breath and checked my wrist, which I had seen the cops do on CHiPs after an epic car crash scene.
Then I started the slow journey—not fast enough to die—down the hallway with one hand on my heart and one against the wall, until I finally pushed open my parents’ bedroom door.
“Wha . . . What’s that?” My mom sat up as though a serial killer had walked in.
“It’s my heart,” I said. I knew how they would respond. In my family the fear of death seemed mixed up with the desire for death, thrown together into a big grab bag where you were never sure which one was the winning answer. Either way, death was a call to action. We were suddenly at our best.
My dad jumped out of bed and ran toward me. His face glowed like a ghost’s in the moonlight as he leaned down to put his ear against my chest. When he looked up, his gray eyes jumped out of his big black plastic glasses. Turn on the light, I wanted to say but did not. I was sure he could not hear a heartbeat.
“Well, it can’t hurt to take her in,” he said to my mom. That confirmed I was dying. In the dining room, the mottled green carpeting looked full of land mines that had to be avoided in the refracted moonlight pouring through the windows.
As we drove to the hospital, my arms looked greenish white, which made me feel even more sick. I was glad when the ER doctor finally put me in a bright white room with white sheets all around me, then listened to my heart while everyone watched. The way he hung there, so close and reassuring, made me relax. “Having a hard night, huh?” he said as he listened. I wanted to cry right then but did not know why. The brilliant light shining down on me, and the certainty of the doctor, and the cleanliness, made everything, all the questions about life and death, seem crystal clear and focused in that moment.
Finally, he looked back at my parents. “Her heart sounds okay,” he said, then turned back to me.
“But it hurts?” he asked again.
“It hurts when I breathe,” I said, “right here,” pointing to my heart in case he was listening in the wrong place.
“Well, there could be a slight bronchitis,” he said. “There is some wheezing. I’m going to put her on an antibiotic for five days and see if that helps.” At least he’d found something, which meant I would not get in trouble for wasting everyone’s time.
“Why does she get to pick the best lollipop?” my sister complained afterward.
“Because she’s sick,” my mom said as she patted me on the head, which felt soothing like rain.
The next time, the doctor said, “Her heart sounds fine.” I was embarrassed to have nothing wrong with me. The time after that, the doctor said, “I might hear a slight heart murmur, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Ah, I have one of those too.” My dad looked suddenly pleased, as if his murmur were proof of mine. We were growing desperate for an explanation. “Mine sort of comes and goes like hers does. The doctors can’t always hear it.”
“They can be genetic,” the doctor added, nodding absentmindedly.
Back at home, my mom tried to help by giving me a medical encyclopedia to read. “This is from my days as a medical technician,” she said proudly. “All the diseases I’ve dealt with are in there. Maybe you can find yours.” I saw pictures of people with giant boils, rashes, amputations, and that sort of thing. I could not find my particular disease and kept having more and more of what I thought were heart attacks.
My dad bought his own stethoscope at the base medical supply center so we could stop bothering the doctors at the ER. After that, when I woke them up, my dad would run for his stethoscope and put it on my little chest while I lay on the living room couch, enjoying the silence of his concentration.
“Hm, I’m not sure,” he would say, then concentrate and listen more.
There were so many things to be frightened of at night—the Rapture coming, jets crashing on you, bombs accidentally landing on your house. Sometimes parachuters suddenly fell from the sky or a man flew by in an ejection seat test. It seemed there was a daily invasion going on. I knew the worst one would be the Rapture, because what if I was left behind?
China Lake’s newspaper, the Rocketeer, had a cartoon one day about a low-flying jet snagging a highway sign, followed by the pilot getting chewed out by his captain in the next cartoon window. The week after the cartoon came out, my mom said while holding the Rocketeer, “Listen to this. Someone complained about the cartoon, saying it brought back memories of the time he saw a jet three feet off the ground in the rearview mirror of his truck. It was headed right for him but suddenly veered up, barely missing him.”
“What’s he complaining about?” my dad asked.
“He says it’s a serious problem,” my mom replied. “We shouldn’t joke about it.” In China Lake, you could report such incidents the way people report bad truck drivers, but only if you were able to write down the plane’s number as it flew into the speed of sound.
Luckily, though jets were loud and irritating, they never flew close enough to snag me.
In fact, the only real threat to me was my sister. For instance, sometimes I would start tapping my spoon on my emptied bowl of ice cream while sitting on my queen’s throne of a squishy white vinyl beanbag chair. “Stop tapping that,” Christine would say from her yellow throne. But I would tap again. Finally, she would rise up, the embodiment of vengeance and justice, and grab the spoon with a yank from my hand. When I began to cry, she would punch me in the arm. “I’ll kill you,” she would yell, pummeling my back while I curled up into a little ball and let the tension stream out.
Then I would scream, “Mo-o-om! Stine hit me! She’s hi-tt-ing me now!” The pummeling on my back made it hard to get out the words, but the world would gradually right itself again.
“Karen is being a brat! She deserved it,” my sister would argue before the judge, but my mom would inevitably yell at my sister, and then all was as it should be.
Sometimes, when my sister chased me around the house like a missile, I would run and hide in the bathroom, the most secure place in the house, and pray that Jesus would make the lock hold strong. But one time, Christine’s foot broke right through the door when she kicked it, so I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Mo-o-om! Help! Help! Help!” After my rescue, my dad had to patch the door with cardboard that he painted white, which took a long time and made everyone think about how awful my sister was. It stood there as evidence of our trauma, so we never talked about it after that. But they knew I was better than her.
Christine would say she was going to kill me, but she never did. We were not very efficient with our kill ratios. “Don’t say you’re going to kill your sister,” my mother complained. “Sometimes people really do kill people. It isn’t nice to say that lightly.” We took that to mean that we ought to take killing more seriously, like the military. We should say we were going to kill someone only when we really could.
Christine and I were slowly becoming U.S. Government kids. We began to roam a bit too far from home, out on the base ranges, which was technically illegal, but no one cared. My mom was not afraid of the soldiers with guns or the explosions; she was afraid of the desert. It had rattlesnakes, scorpions, heatstroke, and lockjaw. One man’s car ran out of gas on a dirt road, and though he stayed right there on that road as he was supposed to, no one found him until he was dead. Another man fell into a mine shaft and was bitten by a dozen or so rattlesnakes. Two girls flipped over in their Jeep in a flash flood and were trapped inside and drowned. Besides, there were cougars that came into people’s backyards and bobcats out at Salt Wells Propulsion Laboratory, where they once made the atom bomb. Forget about A-bombs—bobcats could jump down in your hair from the trees to scratch your eyes out.
My mom must have known that if she forced us to stay inside all day, we would spend all our time trying to kill each other. She was in a catch-22. So she let us roam. Rather than the TV, the desert was our babysitter and our teacher. We learned our lessons from it while my mom veered between worry and boredom at home. Luckily, the navy already had a plan for her, though she did not know it. It turned out they had been trying to figure out what to do with people like her—housewives—for decades before we arrived, looking for something to keep them distracted from the emptiness of the desert. They also needed the extra labor since it was hard to recruit people out there.
Ultimately, the navy settled on a solution: turn housewives into weaponeers.
Chapter Seven
Missile Mom
At first, it was hard to attract women to China Lake. Maybe it was the slot machines at the officers’ club; or the taxi to the brothels at the nearby mining town of Red Mountain; or the bikini-clad “pinup” girl in every issue of the Rocketeer, with captions like “Eyes are upon shapely Philippine actress Sonja.” The nearby defunct mining town of Red Mountain advertised itself as a “living ghost town”—complete with women dressed like Old West barmaids and rooms above the bar where you could take them for a little living history. According to the base’s first commander, the men who came to work at China Lake were “war-weary veterans, with nervous disorders and physical problems,” just back from the battlefields of World War II. It was not a place that attracted missile wives.
The navy claimed the Indian Wells Valley in 1943. At the time, it was home to the Desert Kawaiisu and Panamint Shoshone, though Sherman Burroughs, who discovered the land, told the navy there was “no one there.” The valley was full of mining tunnels but not many miners, the Gold Rush having ended decades before. The few miners who remained had turned into what we call “desert rats.” One was living in three sedans—one for a kitchen, another a parlor, and the third for his bedroom—on the lake bed. Another was known locally as the “Mad Doctor” in the struggling town of Crumville, later renamed Ridgecrest. People thought he was mad because he gave up his job as an LA physician to strike it rich in the d
esert, though there was little gold to be had in the Indian Wells Valley. Crumville was a frontier town full of missionaries, saloons, brothels, homesteaders, and gunplay, with about one hundred people.
In its early years, the base was half war town and half Wild West.
But base commander Sherman Burroughs had bigger plans. He wanted a permanent research facility to rival Hitler’s military base on the Baltic Sea, where engineers developed the V-1 and V-2 missiles that rained down on London in the Blitz. China Lake, Burroughs declared, should be “an American Peenemünde . . . a place where nobody knew what the hell was going on.” There would be, Burroughs said, “a huge laboratory wherein men and arms would be perfected for winning this war and for safe-guarding our national integrity in the future.” He wanted perfect men and perfect missiles. Today, a giant white “B” still hovers on a hill overlooking the town, commemorating Burroughs as our founder.
Burroughs’s only problem was women. Unlike sailors, who had no choice where they were sent, scientists would not permanently move to the desert without their wives. So China Lake was forced to clean up its image and look “safe” enough for women. First, the navy shut down the base casinos and the shuttle to Red Mountain. A short promotional film was made of the slot machines being run over by bulldozers, guaranteeing they would not miraculously reappear. Prospective employee families could watch this video, which lauded the “family friendly” environment of China Lake.
Next, they went after the brothels. In a 1952 memo sent to all base personnel, Captain Walter Vieweg, China Lake’s commander at the time, wrote, “All service personnel are prohibited from patronizing, entering, or frequenting the Owl Café and Hotel, Helen’s Place (also known as ‘Goat Ranch’), Mamie’s Place (also known as ‘Hog Ranch’), and J and J rooms.” All houses of prostitution. Unfortunately, the memo had the opposite of its intended effect since it provided directions to each of these secret establishments. It was even posted on their doors, serving as an inadvertent advertisement. The first thing I noticed about this memo when I found it in the National Archives was the name Captain Vieweg, the namesake of my elementary school after Groves. I weirdly thought of second grade, prostitutes, and farm animals all at once. It didn’t sit well in my stomach.