Tustin Hangar, #28
1942-2023

Through an airplane porthole descending towards home, I spot the remains of the hangar smoldering weeks after its wooden frame caught fire. The immense doors still standing—bookends to grimy debris.

A Navy heirloom handed down to generations, buildings 28 (North) and 29 (South) were built on lima bean fields. But first the Tongva lived here.

All land is sacred.

The morning of the fire, I drove toward the ballooning smoke not knowing what burned. The hangar ablaze—the conflagration of a childhood landmark, and kin to a cathedral or temple—I remember the symmetry of its timber arches and half egg-shell shape. 

The best kind of land to build on is flat land, writes Frank Lloyd Wright.

For six decades, the military worked the land and sky. Twin buildings housing lighter-than-airships—both civil engineering marvels—the buildings became objects, speaking a language at once grand and unkind. We want protection from the enemies of a world at war. Again, and again.

To write history, set it afire. The ruins are not beautiful.

*Title Image: FlynntheProtogen, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Lorene Delany-Ullman teaches composition at UC Irvine and is the author of Camouflage for the Neighborhood. In collaboration with artist Jody Servon, their book Saved: Objects of the Dead, a photographic and poetic exploration of the human experience of life, death, and memory, was published in January 2023 (Artsuite).