Saturday, October 4, 1969

NUCLEAR ROCKET DEVELOPMENT STATION, JACKASS FLATS, NEVADA

A smell of burning came on the breeze off the desert and mixed with the test rig’s faint stench of oil and paint. The scents were unearthly, as if York had been transported away from Nevada.

I remember reading that moondust smells like this, she thought. Of burning, of ash, an autumn scent.

In 1969, Natalie York was twenty-one years old.

In Ben Priest’s Corvette they’d made the ninety-mile journey from Vegas to Jackass Flats in under an hour.

At the Flats, Mike Conlig was there to meet them and wave them through security. That late in the evening, the site was deserted save for a handful of security guys. When the three of them — York, Priest, and Petey, Priest’s son — climbed out of Ben’s Corvette, York noticed how the car was coated with dust and popped as it cooled.

Nevada was huge, empty, its topography complex and folded, cupped by misshapen hills. The sun was hanging over the western horizon, fat and red, and the day’s heat was leaching quickly out of the air. The ground was all but barren. York recognized salt-resistant shadscale and creosote bushes clinging here and there, and the occasional pocket of sagebrush. Good place to test out a nuclear rocket, York thought. But — my God — what soul-crushing desolation.

In bursts of quick jargon, Mike and Ben started discussing some aspect of the test results they’d been reviewing that day. If York had learned one skill in too many hours in college bars and common rooms — she was finishing up her own BS in geology at UCLA — it was how to tune out someone else’s specialty. So she let Mike and Ben talk themselves out and walked a little way away from them.

Ben Priest’s son Petey, at ten, was a lanky framework of muscle and energy; he ran ahead of the others, his blond hair a shining flag in the last of the daylight.

The test site was laid out as a rectangle confined by roads to the south and rail tracks to the north. They were walking west — away from the control buildings, where the car was parked — toward the static test site, Engine Test Facility One.

The test station was cupped in an immense dip in the land delimited by two great fault blocks: the Colorado Plateau and Wasatch Range to the east, the Sierra Nevada range to the west. The station — with its isolated test stands and bits of rail track and handful of shabby tar-paper shacks — looked overwhelmed by the echoing geology of the desert, reduced to something shabby, trivial.