5. Nuclear Family
A spring and a small creek had been buried in our yard when our subdivision was built. My father had seen it on an old topo map of the county, and calculated the coordinates. Crystal pure water had bubbled up out of the earth, bright with moving flecks of light, swathed in green moss and little ferns, somewhere to the left of where the asphalt for our driveway was eventually poured. Bulldozers had graded the top off of a low hill over where the Dombrowskis’ house now stood, dumped the fill in the Bakers’ yard and ours, cut down forty acres of woods, and channelled the water into a 24-inch concrete pipe that ran under the southern part of the development and emptied out in a dank culvert under Bucksville Road.
Things were hidden in the fill dirt that had leveled the neighborhood. When we dug in the back yard we would find little green plastic army men; Lilliputian GIs, helmeted and flack-jacketed, peering through the sights of machine guns, lobbing grenades, crouched with bazookas. Buried like dead bodies, but poised as though springing to action, eternally ready to kill. They had sharp edges down the sides where the plastic had leaked out of the molds; sometimes teeth marks, distorted or amputated limbs, from a dog or a teething baby. A foot flattened between new molars; an abdomen mangled by a sharp canine.
Our subdivision was called Norbrook Hills, named not only for the flattened hills and buried brook but also, cleverly, for the Naval Ordnance Research Center (NORC) across the highway, where our fathers worked. The GS-12’s and below, lab technicians, secretaries, high-level maintenance personnel, and lower-level research physicists and chemists lived in Norbrook Hills; adjacent to our neighborhood to the east was Norcrest Estates, which housed GS-13’s and above: PhD’s, engineers, Navy brass and upper-level civilian management.
The Naval Ordnance Research Center had been built at the tail end of World War II, which is to say the beginning of the Cold War, on 742 bucolic acres of woods, creeks, and farmland, with the mission of carrying out research in mines, explosives, torpedoes, surface-to-air missiles, and later the Polaris submarine-launched nuclear warhead. NORC had an active Employees’ Association which operated a golf course on the parklike grounds, a Film Society that showed movies on Friday nights, a glee club, a barbershop quartet, and a musical comedy theatrical group that sponsored an annual Talent Show and put on full productions of Broadway musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. While we rode our bikes, climbed trees, and played kickball and freeze tag at Norbrook Hills, across Westhaven Avenue our fathers calibrated detonators, tested explosives, and designed laser missile guidance systems in a secret city of hundreds of laboratories, machine shops, hypervelocity wind tunnels, subterranean munitions magazines, bombproof explosion chambers, high-gravity centrifuges, hazardous chemical storage facilities, hydroballistic tanks, shock simulators, free fall drop towers, and a mysterious structure known as the “Phoenix Building,” in which systems and components were subjected to nuclear weapons radiation simulation. (As Wikipedia now states: "Phoenix" undoubtedly refers to systems "rising from the ashes" after a nuclear explosion.”)
Of course we knew only fragments and shadows of this; most work done at NORC was classified and could never be spoken of. All was veiled in the serene smoothness of suburbia; red brick; shade trees; rolling green lawns. From the air it was an integrated ecosystem; houses; schools; shopping centers; the forges of war. What rained down death in Southeast Asia kept us all in penny loafers, Barbie dolls, and Schwinn two-wheelers with butterfly handlebars, but this connection was submerged, like the image of a familiar object refracted through murky water.
The fragments and shadows of our thought extended back through time as well as out through space. Dimly we understood that before NORC and Norbrook Hills the land had been farmland and second-growth successional forest; but beyond this our awareness petered out to mere wisps and murmurs of the time when the Piscataway nation thrived here amid the great Eastern old growth forest, oak trees too vast in diameter for three men to span with outstretched arms, white pines tall as ships’ masts, rivers and creeks well-traveled thoroughfares between populous towns surrounded by fields of corn, beans, squash, and tobacco, well-managed forests rich with deer, bear, rabbit, wild turkey, berries, nuts, wild greens and medicinal herbs, waterways abundant with bass, pike, perch, and freshwater shellfish.
No one told us that the Piscataway had received our ancestors graciously in 1608 and for a century tried mightily to coexist with them, to no avail, or that in 1623 Governor Francis Wyatt attacked and “putt many to the sworde,” and “burnt their Howses with a marvelous quantitie of corn.” We did not grasp how the English, competing with rats and mosquitos as the greatest disease vectors in epidemiological history, decimated populations wherever they laid their unwashed hands and exhaled their tainted breath; or how by 1700, worn down by disease, dirty politics, and wave after wave of homicidal settlers, most Piscataway fled west and then north, some joining fragments of refugee Lenape, Delaware, Susquehannock, some dispersing as far as present-day Detroit and Toronto, while those who remained had their identities submerged for centuries under the “one-drop” racial laws that defined them on the census rolls only as “colored.”
And so we had no grasp of the process, buried in the shadowy recesses of our suppressed and forgotten history, by which the great trees soon fell, the wolves ands lions were slaughtered or fled, the rivers were fouled and ran less clear, and steadily, relentlessly, the land was carved up and fenced in and paved over: “developed,” as they say. And now, three hundred years later, here we were, oblivious swarms of white children, lost in our eternal amnesiac present, our numbers burgeoning alarmingly in the post-war baby boom, riding our bikes on Piscataway land, climbing in Piscataway trees, and playing in Piscataway creeks, the blood of our genocidal forebears running in our small veins.
On Friday nights we would go to NORC to see a movie sponsored by the Employees’ Film Society in the spacious auditorium at the rear of the main building: The Sound of Music, The Pink Panther, With Six You Get Eggroll, Born Free; complete with Bugs Bunny or Tasmanian Devil cartoons, Army Corps of Engineers propaganda films about the wonders of hydroelectric power, and later a memorable Navy propaganda film about the perils of LSD. The four of us would cross Westhaven Avenue, walk down the long drive past the golf course and the fountain and the looming American flag, and enter the bronze and glass main doors into the cavernous front lobby. Then my brother and I would dash up the marble staircase with its smooth brass hand railings to the long second-story corridor that led to the theater.
This rather grand corridor was a gleaming gallery of maritime death, lined with long glass cases displaying missiles, mines, torpedos, photographic exhibits mapping the inner geography of battleships and submarines, and, to our great delight, a 1960’s-era interactive demonstration of the Polaris ballistic missile system wherein you could press a red button and “launch” the missile from a submarine deep in the ocean. Authentic recorded sound effects were triggered as the missile “burst” brilliantly up out of the water, followed by an arc of blinking red lights representing its “path” to the “target,” where a glorious booming “explosion” would ensue. Children would line up and jostle each other for the chance to press the red button and hear the soul-stirring “boom” before the first cartoon started.
Did we comprehend that this represented a 600 kiloton thermonuclear warhead a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, capable of raining down instantaneous death or prolonged excruciating torment on hundreds of thousands of civilians in a single shot?
We did not.
As it happens, instantaneous death and prolonged excruciating torment were not featured in the interactive display.
Once a year NORC had an “open house,” and Easter-Sunday-dressed families toured a cheery cherry-picked selection of offices, labs, and carefully crafted visual displays; unseen powers decided what we would see and what we would not see. I remember standing in the room where my father worked, staring at his gray metal desk, the beige and gray terrazzo flooring speckled like a sparrow’s egg, a large clock on the wall with a dark electrical cord trailing down, incomprehensible instruments and devices on gray metal shelves. The little piles of papers and objects on his desk seemed just like the little piles that my father would make on his workbench at home; like a field biologist tracking a pack rat or an oriole, I recognized the spirit in which he assembled and arranged small objects. But what he did with those objects we could not fathom; something to do with magnetism, he said; then lasers.
Technically, we knew, he was a physicist. In the stratified social world of NORC, hierarchically defined like all government agencies by GS-level, he was a lower-level physicist, a technician, a tinkerer, a kind of weapons-development handyman. For several years he worked on a project called DOOM (Deep Ocean Optical Measurement), designed to “measure to any depth in the ocean spectral attenuation coefficients from 380 to 560 millimicrons through an angular range from six to 92 degrees, and background illumination of both celestial and biological origin.” I have a picture of my father on a ship out on the open ocean, smiling and young, next to a shining sphere full of finely calibrated instruments designed to be lowered into the depths to measure the way light from stars and ghostlike bioluminescent creatures passed through the dark waters.
A booklet describing the project lists my father among eight men who are gratefully acknowledged for their significant contributions to DOOM.
In a way he enjoyed the work itself, the figuring and fashioning and making things work, the same way he enjoyed fiddling at his workbench at home, fixing the toaster or the vacuum cleaner, going to the hardware store, spending long hours browsing through the tools and parts and widgets, looking for just the right screw or clamp or hinge, fitting things together, filing them down, making them work, making them hum. But he hated to think about what it all meant so he didn’t.
The knowledge buried itself in the cells of his body, a slow-acting virus.
This buried knowledge was a constant background noise in our life, an unseen machine humming behind a concrete wall, a low-frequency buzz that never rested, so low that you never quite heard it but without knowing why you were never quite at peace.
I hear the sound of my father limping slowly down the darkened hall as I lie in bed, circling the house, locking doors. Hearing his heavy left foot drag along the floor. I didn’t realize he was limping at the time; it was just the familiar sound of my father’s tread, and it was not until later that my mother finally told me of the autoimmune disease attacking his nerves, unsheathing his myelin, attacking and retreating then attacking again. Like secret divers laying mines in a harbor, autoreactive lymphocytes moved silently through his body, cutting wires, disabling communication, disarming his spine, his legs, his hands, later his urethra, at last the speech center in his brain.
Inside, at the cellular level, silently, he fought his war.