Chasing the Glory Excerpt

<< back

The sky is full of mystery -- stars, clouds, the movement of geese. But so is the land. Sometimes it's hard to figure out, just by looking, what on earth is going on down there.
One afternoon I flew over a particularly odd place in Southern Utah. It was a long mesa, a plateau that hung above the valley of Interstate 15 not far from St. George. From below it would have appeared just as an indent in the cliff, its curiosities hidden from the cars on the road the way a ham on the table is hidden from the cat. But from above it was a wide, flat bench with a track down the middle. The map called this place Hurricane Mesa.

The track occupied the center of the stone table. It was long and straight. It emerged full grown from a steel shed at the north end of the plateau, ran straight for about two miles, and vanished off the edge of the cliff.

I love seeing things like this, for which absolutely no rational explanation leaps to mind. It gives me latitude to invent.

I looked down. This was a rogue track; a Bermuda triangle of the railroads. Sometimes, late at night, the earth trembled. Whistles sounded in the distance. A four-engine unit train pouring black smoke and howling and pulling a hundred black cars loaded with Carbon County coal from the mines up by Price, Utah, emerged from that shed the way a chain of flags is pulled by a magician from someone's ear. The train, going full speed right out of the garage, rumbled down the two miles of track, snorting and bellowing and dusting the embankment with coal, and shot over the precipice at the end with a great roar of screaming engines; the train wreck of the century. Far below, in the peaceful villages of the red rock land, people would hear the distant clamor and stir uneasily in their sleep. But in the morning there would again be peace in Southern Utah, and a lid of official silence on rumors of a missing train.

I looked at the empty track. Probably not. Oh, well. Then something else caught my eye. It was a trailer. A dirt road wound over to it from an unknown access and made a circular driveway. It stood among pinon pines and junipers on light brown sandy soil by a cliff that dropped off 150 feet of sheer sandstone to a fall of gravel and stones and a wriggle of steep washes in which no rolling body would come to rest. But this trailer was not just NEAR the cliff. About a third of it stuck over the cliff, hanging out in the breeze.

I circled, looked carefully, and took photographs. It was no illusion -- this trailer was installed on a long slab of sandstone that leaned out from the cliff, but whoever put the trailer there was not content with living on the edge. He or she had to be over it. The entire area of the trailer that might be called the living room -- ten or fifteen feet of the thing -- hung out past the stone into space. The windows looked out at no shrubs, no yard, no ground at all -- just air. I assumed it was anchored at the grounded end, but I quickly populated it with guests at a cocktail party, who were all bunched as far as they could from those terrible windows for fear of tilting the whole thing and going for a short flight. The guests talked brightly about valleys, Kansas, and the reassuring values of religion, and left when they had the chance.

I liked these scenarios, but there is something compelling about reality. So eventually I found out about Hurricane Mesa. It turned out that I was pretty far from the truth. I hadn't thought strange enough. The track wasn't a phantom section of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was military. I should have known. Scratch something truly bizarre and it turns out to be painted olive drab. It was a track used for the testing of ejection seats.

You can't just climb out of a jet when it's coming apart at a thousand knots, so ejection seats must be designed to protect pilots from violent forces. Early ones weren't very good; at the beginning of the supersonic age pilots were almost as worried about being ejected as about being shot. So the track was built on Hurricane Mesa to test new designs.

"This was when they didn't have it down too pat," said Ward Wright, a sixty-seven-year-old native of Hurricane who worked as lead mechanic on the mesa for about a decade.

Wright had an interesting way of expressing things. The track was built in Utah, he said, because the Air Force was using a similar facility down at Edwards Air Force Base in California but it wasn't working out very well.

"I guess they had a major down there went down the track and was thrown up only about eight hundred feet and his chute didn't open,'' Wright said. "It just ruined him."

The Hurricane track was two miles long, and you could fire a rocket sled down it at up to 1,700 miles an hour. The normal speed was a more modest seven or eight hundred. When Wright worked on the Mesa during the fifties and early sixties, when Coleman Engineering of Culver City, California, ran the operation, he would travel all over the country ordering surplus rockets from military ordnance depots. He would adapt the rockets to his sled, and then the major plane manufacturers -- Convair, Republic, or others -- would bring ejection seats or whole fuselages up to the mesa and Wright would blast them down the track and see what happened.

At the end of the track was a water brake, a gradually deepening pool beneath the track that a scoop on the sled would dig into, throwing up a great cloud of spray. There the sled and fuselage assembly would stop, while whomever had just been launched from the seat would fly out over the cliff, making pacts with God.

It was fifteen hundred feet down to the rubble above the Virgin River, a gentle ride of several seconds if the chute opened. So I asked Wright who were the lucky folks who got to make the ride?

One was a life-sized mannequin, whose name was Hurricane Sam. But when one thinks about the others one must realize how different human attitudes were to animals in those days. Among the riders were chimpanzees who lived in big cages on the mesa. "Powerful animals, those chimpanzees," Wright said. "There are several chimpanzees buried up in those hills. Someday someone's going to dig one up and wonder."

The other passengers were bears.

The bears -- and the chimps -- would be sedated while they were strapped into the straitjackets and parachute harnesses in the ejection seat. But because it was important to monitor all their functions as they careened toward the edge, they would be wide awake by the time the rockets went off. Wright put it differently:

"At the time we were ready to fire,'' he said, "those bears were RATIONAL."

He did not say much about their sanity when they reached the ground after that engrossing ride. But at least once, he remembered, a bear retained some sense of reason through the chaos. When he alighted softly among the rocks by the grace of Uncle Sam's parachute, he got the hell out of that straitjacket and ran for it.

So that solved part of the mystery. But what about the trailer that hung over the edge?

That was a relatively recent installation.

"I helped put that on," said Mack J. Hall, also of Hurricane. "It's a restaurant. A kitchen, where the workers ate. We just poured a footing and put it on it. It's about fifty feet long, and about twenty feet of it hangs out. I guess it's pretty picturesque. At one time they wanted to put a glass bottom on it so you could look down while you ate."

This was better than I had imagined. This story was much more satisfying than anything I could have made up. What a pleasant break, sitting there with your hamburger, trying not to tap your feet too hard to the jukebox music, watching the bears fly by.

<< back