I learned to fly at a small airport in a small town. This was in 1988, four years after the release of Phillip Kaufman’s movie The Right Stuff, and it’s beautifully-filmed telling of (among other things) hypersonic flight test operations in the Mojave desert during the 1950s. I was the lone female in a loose cohort of six, the other five high school friends the same age as me who had been smitten to some degree with the film. We all wanted to fly professionally, one the new F-16 for the Air Force, another F-18s for the Marines, some for the airlines, and I wanted to be a bush pilot, flying across Africa like Beryl Markham. Our instructor, rumored to have been an Air America pilot who had spent the year I was born landing Caribous up the sides of hills in Southeast Asia before returning to instruct F4 pilots headed to war. He was a real stick and rudder man, and was more than happy to indulge us with his wisdom: our lessons included not only aerobatics and operations at unimproved fields (no kidding, sometimes they were pastures or the levee roads between crops) but also the three simulated in-flight emergencies per flight that were the hallmark of military training during his era.
Best of all were the weekends, when we would rent every craft we could get our hands on for a ‘road trip’. Usually it would be out to Soda Lake, where we would land on a dirt road and the guys would take turns practicing aerobatics over the alkali flat before we headed over to California Valley for burgers and curly fries. But sometimes when we were flush we would depart – from the hangar used to launch Lindberg for Paris in the film the Spirit of Saint Louis no less – and fly due east to Mojave Valley, the end-of-the-earth site of so much aviation history: Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the X-1; flights in the X-15 that Bob White (and eight others) piloted past Mach 6 to fifty miles above the earth; and the landing trials of it’s descendant, the Space Shuttle program. It was a heady time to be in aviation: the Rutan brothers were pioneering the modern ‘homebuilt’ moment with their swept-wing rear-propeller VariEze; the Reno Air Races were still small enough that you could participate without major sponsors; and America’s manned space flight program was ‘back in business’ after a two-year hiatus. This energy, both military and civilian, seemed focussed in this hot and dusty valley between Bakersfield and Barstow, and we were always eager to take a drink.
We would leave early in the morning, flying in loose formation, the green of the coast range, Central Valley and lower Sierras sharply transitioning to desert austerity just east of Tehachapi. The budding fighter pilots among us would descend, the rest of us close behind, and we would spend the next half an hour or so exploring the hills and alluvial fans that bordered the Most Holy of Airspace in as close to nap-of-the-earth flying as regulations would allow. Miles of tan sand, mottled grey with dried sagebrush, passed below our wings as we explored the long valleys, all the time maintaining the mandated five hundred feet from any person or man-made object, and with our throttles at red line to trade airspeed for altitude in the event of an unexpected downdraft or taller-than-usual joshua tree. During these flights it was easy for us to imagine being part of aviation history, the boys as test pilots born to push the envelope, me in the footsteps of air race pilot Jackie Cochran or adventurer Pancho Barnes. Once low on fuel we would head west to Rosamond or Mojave for a top-off and lunch before heading west back to the coast. It was this enthusiasm I had caught a whiff of two weeks before, and I was eager for another dose.
First another stop. I drove south through the Salinas Valley, windows down so I could bask in the 90-ish degree air, the cement highway resonating a reassuring tha-thunk tha-thunk as miles of cultivated crops, vineyards, oilfields and the dried open grasslands of military reservations passed around me. I met my college friend Esther* at her house, and we went out to get me a much-needed mani-pedi. Somehow, as we relaxed in the salon chairs, conversation turned to our experiences as military wives, something we had never really talked about before. Her husband had been a reservist based out of the Army Camp just north of her town, and had been called up during the surge. It had been a hardship for them in many ways. First, his active-duty allowance, even with hazardous-duty pay, was nowhere near his civilian salary. With two young boys and one caregiver away, she had to reduce her work hours, further adding to the financial hardship. Her children missed their father horribly and would sometimes act out as a result; military communities recognize this and have created programs to help children during deployments, but her civilian community did not provide the same support. They barely made it through his fifteen-month deployment and what was to come.
Shortly after arriving in-country, her husband had begun experiencing strong headaches. Visits to the doc did not help, while they did provide pain meds they were unable to determine the cause. Shortly after his return a vessel burst near his brain stem. In a few short hours Esther went from happy spouse adjusting to her husbands return to a late night airlift to a San Fransisco trauma center, agonizing days outside the ER, OR and ICU waiting as top neurosurgeons worked to stabilize him, and the dreaded ‘you may have to make a decision’ conversation while critical X-rays were being examined. I have often thought I had it ‘easy’, no wartime deployments, no communications blackouts after something had ‘gone wrong’, no guys coming home broken or worse. As awful as it was, mine was an unexpected knock on the door in the middle of the night, and her tale of navigating civilian and VA medical care and reimbursement systems have only reaffirmed this perception. Fortunately they were able to contain and repair the damage, her insurance was able to cover his care, and after months of treatment and a year of rehab he was home and back to work, though slightly different than before.
After a nice lunch and picking up her boys at school, I was back on the road, this time east on Highway 46. This road is known (at least locally) as a great place for scoping out folds, fissures, and other visible evidence of the San Andreas fault. It is also the road on which James Dean met his demise. So off I went, with a plan to get photos of both. But I had forgotten it had been a while since I had been to the area. My favorite gully was now fenced off (with cattle grinning from it’s banks), and my favorite crest of road, in the past lumpy with repairs due to the constant movement of the earth, was now the cleanly paved-over entryway to a hazardous waste facility. (Seriously.) I did snap a pic at the marker near the intersection where James Dean’s speeding Spyder collided with Donald Turnupseed’s sedan as the latter attempted a turn. I smiled as I drove through the next range, remembering the conspiracy theories that arose in the early 1980s when a mysterious object** was swarmed by DOD personnel who cordoned off the area within minutes of it’s collision with a local rancher’s fields. (One rumor was that when said rancher asked after his cattle, a suit wrote him a check for the entire herd on the spot and advised that any who wandered back were his to keep.)
The next day began at Mojave airport. I was not the only one caught in her web; I shared the restaurant with a family from Poland, the father and daughter clearly enthralled with the flightily and artifacts adorning the diner’s walls. During our late breakfast we were treated to the departure of a large Voyager-like glider with an impressive climb ratio. After the meal, I crossed the parking lot to read three lonely plaques. Much to my surprise, just past the stand of thirsty pink oleander behind them there was a small memorial park. One side was well-groomed, with cement walkways lined with desert stones, a green lawn, a ramped portico with markers commemorating significant milestones (and also those lost) during recent commercial space flight efforts, and a windowed display containing one-fifth-scale replicas of Voyager and Space Ship One. The other half of the space was… a community garden! I counted seventeen four-by-eight plots in varying stages of cultivation, a surveyors stick with a name in loopy cursive at one corner of each, a handful sparsely sheltered by young fruit trees. What a beautiful tribute, I thought, bringing the community together to cultivate flowers, tomatoes, peppers, squash and could that be… butter lettuce? in an area set aside to remember the fallen. I wandered through the rows, alternating my attention between the earth and the little blue plane practicing a routine in the aerobatic box above me.
Then the promised land: Edwards Air Force Base. There is a low hill a few miles inside the north gate where you can see for miles. I pulled off, a worn track in the dirt clear evidence I was not the first with this idea, and took it all in. Miles of dirty cream lakebed stretched before me, in a crescent to the east and south lined with low buildings and an air of secrecy. There was the compass rose, four thousand feet wide, it’s elongated loop visible over NASA’s test flight facility (if you look closely in the photo you can see it). And past it, the long straight scratch of runway, thirty-nine thousand feet of it, where the Space Shuttles alighted after more than half their flights to space. Down at the paved runways, what looks like Hornets, Eagles and Raptors scream into the sky, perhaps on patrol or perhaps to support training up in the ranges. Jet fuel, desert dust and wide blue sky, nothing smells like it. Being here, with this hallowed dirt under my feet, it was easy to remember the innocence, the joy, the camaraderie, back when flying was fresh, and new, and fun; how it opened up the world for me, made it seem like anything was possible. Somehow over the last few years, with the habits of daily routine, this had been lost and my world had gotten smaller.
After a quick stop at the Base Exchange (when did airmen get so young???) it was Air Museum Time. The museum at Edwards is smaller than you would expect, but oh! So Much History! Inside there are actual prototypes (and some replicas) of both well-know and obscure aerodynamic test programs, mock-ups of historical cockpits (soooo analog!), and the standard suits (flight and space) and other memorabilia you normally see in these places. They also have some great displays and dioramas explaining the lake’s geology, topography, flora and fauna, and honoring specific historic flights. And on the wall just before the exit there are framed handprints from many famous pilots and ‘star voyagers’ that helped create aviation as we know it today. Outside, standing proud in wind so strong it causes bent over weeds to wear an arc in the earth, are a dozen or so planes: an A-10, an SR-71, a P-51 replica, an A-7 and others. They even have helicopters, a Sea King done up in Navy livery, and a H-34 (military version of the -58) that, when I looked at the markings closely, had blades that were manufactured before I was born! If I was a dog, my tail would have be wagging big time!