Borderlands Boy

Love, War and Peace in the Atomic Age

Ken Carpenter

• Editorial: Sunstone Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611395822
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Biografías de ciencias sociales

This lyrical, moving and intensely personal coming-of-age memoir is also a coming out story of a gay boy from a conservative family growing up in the U.S. Southwest in an era of political, social and cultural transformation. It is also an extended reflection on the importance of place, time, history and geography in shaping who we are and who we become. In post-World War II America, the specter of nuclear destruction and environmental crises, challenges to racism and women's inequality, the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution threaten to tear the country apart. Already struggling with what it means to be different and what kind of man to become, the author faces the ultimate moral test of courage and conscience when he graduates from college and is drafted to fight in Vietnam. How will he navigate these tumultuous years and what will he learn from his experiences? How can he survive, find love and a purpose in life? And what lessons are there in such a story for future generations in a world without borders?

Borderlands Boy

Love, War and Peace in the Atomic Age

Ken Carpenter

Dedication

This work is dedicated to three men of different generations

whose love has lighted my way and sustained me

over the years:

My late partner Greg Calvert

Our son Oscar Acosta Suazo

His son Nikai Guyton Acosta

Acknowledgements

This book was born out of my interactions with scores of extraordinary students at the University of New Mexico over the past twenty years who constantly probed and challenged me with their questions, class discussions, reflections on their own lives and expressed interest in hearing about my experiences when I was their age. Without them I would never have embarked on this project and I am grateful for their constant encouragement.

I am also indebted to many amazing staff and faculty colleagues I have worked with at the University of New Mexico, too numerous to list here, and to my family members and wonderful circle of friends in Albuquerque and elsewhere on the globe for their enthusiasm and support for my research and writing. Early readers of selected chapters include Anne Callaghan, Myrriah Gomez and Diane Gregory. A special thanks to Celia Lopez Chavez and Tom Chavez for their help in finding Sunstone Press to publish the book.

Working with editor James Clois Smith Jr. and his team at Sunstone Press in Santa Fe has been a positive and gratifying experience in every way and made my life immeasurably easier during the publishing process. Their nearly half-century of commitment to Southwest writers and themes has been remarkable.

I also want to acknowledge the inspiration of some of my favorite Southwestern writers, who have had a profound impact on my life and beliefs and who remind us that regional stories can also be universal in their themes. They include Edward Abby, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Rudolfo Anaya, Vine Deloria Jr, Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Mabel Dodge Lujan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, N. Scott Momaday, Ralph Moody, Willie Morris, Ferenc Morton Szasz, John Nichols and Frank Waters.

Preface: Coyotes

One lovely translucent New Mexico fall afternoon, my partner Greg Calvert and I were hiking among the majestic cliff dwellings in the Gila Wilderness. Across a small dry canyon from where we paused to rest, a scrawny coyote suddenly materialized in a grove of aspen and pine trees, then another silently appeared. They eyed us briefly and began to play, chasing one another, joyously cavorting, nipping, dancing, wrestling, rolling among the leaves and pine needles, perhaps a mating ritual or just pure exuberance. We watched for several minutes, then they disappeared into thin air, as suddenly as the had come. I had an intuition they were there to tell me something but I didn’t know what that might be.

The memories of my long life are like wily coyotes—sly, secretive, seductive, tantalizing with far-away plaintive songs in the night, popping up out of nowhere when I least expect them, running circles around me, enchanting, thrilling and alarming me, then disappearing as suddenly as they arrived. Sometimes they gently nuzzle me asking for affection, or they can suddenly leap on me and tear me to pieces. They are clever shape shifters that come back again and again in different forms so you will not at first be able recognize them. You cannot trust them. Like old photographs and movies, they are the stuff of images, moods and feelings, light and shadows, revealing or concealing facts and truth. They are neither dreams nor mirages, though they can easily be mistaken for them.

Yet memories often have more importance in shaping our consciousness than actual events. They are not merely lies or delusions but the building blocks that make us who we are, as much as our verifiable experiences. The older I become, the more memories mean to me and the less potent actual events seem. I do not claim that my memories are true or false, only that they have been essential to my understanding of who I have become and how I make meaning out of my experience. I know the difference between lies and facts and I don’t confuse memoir with history. I don’t deliberately write lies disguised as memories about things that have happened or not happened, but I will tell my clearest memories as best I can recreate them. If they differ from actual events, as I am sure they often do, that is not intentional. I will confess, however, to lies of omission, in the form of memories or events that I choose to leave out, stories I choose not to tell, or details to reveal, usually out of respect for the privacy of others and occasionally my own.

When it comes to writing about the historical events of the times in which I have lived, I have tried to stick to provable facts and events and my honest interpretations of their meaning. I am solely responsible for any errors in relating those.

1

The Mushroom Cloud and the Mushroom Farm

But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is...to tell the truth.

--Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History

New Mexico

On July 16, 1945, just before dawn, a great flash of light brighter than the sun lit the sky in Central New Mexico, lasting several seconds before darkness once again enveloped the landscape. The flash was visible within a radius of two hundred miles in all directions, and those closer could also hear a massive explosion and feel the ground shake like an earthquake. Some observers witnessed a fireball that rose high in the sky before turning into a huge multi-colored cloud, shaped they said like a mushroom. Among those who were wakened by the brief false dawn were Charles Carpenter, a Santa Fe railroad worker, and his wife Lillian, a high school teacher, living in Mountainair, a small village at the foot of the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque. They would have risen to check on their eighteen-month-old son, Johnny, who probably slept through it. Later in the morning local radio stations and newspapers quoted an Air Force press release saying that a remote ammunition dump near Alamogordo had exploded. There were no casualties and no danger to the public, but the military was evaluating whether to evacuate a few people from the surrounding area as a precaution.

Charles, like a lot of other New Mexicans accustomed to the regime of wartime secrecy, had reasons to question the official explanation. Despite the unprecedented security that existed, many people were aware that the U.S. military was developing and testing new weapons in secret sites in the mountains west of Santa Fe and the deserts around White Sands and Alamogordo. As a security agent and auditor for the Santa Fe railroad during the war years, Charles would certainly have noticed the large numbers of military personnel and well-dressed civilians, many with families and some with foreign accents, who arrived at Lamy, a tiny railroad station east of Santa Fe, carefully avoiding the other passengers and disappearing quickly into unmarked vans as they disembarked the train. There were also vast amounts of cargo arriving in sealed rail cars guarded by soldiers and loaded into military trucks at Lamy or at an obscure railroad siding in the desert south of Socorro, where a new paved highway closed to civilian traffic had inexplicably been constructed, heading off eastward into the wilderness of the Sierra Oscura mountain range.

As the war years dragged on, most American had learned to respect secrecy and not ask too many questions about strange goings-on around them. So the ammunition explosion story was generally accepted, if not believed. Charles was a serious and tight-lipped lawman who valued authority and was not about to say anything that might interfere with the war effort. Whatever he knew or surmised about the military projects underway in New Mexico, he wouldn’t have been one to talk about them. He had been a few months too old to be drafted to fight after the Pearl Harbor attack on the U.S. but would probably not have been sent abroad anyway, since protecting the railroads was considered a significant national security responsibility. He and Lillian, like most Americans, also had high personal stakes in the war. Charles’ only sibling, Henry, was a civilian businessman who been captured in the Philippines during the Japanese invasion and held for several years in a prisoner of war camp. And his older son by a previous marriage, also named Charles, had run away from home and enlisted in the army at age fifteen, spending most of the war stationed in London and surviving the Blitz. Lillian’s three brothers were all deployed in Europe or the Pacific. Even in one of the least populated and most remote corners of the country, the war dominated the lives of most New Mexicans, and after four years of bloody battles, family and friends lost, lives disrupted, and rationing of food, gasoline and consumer goods, people were sick of war and wanted more than anything else an end to it. Still, most were proud of the sacrifices, the troops, and political leaders and believed their nation was fighting a war to save the world from barbarism.

Charles and Lillian had met shortly before the war in Thatcher, a town even smaller and more remote than Mountainair, in the southeastern badlands of Colorado just north of the New Mexico line. He had been sent there for work and one afternoon noticed a young woman coming out of the high school across the tracks from the train station. He thought at first she could have been a student and he almost turned away and went about his business, but he took a chance and struck up a conversation. Fortunately for him, she turned out to be a teacher not a teenage student. For their first date, they borrowed a car and drove sixty miles to the nearest theater to watch that year’s hit movie, Gone with the Wind. A few months later they were married by a justice of the peace.

They must have seemed an unlikely couple. Charles was a big man, six feet four, stocky, outgoing and affable, but with a quick temper like the Irish cop he was. Lillian was five feet four, barely a hundred pounds, shy, introverted and studious, but who came fully alive as a natural-born and passionate teacher of young people. Charles had grown up in Camden, a small town in Missouri, son of a pious Methodist couple who struggled to keep themselves and their two sons fed and clothed. My grandfather worked most of his life as a laborer on the Wabash Railroad and later the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. In his tiny high school, Charles had been a good student and when the school ran out of funds in his senior year, he and other students staged Shakespeare plays and passed the hat for donations to pay the teachers and keep their classes in session. But after graduation he grew restless in Camden, leaving for the bright lights of Kansas City, briefly studying medicine, then law, and finally joining the police department, an experience he did not talk much about in later life. He bore a scar in his lower back, which family rumor had it, was from taking a bullet, but I never got the courage to ask him about that. He soon fathered a son but did not stay married long to the mother, then had a second wife and another son with the same results. Still in his twenties he left the police force and joined his father working on the Santa Fe railroad, making his way up through the ranks, becoming a special security agent and auditor moving constantly along the rail lines in the Great Plains and Southwest.

Lillian, twelve years younger than her husband, was from a family of schoolteachers, who also happened to be Methodists. Her parents had migrated west from Ohio for a drier climate after her mother contracted tuberculosis and they became itinerate teachers moving through a number of one-room school houses in small towns throughout Colorado and down into the newly created state of New Mexico. As the male, her father was often school principal as well as teacher and the supervisor of his wife. They finally settled on a small farm in Arvada just west of Denver and continued to teach and raise a family. They produced three boys and two girls, all but one of whom went into teaching. Lillian was a bright and determined student who played piano and violin and was an avid reader. She entered the state normal school for teachers in Greeley in the midst of the Great Depression and survived partly by making doughnuts in a dormitory kitchen and selling them to other students. Eventually she got work as secretary to one of her professors, an aspiring but unknown young novelist named James A. Michener. She got through college early and at age twenty, followed the model of her parents, teaching high school in Kremmling, a small village high in the Rocky Mountains, then in Thatcher on the high plains to the southeast. In those obscure places she might have only a handful of students but was expected to teach any possible combinations of Latin, Spanish, French, English, history, civics, science, math, home economics, and girls physical education, as well as serve as a vigilant chaperone for school dances and community social events.

Charles’ work kept him moving constantly and Lillian resigned her teaching job to accompany him through numerous stops along the Santa Fe lines through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico. They spent some time living in a box car, converted into a rough apartment, that was hitched to freight trains and dropped off for days or weeks near small-town rail stations or rural sidings where Charles was assigned to work. Eventually he was able to move into higher level positions that allowed them to settle down, first in Amarillo, Texas, and then Mountainair, New Mexico, where they spent most of the war years and where Lillian was able to get a job teaching in the high school. In January 1944 their first child, John, was born, followed by me in August 1947.

Travelers crossing West Texas by road or rail enter New Mexico in a region where the Chihuahua Desert, which dominates much of Northern Mexico, gradually transitions into the Great Plains stretching northward into Canada. It is a dry and hilly land of scrappy creosote bushes, yucca and mesquite, gradually giving way to grasslands and verdant river valleys as you move northward. Entering the desert from the east, if you stare long enough into the western horizon, you begin to detect a faint line emerging among the banks of white puffy clouds. Little by little the profile of the Rocky Mountains takes shape, rising then dominating the skyline, an imposing purple wall that threatens to block the way west. The town of Mountainair, elevation 6,500 feet, lies at a junction where the desert, grasslands and mountains converge. To the northwest are the Manzano Mountains, an alpine wilderness that reaches above 10,000 feet, covered in thick forests of ponderosa pine, juniper, maple, oak and aspen. To the south lies the Chupadera Mesa, an enormous ancient flat-topped mountain rising out of the desert floor like a massive fortress. A hundred square miles of barren and almost treeless land, the mesa is home to a few ranchers, neighbors to coyotes, deer, bears, bobcats and dwindling herds of wild mustang horses that run free among the hidden canyons and rocky crags. Leaving Mountainair headed west, you enter a narrow pas...

Índice

• Preface: Coyotes
• The Mushroom Cloud and the Mushroom Farm
• My America 1950s
• A Liberal Education
• From Protest to Resistance
• El Reno
• Sin Fronteras
• Coming Home
• Postscript: The Art of Politics
• Readers Guide