Riding Rockets

He then called for my mom to start the car. I was so proud of my dad. How many other fathers could do roadside maintenance like this in the middle of the desert? And my dad was doing it on crutches and braces.

As pride swelled my soul, gas began to squirt from the output line of the pump and spray across the hot engine. A vapor of fuel immediately enveloped us. With a gratifying grunt my dad proclaimed, “The fuel pump’s okay.” As he was stating the obvious, I noted a blue spark coming from the distributor wire and flashing to the steel of the engine block. It made atick, tick, tick sound. I was just about to comment on this spark when an explosion flashed under the hood. KA-BOOM! The fuel vapor had combined with the surrounding air to form an explosive pocket. The spark from the disconnected distributor wire had provided an ignition source. We had just become all too intimate participants in the first test of a fuel-air weapon. Four decades later, the air force would develop just such a weapon for use against terrorists hiding in caves. The press ballyhooed the device.Nothing like it has ever been developed, they crowed. Not exactly. Let history now show my dad was the first to test such a weapon. He did it under the hood of a 1956 Pontiac station wagon at the Teec Nos Pos trading post in northwest New Mexico on June 14, 1963. It worked.

My brothers and I stumbled backward with blasted eardrums and flash-blinded eyes. The smell of burned hair wafted in the breeze. My dad, unable to retreat because of his braces, had fallen straight backward like a cleanly felled tree. He was now a cartoon character with a blackened face and the few remaining hairs on his bald pate burned to cinders. The engine block was on fire. My mom worked furiously to get my youngest brothers and sister and the dogs away from the burning car.

On the trading post porch, the previously lethargic dogs were on their feet barking madly. And the response of the Indians? They roared with laughter. I mean fall-on-the-floor, breath-stealing, tear-welling laughter. Jabbering in their native tongue they pointed at the white man’s folly as if it were a free fireworks show (which it was) and laughed and laughed and laughed.

My dad finally recovered enough to hear the laughter and understand its source. He rolled onto his stomach and made a valiant attempt to crawl to the nearest Indian, no doubt to kill him with his bare hands. John Wayne, leading a silver screen cavalry charge, had never looked as fierce. Thank God, at that moment, Dad couldn’t walk for he certainly would have ended up in prison for manslaughter. Finally, he braced himself on one forearm, shot out an upraised middle finger, and roared, “Shove it up your ass, you bastards!” Even the great cry of “balls” didn’t fit this affront.

Over the barking dogs I again heard my mom’s plaintive cry, “Hugh, not in front of the children.”

Even near-death experiences like this did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for family trips into the great emptiness of New Mexico. It was an emptiness that pulled the sky closer. I could climbthrough the clouds and sit on a mountain peak and look down and imagine I was in a jet skimming over the white. I would lie in a meadow and watch thunderstorms build over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and dream of someday soaring between the canyons of vapor.

But it was the New Mexican night skies that most captured my imagination. I needed only to step into my backyard to be in space. Unlike the light-polluted, haze-shrouded heavens that had domed our previous homes, Albuquerque’s sky was dry and stygian in its blackness. On one occasion, my grandmother visiting from New York City stood with me looking at the night sky and commented, “You won’t be able to see any stars tonight, Mike. It’s cloudy.”

I was baffled by her comment since to my eye the sky was spotlessly clear. “Grandma,” I had said, “there are no clouds. It’s clear.”

“Oh, Mike, sure there are…a long one that goes clear across the sky.” And her hand swept from horizon to horizon. Then I realized she was referring to the Milky Way. The edge view of our galaxy was a fog of stars, a “cloud” to the unpracticed observer.

My dad taught me how to take time exposures of the night sky. I would set one of his cameras in the desert and open its aperture and let the turn of the Earth trace the starlight onto film. Later, with the developed photos in hand, I would marvel at the circles of varying brightness and color the stars had inscribed about Polaris. Occasionally I would catch the streak of a shooting star, a recording that would excite me as much as if I had found buried treasure.