Ellsworthian Dreams of Annihilation

When we were moving cows the other day, I was sitting on a neighbor's porch with the hired man and we saw a B-2 Stealth bomber make a graceful turn directly over the house we occupied. I remember saying, "That's not a sight people see every day, at least not to live to talk about." Though I am much more familiar with the predecessor of the B-2, the logically named B-1, such sights are not surprising in our area. My family's ranch is about 4 miles off the end of the runway of Ellsworth Air Force Base, the base that houses a fleet of the planes that did 90% of the bombing in Iraq. On stormy days like today, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between distant thunder and the afterburners of these "thunderbirds" as they lift off. They're running touch-and-go exercises right now, in fact. Whenever I see or hear them, I can't help but think of what these planes are designed to do, the death they entail.

Western South Dakota has long lived with the threat of military annihilation near at hand. During the Cold War, NIMBY principles established north-west South Dakota as the logical place to store over 150 functioning nuclear warheads. Though the warheads are now gone, the silos, like my dreams of their vast destructive power, remain. Not infrequently, I have dreams of nuclear destruction: Rapid City and the base in a mushroom cloud, we the bystanders left to watch and survive in the post-nuclear world. Equally vivid are dreams of a B-1 crashing in one of our fields. In these, this leviathan of the sky suddenly finds that the air will not support it, and it hurdles, slowly, reluctantly, but inevitably, toward the ground.

I would not describe such dreams as nightmares; though I am usually extremely nervous, it is never about fear of my own destruction. More accurately, I would describe my reaction as excitement: in the nuclear dreams, the excitement of a fresh start, knowing that whatever comes next is entirely new and untested, that I get to be there to see it unfold, and, above all, the knowledge that here, in this place, I have the resources to survive in such a world; in the crashing dreams, the excitement of having an event of worldwide significance take place here, in our very own backyard, to be the first human being to approach the wreckage, to look for survivors, but primarily, to know that finally, the eyes of the world will be pointed to this place and that for once, this place matters in the eyes of the world.

How much of these weird dreams are my own idiosyncratic personality is, in the end, irrelevant. I could not have them without this place, in these circumstances; at least to some extent, it is the place that has shaped the person that I am and not the other way around. And I am not the only thing that is different because of the military presence. Our dogs are terrified of thunder, but indifferent to B-1s. Our cows are amazingly docile even when a B-1 comes in for a landing no more than 1,000 feet up, louder than any Harley or NASCAR race.

The planes have changed all of us, affecting even my subconscious and sleeping thoughts. My dreams of their destruction are dreams of hope, hope in a return to a simple world where everything is once again important.