The Mirror

Kirkland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 1977
My friend had just gotten her driver’s liscense and she had borrowed her mother’s car. We were ditching school so we had to be careful where we went; in those days police approached teenagers out and about when school was in session. So Karen and I did what most young people did in these circumstances, we cruised the country side. Sometimes we went into the beautiful Sandia mountains that dominate Albuquerque’s eastern skyline, and sometimes we went to the ranches that dominated the Rio Grande river to the north (now it is a town of its own called Rio Rancho). It was only a matter of time and opportunity before we thought to explore the Kirkland Air Force Base.
Our country’s idea of security was very different in the Seventies, and a person could get well into a military base before special identification was required. But this was also the home of the Atomic Museum, and Sandia Laboratories, where parts of nuclear bombs are made. I do not know what was going on in our minds this day but we gave ourselves a goal…a dare really; we decided to see just how far into the base we could go before we were stopped.
The military base was enormous. Looking now at Google maps, one can see how the area south of Albquerque is developed with dirt roads that dead end in the desert and great complexes of barracks and buildings. We made our way, and when we came to a check point we explained that we were meeting our father. To our amazement, this worked every time, and never once did anyone ask for our father’s name. Since our goal was to see how far south we could get, we did not really pay attention to where we were going and soon we found ourselves out of sight of any structure and heading toward the Mazano stretch of mountains. The dirt road was not wide enough to turn arournd, so with no other choice, we continued on, happy with our incredible luck and success, but in all honesty quite bored. And then we saw it, in the distance.
It was a small twinkling of light on one of the foothills in front of us. We guessed it was the window of a stucture of some kind, but as we drove closer we soon realized that it could not be, unless the entire building was a window; the light was just too intense. As we approached the foothills and began climbing we could see that there were edges to the brightness and after a few more minutes we could make out that this was a giant mirror, the size of maybe four billboards, tilted slightly up to the sky. The thing was beautiful in its own way; the surface was highly polished and even out here in the desert it looked fresh and new. This is where the road ended. Getting out, we could see that this mirror was mounted on a movable frame and there was a small locked shed behind it. Otherwise, there was nothing to mark this area. We speculated on what it might be for; maybe to guide satillites, we thought. Then we waved our arms in front of the giant mirror, wondering if that might be noticeable to a satillite.
From here we also had a wonderful view of Albuquerque. We had gained a little elevation and we could see almost the entire city. It was then that we noticed a jeep coming on the road towards us. We sighed – it had been nice but now we were busted. We weren’t scared, we would just tell them we got lost and be on our way; after all, it was them who had let us through. We were smiling and waving hello when the jeep pulled up, but I never got to see the if the two uniformed soldiers inside smiled back. From behind us exploded about a dozen men, screaming and waving weapons. Within a heart beat they had surrounded us and shouting, demanded that we lay on the ground.
These soldiers were serious – I could see by the look on their faces that they had not known what to expect, and they had thought that we could have been a real threat. But I could also see their relief after we convinced them that there were were other people beside us two teenage girls. We admitted that we were ditching school to cruise in her mother’s car, but we never told them our alterior motive. An officer explained to us that this mirror was highly sensitive, and very expensive, and if it had been active, it could have hurt us with mircowaves. The soldiers dissappeared back into the mountains and the jeep excorted off of the base with a warning to never return.
We felt genuinely sorry for the drama; just the thought of all these men crawling through the area, sneaking up on us like that…it was years later that I realized that they probably really enjoyed it.