On Being White

Let's start out with the most visually stunning thing I saw on Friday:  White Sands National Monument.

White Sands is 275 square miles of gypsum dunes - the largest on earth - at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in the Tularosa Basin.  The dunes are often 75 feet high and seem to go on nearly forever.  114 square miles of the area is contained within the national park; much of the rest is within the White Sands Missile Range by Holloman Air Force Base, which doesn't have a gift shop.  (More on missiles in a few minutes.)

While Aunt Susie and I were there, we were entertained by an airshow.  A small prop plane was diving around, flipping and turning and doing all sorts of tricks.  It looked like a balsa-wood toy plane from where we were sitting on top of a dune.  The plane was red and white, and against the blue sky and light sand, it was an incredible sight.  (The limitations of my camera prevent me from being able to share this with you.  Sorry!)

If you have been following my adventure, you'll know that I had a rather unpleasant experience with snow and ice on Interstate 80 last month.  The funny thing about White Sands is that the sand has built up on parts of the road with the same effect.  This is sand, not snow:

One interesting thing about White Sands:  it's only white sometime.  The first picture shows white sand, but most of the rest of the time we saw something slightly darker.

 

 

As I look at my pictures, I realize that the sand looks whiter in the photographs than it did while we were there.  Such are the vagueries of light.  Aunt Susie has been here several times, during different seasons and different times of day, and she said that this was the least white she'd seen the sands.

Which reinforced, in a way, an experience we had on our way to Alamogordo.

About a mile west of the national park, there were a bunch of traffic cones narrowing the highway to one lane.  This is not so uncommon, of course, but then I realized they were there not for construction but rather were guiding everyone off the road to what looked like a weigh station.

Except it wasn't a weigh station.

According to Aunt Susie, this is not particularly notable.  "Hon, you're really close to the border" she said, as if I had expressed surprise about seeing a grocery store.

We drove up to a very nice border patrol agent who peered in the Vue at my aunt and me, each of us looking very Caucasian, politely asked if we were both U.S. citizens, and when we answered in the affirmative said "have a nice day" (like he meant it) and we drove on.

It was as we encountered the checkpoint that I realized that the Vue has a bunch of bins (which comprise about ten percent of my worldly possessions) along with a blanket that was spread out in the back.  To me, such conditions might have reasonably raised suspicion but apparently we were white enough that it didn't.

This might not be fair.  After all, the agent concluded correctly that we weren't smuggling anyone or anything.  I'm sure we weren't giving off any suspicious vibes and the Vue sports an Indiana plate and an Obama bumper sticker.  These may be what could be referred to as mitigating factors.  The agent probably has a number of specific details that he is looking for and that I don't know - he's the professional, after all - and bins and blankets may not be among them.  (Perhaps if someone is smuggling people they'd try to be more clever?)

Still, Aunt Susie wondered aloud (for both of us) whether we would have had the same experience if we had presented with browner skin.  Of course, Aunt Susie and I are the kind of people who have these sorts of thoughts.

As is Uncle Terry.  He's a retired Methodist minister of the liberal sort, and has written a number of books.  In one of his books, Frankenstein and Miss America:  Who's Who and Who's Not, he does a little math.  Regardless of the specifics of one's conception and family situation, each person has two biological parents, who each have two biological parents, and so on; everyone has eight biological great-grandparents.  If you take this back 20 generations, we each have over 1 million ancestors; go back 30 generations and we each have over 1 billion.  The fact is that 30 generations ago (roughly the year 1250) there were only a half billion people on earth, so clearly there has been some overlapping and duplication going on, and that's his point:  "...going back only a few generations, we are directly related to almost everyone presently living in our own country..."  And even if that isn't 100% true, it's true enough to make a person frustrated about racial prejudice, even if one is of a race where one is generally on the privileged side.

End of sermon.

New topic: 

Having 300 days of sun each year makes you the perfect climate for a lot of industries.  When you combine that with extremely low population density, flat terrain and general lack of commercial interest in an area, you have the perfect place to test missiles and bombs.

And so they have.

The New Mexico Museum of Space History is just outside of Alamogordo, on the side of a mountain, and is a very good museum.  They have a lot of exhibits inside, of course, but also a number of outdoor exhibits.  One thing that we missed because we weren't paying close enough attention is the grave of HAM, the first Astrochimp.  But I did get this picture of an exhibit in the little guy's honor:

HAM (Holloman Aero Med), the first Astrochimp

The primary focus of the museum is rockets.  Rockets, of course, are the basis for space flight.  We encountered a very knowledgeable, friendly and interesting volunteer named Viggy who spent his career (first in the U.S. Army, then at Raytheon) working on the HAWK missile.

Viggy with a HAWK over his left shoulder

Viggy (a nickname he was given in high school in Connecticut by someone who had trouble pronouncing the French-Canadian name Vigneault) had never been away from New England when he joined the Army and was sent to Fort Bliss (El Paso) for electronics training.  (Viggy still has a Hartford accent despite having lived in the southwest for most of his life.)  He started working with the HAWK missile when it was in its infancy and spent the last 19 of his 20 years in the Army on that program.  After leaving the service he worked for 11 years at Raytheon, servicing HAWKs.  When he retired from Raytheon, rather than a watch they gave him this trophy which he had with him at the museum:

But Viggy had a broader knowledge of history than just the HAWK.  For instance, he told us about Werner Von Braun, one of the German rocket scientists who surrendered to the Americans in World War II.  He was smuggled into the U.S. by the U.S. government and began work on the V2 rocket, among other things.  When he wanted to become a U.S. citizen, there was no history of his legally entering the country since, in fact, he had not legally entered the country.  So from Fort Bliss the government took him and his family to near the Mexican border in El Paso.  They walked over to Juarez and walked back in, establishing a clean paper trail.

Another connection between the V2 rocket and Juarez was not quite so benign.  Turns out that the V2 didn't have much of a guidance system.  They were being test-fired (no bombs, of course) from White Sands until one of them landed in a cemetery in Juarez.  No amount of sweet-talking could persuade the folks in Juarez that this was okay, and that, according to Viggy, was the end of V2's being fired from White Sands.  HAWK is an acronym:  Homing All-the-Way Killer, and none of them ended up in Juarez since it had a radar guidance system.

[Apparently the Mexicans weren't the only people with concerns about the White Sands base.  There were ranchers on this land before World War II, and they turned it over to the federal government to build Holloman Air Force Base, the White Sands Proving Grounds, and McGregor Range.  After the war, the ranchers assumed they'd get it back but they assumed wrong.  A legal and political battle ensued, and the government ended up using its power of eminent domain to keep the land.  According to a display at the museum, "Many ranchers and their descendents have neither forgotten nor forgiven the federal government for what they believe was an unfair and unjust action."  Of course, as Aunt Susie pointed out, they weren't so concerned about taking the land from the Indians.  Yeah, that whole "good for the goose" thing is hard to keep straight.]

But back to Viggy for a minute.  If somebody hasn't already done this, someone needs to film him talking about his experiences.  He is the kind of person who makes history come alive.  I hadn't thought I'd find rockets interesting until I met him.  We easily forget that history is made by people, and it is those same people who make history unforgettable if we take the opportunity to listen to them.