Now that I am done concentrating, it wouldn’t hurt to tune in Jay Mohr Sports radio. I don’t follow sports, but loves me some Jay Mohr.
I counted the telephone poles, that was what I did subconsciously so that I would know sort of where I was in the grand geospatial realm of the test site. There were distant mountains for reference, but the reference was one-over-the-world, and not much good to pin down one’s position to within a few hundred meters. That is about how close I needed to know where I was to quell my comfort zone’s outcry. I was a 200-ish meter guy, so I did fancy. Most others were about ten mile to fifteen mile folks.
Even at 90 miles per hour something ‘white’ caught my eye to the left of my speeding Chuck Yaeger mobile. There just isn’t anything ‘white’ out here to speak of, so a thing that is ‘white’ caught my eye. I looked again, straining to confirm white, and I did. I saw two things white, white and fuzzy.
“Whoah, Nelly!” I coaxed as I maneuvered to bring my truck with its white-hot windshield to a stand down and turnabout. Well hell… I’ll just turn around at the west gate and watch for ‘white’ on the right side this time. It just takes too long to bring this beast back to hypo-speed and engage in a bearing-reversal solution; why quarrel with Sir Newton–right?
As the steel stallion whinnied to a cantor, I was put in mind of the time I got three speeding tickets in two weeks, and lost my driving privilege on the test site for a whole year. That happened near the main base camp Quick Silver, some sixty miles north of Reno, NV.
Quick Silver was the area of the test site from where all other white men feared to venture. That included the county sheriff, who routinely set up and picked on homebodies with paltry speeding citations: “Yeah, you’ll rule the world someday, you pogue mother fucker… one speeding ticket at time!”
Yeah so, breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law, yeah bro! I drove anyway. I drove for an entire year never venturing a millimeter over the speed limit. It was in that year that I came to really know the scape and score of the test site… I mean, there is so much more to see at 55 miles per hour, you know?!
I used a radar detector, a laser one that covered the County Sheriff’s speed gun bandwidth. I gave a fellow who was in trouble a ride one day when nobody else would. I mean this guy was going full-caliber desperate for ride of some 180 miles round-trip. For my insolence he turned me into management for using the detector.
That same fellow ‘lost’ his truck one day in the twilight zone. Truck just up and disappeared while he was checking some seismic sensors (too far up north). He had to walk some 15 miles across the ‘frying pan’ until a security patrol found him. Say he almost croaked. The worse thing for the poor fellow was, when they went to look for his truck… there it mysteriously sat, right where he had left it. Tanto’s land; Tanto’s Bermuda triangle in the desert. Don’t cross Tanto!
So Nelly is run down to 45 MPH going east now. I am counting poles and craning my neck to see fuzzy white. And I see it finally. There, at some 100 meters from the roadside is a lone telephone pole. In the cross timbers of the top, is a pile of sticks and twigs that formed a bowl. From the top of the bowl of branches are two white fuzzy heads. I cruised up closer and reveled in the spectacle that was two baby Red-Tailed hawk chicks, just days old, and yet already so big and fuzzy-white.
Daedalus and Icarus awaiting instruction from Mama-Hawk.
I did a slow circle around them and their nest. Two fuzzy white heads tracked my circular route around their stick bowl. They were big-headed and fuzzy; white and big-headed; magnificent and fuzzy. I marveled at them for moments. But… Mama-Hawk must be marveling too, and close by. I scanned about quickly. At near that moment Mama-Hawk flared her wings hard as she came to light on an adjacent, abandoned pole.
“You ain’t from around these parts, is you, white man?” was the look in her eye, and she belched forth an ominous and foreboding screech, challenging my resolve to meddle with her chicks. It was that same hawk screech that I had heard in every western movie I ever saw as a boy. “Advantage; Mama-Hawk” I conceded as I drove slowly from the stick bowl perched upon the peg, that abandoned pole, out in no white man’s land.
(My bro Roberto the Bobcat used to haunt one of my remote test stands. I have been less than ten feet away from him on one occasion… purely by accident, mind you. He liked my shade.)
geo sends (finalized in part II)
Featured image courtesy of DOE
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