Blue Sky Dream (6 page)

A similar brochure published in the mid-1960s offered data even more compelling: “People here feel more fit because they live more healthful lives,” ran the copy, “and the average youngster is a few inches taller and a few pounds heavier than his counterpart in most other sections” of the country.

A
s a child, Wernher von Braun is said to have been possessed by the planets from the moment he first looked through a telescope.
The telescope was given to him when he was eight by his mother, a baroness (the re-imaginer of America’s middle class was born of German nobility). The child Wernher von Braun came of age not long after the close of that first experiment of technological mass destruction, the First World War, and when, sometime around puberty, he read Hermann Oberth’s
The Rocket into Interplanetary Space
, the boy found more than numbers. He found Oberth’s suggestion, for example, that a nation’s rulers might want to use immense, orbiting mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto an enemy’s crops and cities, scorching them away like ants under a magnifying glass. Soon the teenager was setting off simple rockets outside of Berlin.

At age twenty Wernher von Braun met his most important mentor, General Walter Dornberger, who, in his plan to re-arm Germany, longed for a manned “boost-glide bomber” that could slip in and out of space, raining hellfire at will. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, von Braun was told, were designed to quash German arms production—but those terms neglected to mention space rockets. They said nothing about gaining the ultimate high ground. General Dornberger and the German Army became Wernher von Braun’s customers, and then, within five years, so did Adolf Hitler.

Much later, Wernher von Braun would say to America that any man who wanted to create a space rocket in the Germany of that era had little choice but to belong to the Nazi Party, that this is why he had been a registered Nazi. He would claim that he took money from the Nazi State early on thinking that “Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin mustache.” He would admit he saw Nazi guards forcing prisoners to build his rocket under gruesome conditions, and that he had heard some who resisted were executed. He would assure, however, that he “never ceased to be ashamed of the fact that even in a battered and gutted Germany struggling for survival such an outrage could have developed.”

General Walter Dornberger, who headed the V-2 project, remembered different emotions. He remembered that Hitler had
dreamed in his sleep that rockets would never be the weapons of terror Germany needed, and that the Führer considered this dream “infallible.” Dornberger remembered how he and Wernher von Braun caused Hitler to dream differently. At noon on October 3, 1942, on a day when “the arch of a clear, cloudless sky extended over Northern Germany,” Dornberger recalled standing with “Dr. von Braun” and various of Hitler’s brass, watching the first successful firing of the V-2 “vengeance weapon.” As the rocket “raced away at a speed of over 3000 mph,” at the sight of that “tiny dot glittering dazzlingly white,” one of Hitler’s colonels wept with joy. And then, wrote the general, “like excited boys … everyone was shouting, laughing, leaping, dancing, and shaking hands.”

The best at selling believe every one of their pitches, no matter how irreconcilable when laid side by side. Indeed, if the salesman Wernher von Braun was deft with the rational construct, he never let himself be captive to it. No, cool reason must at some point be put aside if one is to build a space rocket product, America was told in
Space Travel: A History
, a book cowritten by von Braun, which ends by reminding that “Henry the Navigator would have been hard put had he been requested to justify his actions on a rational basis.”

Faith, as much or more than reason, caused space rockets to be made, Wernher von Braun instinctively knew. That clinging to faith probably allowed him to believe everything he ever said to every one of his potential customers. Erik Bergaust, a tireless promoter of early U.S. aerospace efforts, writes of his friend Wernher von Braun sitting by the campfire at night, lecturing his American companions on what God wants of men, on morality, on the “ethical laws” that are “enforced from upstairs.” There is, in another book, a picture of Wernher von Braun’s team standing smiling before the ruthless machine they have built for Hitler. Painted on the rocket is a winsome Girl in the Moon.

T
aken together, all of the teachings of Wernher von Braun add up to nothing coherent, and yet they have offered his blue sky tribe, people like my family, an approach to life. Taking his example, we have found it possible to hold many profoundly contradictory notions in our minds as long as a sensation of forward momentum could be felt in our lives. A space rocket to preserve us, a space rocket to change everything, the evolution of animal man, the revelation of God’s plan, the Girl in the Moon on the weapon of vengeance—Wernher von Braun gave his tribe any number of ways to explain to ourselves why we naturally deserved the fruits of an economy commanded from above, our new lives of aerospace suburban gentility.

When, along with dozens of other Nazi rocket experts, Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger became America’s victory spoils, they dusted off visions of apocalypse for their new paymasters at the Pentagon. “I didn’t come to this country to lose the Third World War. I lost two,” Dornberger would tell the Air Force, still selling his hellfire raining space bomber. But it was von Braun’s genius to hook into the American mass imagination not with destruction fantasies but with an immigrant’s ode to his new country’s can-do spirit. He stroked the ego of “the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed.” We would assert our American exceptionalism with each Chesley Bonestell planet we visited. America would ride the optimism of its newly technocratic middle class into space and find even more optimism
out there.

What did I, eight years old, know of Wernher von Braun as I flew in my father’s rented Piper Cherokee in search of some shared story among the subdivisions below? I knew nothing specific, not even the name of Wernher von Braun. But I knew that on the television some mornings there was Walter Cronkite and a Mercury blastoff instead of cartoons, and I knew that my father was tied in some way to this, and that this might be why I lived in a place where people, like things in general, were always looking up.

“See the church there? The cross?” Yes, I saw it. “And over
there, those big letters, that’s Shopwell.” Yes, I saw our supermarket now. “There it is, Dave, there’s the house, juuuuuust about
right
below us.” Yes, I was happily relieved to say, I could see the house—our house, our station wagon parked out front, our cul-de-sac, our backyard. I could see my mother, too, a speck marking our spot in the pattern of the whole, waving to us in the sky.

TWO
 INVASION
 

T
hese are words my mother taught us for getting the attention of St. Anthony, who, she said, would guide us to whatever we were looking for but had not yet found. Hers was a perfect prayer for a blue sky family in the early 1960s, as colorfully casual as a tiki lantern, resistant to any doubt that we in our suburban frontier held the interest of heaven.

A crisis would develop. Mutterings, hard soles stepping hard somewhere in the back of the house, the
whooshing
sound of my father moving in his dark suit, moving with those quickened, long strides that sent us children edging into corners, up onto chairs, anywhere that was, as he would say to us, “
out
of the
WAY!
” My father’s keys were missing again. He was yanking open drawers and shoving hands between seat cushions. He was muttering, “For cripes
sake
.” He was late for Lockheed.

“It’s worked before. You just have to believe,” my mother would say, her voice upbeat. She would go to the sliding glass door, walk out onto the redwood deck, stand under the bamboo-thatched roof, move her lips in prayer just beyond my father’s vortex.

Soon enough someone, usually my mother, would be drawn to some unlikely spot, maybe to a clump of crabgrass near a Rainbird sprinkler. There would be the keys, waiting for my father’s exasperated swipe at them. After my father and his keys had disappeared in a puff of exhaust around the corner, headed in the direction of Lockheed, we children would move out of the corners of the house, would reclaim the empty spaces for ourselves, and all the best possibilities for the day would be there for us, as if by some small miracle.

S
ome evenings my father would bring home to me new images for the filling of empty spaces, pictures to hang in my bedroom next to the solar system, publicity photographs of Lockheed products. There were stubby-winged jets and fire-swathed rockets, satellites that hung in space like tinfoil dragonflies. And my favorite, the Polaris. “The most beautiful missiles ever fired,” a U.S. Navy Rear Admiral pronounced the nuclear-tipped A1X Polaris, having witnessed its successful submarine test on a summer day in 1960. The fully evolved, deployed Polaris, designed under the guidance of Wernher von Braun’s friend and fellow former Nazi, Wolfgang Noggerath, was capable of traveling 2,400 nautical miles in a few minutes and delivering, from its elusively mobile
launchpad, three separate warheads to a single target deep within the Soviet Union—facts no doubt beautiful to a nuclear warfare strategist. The Polaris was beautiful as well to a boy who thumbtacked its picture on his wall, a pure and universal shape if ever there was one, white and smooth, perfectly frozen above the convulsed ocean surface through which it had just burst. Lockheed always photographed its missiles headed up, never killing end down. As a child I didn’t wonder what the Polaris was
for
. Perhaps once launched it just stuck there in the solar system’s firmament like a dart in the ceiling. Maybe it metamorphosed into one of my father’s pretty satellites with the glittery solar panels. That the Polaris was so obviously the future exploding out of the sea seemed reason enough to create it.

My mother gave me her own pictures, Catholic holy cards, Virgin Mary visitations, saints aglow, Christ baring His Sacred Heart while floating up in the clouds. And so airfoils and angel wings, blastoffs and holy ascensions, Our hovering Lady of Fatima, her cloaked contour so
aerodynamic
—all of these images, my father’s and my mother’s—mingled in my child’s mind to form a coherent iconography. An empty space was not so hard a thing to fill up if you were determined to see in it what you wanted.

That, my mother and father will tell you, is how they remember their brand-new tract home in their brand-new subdivision: as a certain perfection of potentiality. Nowadays, when suburbia is often disparaged as a “crisis of place” cluttered with needless junk and diminished lives, it is worth considering that it was not suburbia’s
stuff
that drew people like my parents to such lands in the first place, but the emptiness. A removed emptiness, made safe and ordered and affordable. An up-to-date emptiness, made precisely for us.

“We never looked at a used house,” my father remembers of those days in the early 1960s when he and my mother went shopping for a home of their own in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. “A used house simply did not interest us.” Instead, they roved in search of balloons and bunting and the many billboards
advertising
Low Interest! No Money Down!
to military veterans like my father. They would follow the signs to the model homes standing in empty fields and tour the empty floor plans and leave with notes carefully made about square footage and closet space. “We shopped for a new house,” my father says, “the way you shopped for a car.”

Whenever I think of the house they bought and the development surrounding it, the earliest images that come to mind are of an ascetic barrenness to the streets, the lots, the rooms. The snapshots confirm it: There I am with my new friends around a picnic table in the backyard, shirtless boys with mouths full of birthday cake, in the background nothing but unplanted dirt, a stripe of redwood fence, stucco and open sky. That was the emptiness being chased by thousands of other young families to similar backyards in various raw corners of the nation.