Big Sur is one of the wildest, most spectacular coasts in the world. It runs some eighty miles down the edge of California from Carmel to San Luis Obispo. There are no power lines for much of its length. I lived in a tent pitched on a south facing slope twenty-three hundred feet above the sea, through all seasons of Big Sur mediterranean climate.
It sounds idyllic, and it was. But violating this chastity of wildness were flights of experimental aircraft and things that might not be so easily identified as aircraft flying low in the dark, so low I could see the heads of the crews bathed in the red glow of flight decks. One of these craft, I know now, was a prototype of the B-1 bomber, but I will never forget that night when the strange whoosh of its engines jerked me from sleep, and I gazed in horrified fascination at the bizarre shape skimming the moutain at treetop level. In daylight hours B-52’s patrolled high overhead, and sometimes the shriek of fighter bombers – planes with tail configurations even a commercial airline captain could not identify – would ricochet off the sea and reverberate against the cliffs.
I got to know the regulars among the pilots. We developed a strange, waving acquaintance, an eerie well-wishing between people dedicated to opposite ends and means. They knew I was a nun from my tunic and my location; I knew they carried nuclear weapons.
maggie ross