Shitfuckdammit.
Thursday night. The wolves and I are taking our nightly walk, which for the past few weeks has tended to be at the old Nike Missile Base, now turned into White Point Nature Preserve. While Vive was chasing a tennis ball, Kona ran off into the twilight and got skunked.
This is normally amusing, but I’m sooooo not in the mood for it now. See opening sentence.
Anyhow, Kona’s now out drying from her emergency deskunking solution as I sit here fuming on my fourth Sierra — and smelling like skunk myself — looking for some sort of bright point to the whole thing. It occured to me that I’ve got some photos laying around of the Nike base that I’ve been intending to post for months.
During the Cold War years, the United States utilized a detached part of the Fort MacArthur Reservation for the Nike Missile Program. It became virtually unused open land over the decades, and recently was established a bona fide preserve called White Point. it’s a unique mix of natural habitat and military structure of old, all left untouched, with a view of Catalina. Great place for the dogs. Great place to clear the mind. Great place.
So there it is. A random Thursday night inconvenience turned into inspiration.
From an otherwise uneventful day in 2006, one of our countless strolls through the preserve, not a 5-iron shot away from our crib. I had my camera on me:
Those doors are amazing. Hmmmm….. Why hasn’t anyone shot a movie here?!?……. ; )
Well, we tried to establish a Nike Museum at White Point. We got a $35,000 grant from the Getty Foundation to plan for the site. With the help of some of the crew that put together the SF-88 Nike Site in San Francisco, we stripped a Nike site at Van Nuys with the idea of using the parts at White Point, but in the end, the locals in San Pedro and the LA Department of Rec & Parks made it impossible to continue the project.
It’s too bad, because LA-43 at White Point could be part of a historic District. We put White Point and it’s Cold War sites on the California Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Within a 1.5 mile bike ride, there’s World War I, World War II and a Cold War site. But, in the end, nobody cared.