American, right, and Soviet space hardware in Oklahoma.

Armchair Adventures

as seen May 6, 2012

in The Free Lance-Star

Fredericksburg, Va.

by Paul Sullivan

A Road Warrior on The Great Plains

             

            Daybreak came with the incessant soft hissing of tires on nearby I-40. Not a good sign, I thought, since it meant more wet roads.

            As I prepped to leave a motel in Clarksville, western Arkansas, I wondered what day 3 of my trip west had in store.

            In short time, I knew I would begin zooming from one scenic Indian reservation to the next in eastern Oklahoma's grassland prairies. It is beautiful country.

            They ought to call Oklahoma the Transition State for westbound travelers. From the jump-off town of Fort Smith in Arkansas, there's no doubt you're still in the eastern half of the continent.

            Yet, hard as it is to believe there, many long miles ahead, where I-40 rolls into the Texas panhandle east of Amarillo, you have long been driving deep in the heart of the west. The limitless views, the ranches, small cowboy towns-mark a world apart from the Arkansas Ozarks. 

            It is not a place for those who have trouble keeping company with themselves. If that is true driving through it, I can scarcely imagine what it must be like living on one of those ranches. And yet, among those who call it home, it

apparently puts an indelible stamp on the soul. 

            If you want to see what they mean that it's big country out here, this is the place to come. No wonder folks from this region feel cooped up in the East.

            Weatherford is a pleasant town not far west of Oklahoma City. From the interstate, I'd always noted two things about it. There is a gigantic wind farm sprawling over thousands of acres west and north of the city. And there is an old Air Force F-104 Starfighter on a pylon at the airport.

            Trip after trip I'd seen that airplane standing sentinel and the sign for the Stafford Air & Space Museum. Worth the stop?

            I had to make 664 miles to Santa Rosa, N.M., that night, but the little calculator in my head whispered, "Aw, go ahead. Give it an hour or so."

            A very good move, it turns out.

            The museum celebrates the life and spectacular achievements of Tom Stafford, a local boy who soared in the loftiest circles of American space flight. He is Lt. Gen. Thomas Stafford, and his list of accomplishments as an aviator and space flight pathfinder ranked at the top in those heady days when we and the Soviets raced into the heavens. In fact, I could have written this entire column just on Gen. Stafford, a remarkable individual.

            There were countless artifacts from that historic era in the museum, and they were presented in a way that told the story of space exploration, from the earliest days of the Goddard rocket experiments right into the era of manned space exploration.

            That alone would have made it worth my time. But this little museum-which proved to be not so little at all-also told the story of human flight, from its beginnings with gas-filled balloons, into the risky and often failed efforts of the 19th century.

            There were aircraft representative of each era of flight in the 20th century, as well-far more of them than I had imagined.

            But for this traveler, it was not a plane or spacecraft that left the most memorable impression by far.

            I clambered down from a look into the cockpit of a Soviet Mig-21 fighter and saw a long, cylindrical object with fins on it. A panel explained, matter-of-factly, that it was a B61 thermonuclear weapon. Oh yes, and that it could be slipped under the wing of an F-16 and dropped either from far above the earth, or from treetop level.

            I could not stop, alternately looking and reading: "The B61's yield ranges from a little more than 1% of Fat Man (Nagasaki), (or more than 150 times the force of the Oklahoma City blast) to 22 times more powerful than Fat Man."

            What's more, it was explained that the size of the blast could be conveniently adjusted, in flight.

            Hundreds of miles lay before me to be driven that day. It was terribly windy out there westbound on I-40. But the miles passed fairly quickly.

            As a kid who grew up in the nuclear age, who remembered clearly the day the announcement flashed over the radio that a nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima; who remembered all the Cold War hysteria, that small nuke in that museum gave me lots to think about. Not least of which is that if that weapon is publicly displayed, rest assured it is old-tech, far surpassed by newer types.

            It seemed especially chilly when I stopped that night in Santa Rosa.

Next week: Adventures in Albuquerque.