March/April 2000

Discovering Hope in the Nevada Desert

by Joyce Hollyday
 

In 1991, when I was writing for Sojourners magazine, I was accorded a journalist's privilege. I toured the Nevada nuclear test site with a public relations officer from the Department of Energy (DOE). Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed that in January 1951 was the site of the first nuclear blast in Nevada, must be one of the eeriest places on earth. It is littered with relics of the above-ground nuclear tests of the Fifties. A black metal stairway in the middle of the desert goes nowhere. The entrance to an underground parking garage, carved out of the desert floor to test the effect of a nuclear blast on cars, yawns in the blazing sun. A bank vault stands alone, its concrete facade blown away. And on the horizon a bridge, its girders twisted and rusting.

A dirt road leads to Survival Town. A decaying brick house is all that remains of what a 1955 DOE handbook described with ironic precision as a boom town. Cars, school buses, food supplies, a power system, and firefighting equipment were all brought in to create the town, which on May 5, 1955, went up in the blast of a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb, exploded from a 500-foot tower 6,600 feet away. When I was in elementary school, I remember, I watched a family of mannequins who inhabited this town being blown away from the supper table in a civil defense film. I have an equally chilling memory of a forest of trees being blasted over like matchsticks.

DOE literature stated that each test costs from a few million to about $10 million, and preparation of a Ground Zero site takes eighteen months to two years. Vibrations from an average test can be felt up to twenty-five miles away. A network exists for contacting personnel in Las Vegas's tallest buildings, to ensure that no workers are on scaffolding or washing windows during a test. Miners within a fifty-mile radius are alerted as well. Yet it is all over in milliseconds.

A small sign on a pole, hand-lettered in red, with an arrow pointing to a Ground Zero site being prepared, read Floydada. Test names, all approved by DOE headquarters in Washington, are designed not to mean anything to anybody, said my guide. Test series have been named after cheeses, cars, cocktails, colors, nautical terms, tools, famous scientists, small mammals. The current series, my guide explained, was named after Western ghost towns and historical places. Floydada is a town in the Texas panhandle.

She ended our tour by taking me to the cafeteria in Area Twelve. A makeshift sign hung on the door. Written with a black marker on a styrofoam cafeteria tray and attached with masking tape, the sign read: Cafeteria closed 1600 hours. Evacuation. My guide was not at liberty to divulge the meaning of the sign, but it was all too obvious. Within twenty-four hours, there was going to be a nuclear test.

It was March 1991, the tenth year of organized Lenten protests at the test site. Desert Storm had just been unleashed against the people of Iraq after being prepared here in the Nevada desert. On March 8, the day after my tour, I joined a large throng of peaceful people who crossed the white line and were arrested. After our release, we returned to Las Vegas. At 1:08 in the afternoon, as we were finishing lunch, we received word that a nuclear weapon had just been exploded at the test site. It was a ten-kiloton bomb buried 1,100 feet in the ground. The explosion registered 3.8 on the Richter scale. Thirty-eight minutes after detonation, a crater 600 feet in diameter formed in the desert floor.

It was a solemn and sobering moment for the more than 500 people of peace from all over the country who were gathered there, buffeted first by the winds of Desert Storm and next by an explosion in a much closer desert.

And now we are back. Some are still here, some are brand new. It's been going on for over fifty years, the bombing and the protests, in one form or another.

It may seem insane to believe that peace is possible–that we could have a world without nuclear weapons–or at least naive. I am so glad to know so many people who are unwilling to accommodate to the so-called "sanity" of the world. I have been blessed to travel the country, and the world, to meet people who believe in the impossible. People fighting development on South Carolina's sea islands, marching on picket lines for the United Mine Workers in Virginia, doing war tax resistance in Massachusetts and anti-death penalty work in Georgia. Mothers in Detroit fighting gun violence for the sake of their children; people all over the country serving soup and ministering to people with AIDS and protecting the environment–and doing too many other things to mention here. I've helped carry toilets into the mayor's office in a demonstration for public toilets in Atlanta.

We never know what might come of our small efforts. I think of Fr. Roy Bourgeois, scrambling up a tree and blaring taped sermons by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador at soldiers at the School of the Americas. Last November, 12,000 people gathered to protest at the School of the Americas.

I think of friends in South Africa. I made my first visit there in the spring of 1988, back when that country was still very much in the stranglehold of the system of racial hatred known as apartheid. I went to South Africa at the invitation of church leaders there at a time when the church was under siege from the South African government. Church leaders were receiving death threats, and several had been arrested during a march a few weeks before.

On March 13, my first day in South Africa, St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town was overflowing with humanity. Three thousand people were packed into the aisles, the choir loft, the spaces around the pulpit. Police had set up roadblocks around the black townships outside the city to keep the young people away. An elderly woman sitting next to me smiled and said, "They'll be here."" And sure enough, just before the service began, they surged into the cathedral. Hundreds of young people electrified the air with their energy, flowing like a river of hope, dancing the freedom dance known as the toyi-toyi. The congregation rose, cheering, and then burst into the singing of freedom songs.

As police amassed outside, the preachers preached. They thundered their hope. Archbishop Desmond Tutu shouted to the brutal enforcers of apartheid, "You are not God, you are mortals. You have already lost. Come and join the winning side!""

Tutu's confidence seemed far distant from the truth of South Africa on that day in 1988. Since a state of emergency had been imposed in June 1986, 30,000 people had been detained by the police, 10,000 of them children. Torture and assassination were routine state policy. The townships were under military occupation.

Military eyes peered constantly from the tower that rose above the township of Duncan Village, outside East London. The eyes were aided at night by powerful floodlights that could search out activity in any corner. I arrived in the early afternoon and was greeted by Jam-Jam, a young man active in the freedom struggle.

We walked unhindered for almost an hour. Then a casspir–a huge armored personnel carrier–appeared on the horizon and lumbered toward us. Eight members of the South African Defense Forces, pointing rifles, surrounded us and ordered us to the military strong point."

We were escorted in the direction of the tower, taken past rows of razor wire that surrounded the military headquarters, and ushered into an interrogation room. A member of the security police arrived and interrogated me, warning me that it was illegal for a white person to be in a black area, and against the law under the state of emergency to take pictures. Then he turned to Jam-Jam. Shaking his finger and uttering stern and threatening warnings, he said, "Didn't you just get out?"" He was referring to Jam-Jam's recent release from ten months in detention, where he was kept in a cold cell, fed cornmeal infested with worms, and tortured. He finished with the threat that Jam-Jam would be back in soon if he didn't give up his subversive activities."

I will never forget what happened then. Jam-Jam's only response to the threats was to reach calmly into his back pocket and take out his small New Testament. Putting it in front of the face of the officer's face, he said simply, "Sir, I am a Christian."" A brief moment of silence descended as the arrogance of evil met the quiet power of the gospel.

I urge us not to underestimate the power of that which gives us our conviction. Not to underestimate the power of the good news, whatever religious tradition it comes from, for you to change the world.

As I traveled throughout South Africa that first time, I asked virtually everyone I met if they thought apartheid would end in their lifetime. Everyone said no. One elderly woman said, "Not in my lifetime. Probably not in my children's lifetime. Maybe in their children's.""

The only exception to this typical response came from a ten-year-old boy in the township of Mamelodi, outside Pretoria. I asked him if he thought that his children would get to grow up without apartheid. He got a determined look on his face, raised his fist, and said, "I will see to it.""

And see to it he did–along with hundreds of thousands of other South Africans. Apartheid has been declared illegal, and Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa. I returned in 1997 to spend six weeks observing the astounding work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The country that at one time was arguably the most divided and violent on the globe is now a beacon of hope as it works toward healing and reconciliation. Nothing is impossible with God–as long as there are willing vessels to carry out God's work.

This is not easy work, and sometimes hope is hard to find. Lent of 1991 was a time in my own life that seemed hopeless. On Ash Wednesday, the allied forces in the Persian Gulf bombed the Amariya shelter in Baghdad, killing hundreds of Iraqi women and children. That same night, a malfunctioning civil defense siren wailed eerily over Washington, sending the city into a panic about a terrorist attack. I stayed awake late into the night, realizing that such terror was a real and regular part of life for the children of Baghdad. I was kept awake by other sirens as well sirens of police cars or ambulances, sounds of a drug raid or another shooting in the neighborhood.

My neighborhood was indeed a war zone. In the span of a few months, three teenagers were killed on its streets–one stabbed, two shot. One had been in the Sojourners day care center as a child, and all three had participated in our after-school program. The world was not at all the way I wanted it to be. Too many children were dying–in Washington as well as Baghdad. I decided to keep a fast during Lent, as many of us did that year. I didn't know what else to do to keep from lapsing into despair.

The fast brought me a sharpness of vision, a feeling of looking at the world differently, and a deepened sense of the presence of God. When my physical strength gave out, the assurance of God's sustenance took powerful hold. But still I didn't feel hope.

I had to go to the desert to find it. In the third week of Lent, I came back here. After our public witness, I went to a spot where there was just me, and the gravelly sand, and an occasional Joshua tree with spiny branches outstretched like arms toward God. There, as other pilgrims to the desert had done for centuries, I fell to my knees and discovered hope.

I recalled the words of our gentle God, from the book of Isaiah: "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert."" At that moment, I had the thought that perhaps the rivers appear in dry deserts when enough of us have been moved by the earth's pain to weep, to add our ounce of compassion to what may become a mighty torrent of loving hope.

As I knelt in the sand, photographs came to mind–pictures that had been shown to me a few days before by missionary friends just returned from three years in Laos. These friends showed me seedlings growing in the casings of bombs that were dropped in the war that ravaged Southeast Asia. And they showed me other bomb casings transformed into prosthetic limbs for children to replace legs blown off by landmines. Swords hammered into plowshares. The world transformed. A little bit at a time.

God needs people, and congregations, and nations, to be vessels of transformation, in a world dying for our love and our hope. Can God count on you?