Ramstein Air Base
and the Subspace 'Meadow':
A Wayward Train of Thought
U.S. Army & Air Force, West Germany, 1969
  

This little memoir, "Ramstein Air Base & the Subspace 'Meadow'", does not whisper of some exotic, ultra-secret breakthrough project. Nor is it even particularly exciting, except to myself. It's about one odd track along which the creative process may travel, "a wayward train of thought". You may find it entertaining; at any rate, it is true.
  

In early 1969 I was a very young Sergeant in the U.S. Army. The section of the Army base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where I worked was an intermediate headquarters of the U.S. army of occupation in West Germany, hence kept office hours — including their mess hall. Since this was the height of the Cold War between the two great nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, few of us actually on the ground in Germany were too worried about a shooting war breaking out. (Really.)

There were one or two exceptions to the office hours of my Army headquarters. Right then, I was one of those rare exceptions, officially and frequently working a 'round-the-clock duty, for ... reasons.

As I did sometimes, late one night around midnight, I was minding my own business, eating dinner (or maybe breakfast) across the road at Ramstein Air Base, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. Ramstein had to deal with flight crews and ground crews at all hours, so they kept the food coming. Incidentally, their food was better than the Army's: I suspected they had actual cooks.
  

There's the setting. Thoughtfully, Ramstein mess hall played lots of recorded music, songs that were current back home. Perhaps the playlist was from Radio Luxembourg, a powerful station which broadcast a lot of American pop and rock 'n' roll. During this particular midnight meal, a song came on which I hadn't heard before: "Guantanamera".

My wayward mind, picking up a word which it didn't know and running with it in a random direction, naturally parsed "Guan-tan-a-mera" as "once-on-a-meadow".

My mind immediately leapt to the obvious conclusion that "meadow" was the common or casual label I'd been seeking for the subspatial pseudosurface in some of my projected science fiction stories.

Fascinated by this new thought, it was years before I appreciated that "Guantanamera" simply means "the woman from Guantánamo". The lyrics are from from a poem by José Martí. The first Cuban version of the song was released in 1929; the version I heard probably was the Sandpipers' 1966 hit.
  

Pseudosurface? I sometimes use "subspace" as descriptive of this place or environment (and the reader may also), but this subspace isn't actually a place. It's a pseudosurface, by nature dead black, which when artificially lit locally, resembles an old volcanic lava field, somewhat rough here and there. You cannot penetrate below it, not because there's nothing there, ordinary emptiness; rather that there is no "there" at all, no "below". Similarly, there is no real "above", not even vacuum; just nothing. Entities with minds of a certain quality can travel upon it, but there are hazards which I won't go into here.

The reader will note that typical lava fields are basically hot-melted, dried black stone, not conducive to growing grass. In fact, in my novel The Shadow of the Ship there is no grass upon the Meadow; the term is familiar to the novel's characters, although unsupported by specific mentions of any of the twelve thousand varieties of grass which grow upon Earth.
  

Here's a bit of history, with a dialogue, about why this pseudosurface resembles lava. When this lava-like appearance occurred to me in the late 1960s, I had no clue whence, or why.

Much later, in 1984, I was driving to a science fiction convention, passing through Central Oregon where there are extensive lava fields. My childhood was spent in Oregon, and this is an area I had visited a number of times long before. I realized at once that here was the origin of the Meadow's appearance and some of its features. My subconscious had passed this visual idea to my conscious mind, with no origin tag attached. We'll listen in to a sample of internal dialogue I've had numerous times:
  

Conscious Mind asks its Subconscious: "Suppose I have some fresh-to-me idea bubbling up, but it's not really new. I often wonder where you were to neglect explaining its origin years earlier?"

Subconscious: "I'm right here."

Conscious: "So why not inspire? At least, share?"

Subconscious: "That's not how I roll. You haven't asked the right question."

Conscious: "Specifically, or in general?"

Subconscious: "I mean, load your mind with on-topic observations, research, thought, and/or inspiration. Then wait for me."

Conscious: "Wait for what?"

Subconscious: "Wait for me to get around to it."

Conscious: "Sometimes I've not had to wait, other times it's taken years. The name for subspace, the 'Meadow', came from my mishearing the song title "Guantanamera" in the mess hall at Ramstein Air Base. It took fifteen years for you to tell me where you got the idea for the appearance of the Meadow. In The Shadow of the Ship that rough black pseudosurface was a 'Meadow'. Certainly there was no grass."

Subconscious: "Upon driving by the lava fields in Central Oregon, you remembered immediately that you'd found them fascinating as a child."

Conscious: "That drive was fifteen years after I first wrote that name 'Meadow' into my general story notes!"

Subconscious: "I'm in no hurry."

Conscious: "But no subspatial grass. It wasn't until I was struggling with the Meadow chapters in Sphinx Daybreak that I needed some simple means to propagate light, and transfer air, to make minimally inhabitable the Hintersolar Meadow near Earth. Hence, devil-grass."

Subconscious: "Yet you still didn't know why 'devil-grass'. More years went by. For a bright fellow, you can be kind of slow, working in the dark as you often are."

Conscious: "Ha-ha."
  

Bermuda grass is an aggressive species of short grass. During wet seasons, it is green and propagates via long runners. It is helpful against beach erosion but can overwhelm and displace other species. In dry seasons it turns brown and looks dead. "Devil-grass" is a non-affectionate nickname.

There are allusive relations between devil-grass and the Devil, but we must trust that these are merely fanciful.
  

A side note, illustrating that mishearing a song isn't unique for me: a parallel example heard at Ramstein around the same time. John Denver's song "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was a #1 hit for Peter, Paul and Mary in early 1969. The title phrase is delivered rather quickly in the lyrics, and I misheard it as "leaving Oregon plain". My childhood was spent in Oregon, and I was homesick. But this mishearing left only an odd little memory.
  

That 'round-the-clock duty I had with the U.S. Army still occasionally haunts me. But it is the subspatial "Meadow" inspiration at Ramstein which has enlivened a vast realm of wayward creativity.

© 2025 Robert Wilfred Franson