Of Missiles and Melons
A Short History of Fruit and Far Reaching Military Technology in a Desert Utah Town
Every fall in the small town of Green River, Utah, there is a two-day festival celebrating melons, the town’s major export. The town has been celebrating the juicy globes for over a hundred years, ever since early farmers found that the abundant sunshine and sandy soils surrounding the banks of the Green River were perfect for growing fruit. For a small town in the middle of nowhere, the festival is a big deal.
To prepare, the wide streets are cleaned and cleared of trash, the bright green lawn of the park freshly cut and covered with booths and barbecues. Even in September the sun still shines bright and warm, the high desert sky clear and soft blue like a robin’s egg. Early Saturday morning, smiling people crowd the sidewalks holding babies and Diet Cokes. They are waiting for the parade, the centerpiece of the festival.
The parade starts: here come marching bands, shiny red fire engines, and the finest horses of the county trotting by. Three teenage girls in tiaras sit side by side on the backseat of a silver convertible, their puffy white dresses surrounding them like a cloud. Now, rumbling down the street comes the parade’s highlight: a cartoonishly giant watermelon slice made out of plywood and house paint plopped on the bed of a double-axle trailer. It’s a gaudy totem proudly declared by local truck stop postcards as “the world’s largest melon slice.” Eventually the melon disappears round a corner, crowds fill the streets and the procession ends till the next year.
For a weekend, it seems the town is vibrant, upbeat. But once the crowds leave, and the melon stands are boarded up for the winter, it is clear that Green River has seen better days. The main street, wide enough to drive a row of tanks down, is lined with shuttered motels, crumbling brick banks, and boarded-up cafes. The locals are welcoming, but you may not get that impression from strolling the suburbs. There are plenty of quaint, mid-century fixer-uppers, but you’ll need to get past the pitbull-mixes fiercely guarding their plots of crabgrass to get a closer look. Clearly, melons aren’t enough to support the local economy.
Green River is trying to change its rough image, rebranding this sleepy agricultural town and I-70 truck stop into a “Gateway to Adventure.” The town is banking that outdoor types — sick of Moab crowds — will come to Green River for a chance at solitude, or at least the illusion of it. Thankfully, the Green River area has empty space in abundance. Fifty miles in any direction is some of the most beautifully austere country in the southwest — a desolation of sage dotted sand plains, deeply cut slot canyons and striated gray cliffs, split only by the cold waters of the Green River. There’s plenty to explore, and few people to see.
Though betting on the attraction of solitude as a new stream of revenue is a gamble, it wouldn’t be the first time in the town’s history that it would use its isolation as a selling point. Scattered in empty lots around town and in strange, abandoned buildings lying in the desert is evidence that melons haven’t always been Green River’s main export.
In 1961, Air Force Systems Command was looking for a place to test its new Athena program, which focused on creating a compact nuclear missile. The purpose of the Athena program was to develop cheaper, smaller scale Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) — massive, multi-stage, nuclear-tipped rockets with a minimum range of 5,500 kilometers — that could be readily sized up to meet the needs of national defense. The Air Force had been testing these more compact Athena rockets at its famous White Sands Missile Range (home of the world’s first atomic bomb test), but needed a location further away to make test flights at re-entry velocities. The location also, ideally, needed to be close to a reliable supply chain such as rail or the new interstate highway system, and ruffle the feathers of as few locals as possible.
After concluding that only 32 locals, the occasional tourist at Canyonlands National Park, and a statistically negligible percentage of cows would be inconvenienced by missile launches, the Department of Defense (DOD) chose Green River as their Athena program test site, located exactly 425 miles northwest of White Sands Missile Range. The DOD assured nervous state and local representatives that townsfolk would quickly get used to the noise of a 50 foot, eight ton, solid fuel missile lifting off in their backyard. Ranchers were promised per diem on launch days and compensation for any cows crushed or maimed by wayward rocket debris. The all-important melon industry, crew-cutted officials assured, would be unaffected.
For the next decade, from roughly 1963–1974, Athena would bring hundreds of workers and high paying jobs to Green River. People built homes, bought new cars, and drank the watered down Utah beer at local bars and steakhouses. Engineers were as common as cowboys. Melons were out, missiles were in.
While happy new families in horn-rimmed glasses and Nixon ‘68’ buttons waved on another years’ Melon Days float, a parallel procession now took place daily on the outskirts of town: the meticulous preparation and launching of (what the Air Force hoped would become) nuclear tipped missiles capable of turning a small town like Green River and its surrounding environs into a smoldering slag heap.
Unfortunately, the boon didn’t last. Budget cuts, a series of consecutive failures in 1968, and political concerns over missiles overshooting their targets and landing on foreign soil would eventually kill the Athena program. The money left, along with the clean-shaved engineers and cutting-edge, apartment sized computers. The regular morning boom of ignited rocket fuel, the glorious parabola as another missile arced its way towards the summer sun, were also gone. What stuck around in Green River are the truck stops, some abandoned buildings rotting in the desert, and of course, the melons.
But maybe in dissolution there is hope. Although the new (albeit already sun-faded) “Green River: Gateway to Adventure” billboard on I-70 doesn’t advertise it, the Athena Test Complex is a minor tourist attraction for the right crowd. Tip-toe over black and white tile sherds scattered on the ground like ancient pottery pieces in the depths of a moldering control bunker! Watch the sunset lighting up the desert (and the old concrete cylinder launch pad) from the cracked green cocoon of an observation trailer! Wander through an old office painted a radioactive shade of lime and imagine how much more of a pain it was to calculate civilian casualties from the fallout of a nuclear tipped re-entry vehicle without a TI-89!
Clearly, there are plenty of attractions right around town for the chamber of commerce to work with, because despite how nice the festival is, melons aren’t paying the bills. In this way, Green River is like many ex-logging, mining, or military base towns in the rural West looking to diversify its economy and capitalize on new revenue streams such as computer server farms or adventure tourism. Currently, it is hard to say whether there is enough singletrack and craft brewery space in Green River to turn it into another Moab or Bend, but what will hopefully remain attractive — to the right crowd — is the area’s sense of solitude and unique history as a site for Cold War military test programs.
So next time you’re speeding along I-70, making miles between one cosmopolitan hub or another, consider a pit stop in Green River to enjoy some simple, small town pleasures: a juicy melon slice, a beautiful sunset, and the vision of a compact, nuclear-capable missile screaming through a cloudless desert sky.
