A Brief History of Stars

Abstract

A Brief History of Stars Nick Almeida (bio) 1957. An August night. George Van Tassel meditates beneath Giant Rock, a seven-story-tall boulder at the edge of Mojave sky—star-laden, yes, with plasmic ripples that make space look like a pool. Thereabout Van Tassel sees him: the alien Solganda. "Beyond the man, about a hundred yards away, hovered a glittering, glowing spaceship, seemingly about eight feet off the ground," says Van Tassel in his memoir, I Rode a Flying Saucer. Solganda from Venus implanted thoughts in Van Tassel's mind. He was invited aboard the ship. Though some accounts place this first meeting in the high desert of the Yucca Valley, twenty minutes north of Joshua Tree, in the last mouth of the Southwest, others recall Solganda's materialization at the foot of Van Tassel's bed when he received his most important transmission: schematics for the construction of The Integratron, a thirty-eight-foot white copula that Van Tassel would start building two years later in Landers, California, a stone's throw from Giant Rock. A Lockheed aerospace engineer and pilot, Van Tassel used extraterrestrial designs and Earthly connections—Nikola Tesla's science and Howard Hughes's dollars—to build The Integratron. In what had been the frontier a century before, The Integratron would be a portal to that other frontier, the one they called "final," where American exceptionalism seemed able to reach, and where man could reach, too, beaming off the westernmost shelf of the continent toward the stars. ________ The town of Joshua Tree and Joshua Tree National Park take the common name for Yucca brevifolia, the trees that punctuate the high desert in irregular Y shapes and from the tips of their thick, forked branches grow stiletto evergreen fronds. The Spanish name is izote de desierto, "desert dagger." Lore around the trees is vast. It is said they grow only in Jerusalem and Joshua Tree; the foothills of heaven and the gates of hell, respectively. Joshua, Moses's successor, was sent to scout Canaan and hailed the Israelites with famously raised arms, held upward in supplication, for an excruciating period of time, to guide them westward. Thirty-one hundred years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mormon settlers crossed the Mojave and, upon seeing the long arms of the trees welcoming them west, named them Joshua. In that same century, William Jackson Turner would direct his attention to the American West. Among his observations, Turner speculated that the qualities one might find advantageous when expanding westward were in time codified into the essential values of American culture: rapacious grit, entrepreneurial brutality, body and mind like a motor, the hacking arms of industry. Gold was in San Francisco. Gold was in Deadwood. If you can work a claim, you own it. Free land in Oregon; more if you've got a wife. What existed before you, what waited to complicate your acquisitions—a wilderness, [End Page 37] ecosystems, cultures of men—could be called conquerable, fodder, raw stuff for your assent, your pilgrimage west. ________ Five days a week, my mother drove from our house in the Philly suburbs to Flemington, New Jersey, boarded a bus for Midtown Manhattan, worked eight hours at her IT recruiting job, then followed the same commute home. It was the spring of my sixth-grade year, which meant, that night, Mom made it home before dark. She was light through the door, as light as that early evening, and told us about the ad on the radio. A new TV show on ABC Family was conducting a search for America's funniest family. It was a competition, and anyone could mail in a tape for an opportunity to star in this new show, which sounded like a wholesome, low-rent entry into the new canon of reality television. Big Brother, The Osbournes, The Ashlee Simpson Show, The Real World, Who Wants To Marry My Dad?, Fear Factor, I'm A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!, and Temptation Island were all hits in our house. My Life Is A Sitcom worked like this: A handful of families were chosen from the homemade submissions. Los Angeles production crews...