Photo by Craig FritzTrbune

Trbune

Chuck Hosking braces himself against the wind while holding one of his protest banners at the Wyoming Boulevard gate to Sandia National Laboratories. This sign says, "High-tech toxins - do your grandkids want them?" Hosking has displayed his banners outside Kirtland Air Force Base at least once a week for 25 years.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Chuck Hosking rides uphill on Avenida Cesar Chavez from his South Valley home every week, carrying a homemade banner, to protest outside the gates at Kirtland Air Force Base. For 25 years Hosking has hoisted signs that pose ethical questions to those who work on the nation's nuclear weapons programs. He's had some success, he says.

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It is habit now, as routine as buying clothes at a thrift store, living in the poorest part of town or not owning a car.

Which doesn't make it any less important. It only means that there is no forethought.

When Chuck Hosking starts the one-hour, uphill ride from his home to the gate of Kirtland Air Force Base on Friday afternoons - banners made of bedsheets rolled around a pole and strapped to his bicycle - he doesn't think about when this all started 25 years ago.

He doesn't remember the thousands of people who have driven by him throwing rocks, coins and epithets as he hoisted his signs in frigid cold or the summer's heat. Or the few who shook his hand and thanked him for his persistence.

Nor does he pause to ponder the men in uniforms who were escorted away precipitously after they stopped to talk to him.

And he tries hard not to think about the fact that the other founder of the Albuquerque Peace Project - his partner in values, in commitment, in life - is no longer with him.

After a quarter century, Hosking doesn't even ask whether his "bannering," as he calls it, makes any difference.

He only knows he is living his values, as he has since his first civil rights march at age 14, when he saw the contorted features of racial hatred and knew he could not live an ordinary life.

"It makes a difference to me," said Hosking, a handsome man with the weathered features of someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors. "And ultimately, I have to live with myself."

In it for the long run

The Albuquerque Peace Project - personified "about 80 percent of the time" by Chuck Hosking alone - has been a presence at one of the Kirtland gates about once a week since that first vigil.

Friday afternoon, the project commemorated the anniversary of its peaceful presence (albeit amplified due to the celebratory occasion) in much the same manner as it began on Ash Wednesday of 1983.

That was shortly after Hosking and his wife, Mary Ann Fiske - traditional Quakers and activists for peace and social justice - arrived in Albuquerque and were compelled "by sheer proximity" to protest the weapons research at Sandia National Laboratories.

"To my way of thinking, when you're designing weapons of mass destruction, that's a crime against humanity," said Hosking, sitting in the spare living room of his South Broadway neighborhood home. "As I saw it, I had an obligation to speak out against that."

Hosking - a math teacher at Central New Mexico Community College and the University of New Mexico - took his usual analytical approach. For days he counted cars to find the time of maximum flow. He noted the height of traffic signs, the width of letters, the colors that stood out, and the availability of a pole to tie one end of a banner to when he was out alone.

Fiske was the organizational wizard and banner painter; Hosking came up with the messages, nearly all ethical questions: "Why waste a good mind on weapons work?" "Will your kids survive your work?" And first, and most enduring: "Jesus said to love your enemies - do we?"

The words were directed not at the military personnel, but the scientists and engineers whose work supported militarism.

As he pondered the banners, "I thought, `I'll make them all questions because then people will have to consider,' " recalled Hosking, who once aimed for the Episcopalian priesthood himself. "I wanted them to think about the inconsistency between the faith values they professed on Sunday mornings and the work values they lived Monday through Friday."

Initially, he committed to being at the gates weekday afternoons for the 40 days of Lent. Later, it became twice a day, every weekday, for almost a full year. Many hours, no pay.

He kept track of responses. In the early years, they were "consistently" 3-to-1 negative. People yelled, "Get a job!" or "Go to Russia!" They threw the finger, bottles, cigarettes, firecrackers.

One day a man who'd noticed Hosking's beat-up one-speed bicycle brought him a 10-speed. Hosking thanked him but gave it away the next day. It wasn't in line with his two criteria for material goods: Can everyone who wants one have one? (If not, it's elitist.) And, is this technology more environmentally sustainable than the one it replaced?

Once a construction worker across the street shot him in the leg with a BB gun. Smarting but not mortally injured, Hosking crossed the street to talk to shooter.

Every once in a while, one of the scientists would stop to talk, too.

"Some of these guys were brilliant, but they were absolutely tabula rasa in terms of ethics," Hosking said. "They had either never thought about these things or had been mollified."

He didn't spend a lot of time considering if his explanations had any lasting effect. In fact, he didn't expect they would.

He just knew he had to be there.

"I'm a long-distance runner," says the man who ran a 10K every day for 40 years.

"In more ways than one."

Sometimes it works

In 1985, two years after the vigils began, on a day when a well-known anti-nuclear activist drew a bigger crowd, Hosking noticed a man on the edge of the group. He looked vaguely familiar.

He finally realized the man was a scientist who had stopped years before to say how much he admired Hosking's courage.

"I thought that was such a strange word to use," Hosking said. "I thought, `I'm not risking anything.' But to him, I was."

Back then, Tom Grissom had given Hosking a book of his poetry and Hosking remembers thinking: What? A nuclear scientist writing a book of poetry?

The mathematician didn't have much use for the scientist's fancy words, but he did remember the man who had given it to him. As Grissom approached, Hosking asked, "Tom? Is that you?"

"Here, I wanted to give you this," said a smiling Grissom, handing Hosking a sheaf of papers.

"This is my letter of resignation."

Hosking still shakes his head in wonder over that moment.

"That was the most amazing day," he says. "It was the most exciting afternoon in the whole history of the peace project. By far."

Hearing the message

But Grissom wasn't the only one affected by Hosking's presence. A young civil engineer who'd been assigned to the Air Force's "shake, rattle and roll" group, researching the world of detonations, often rode his bike past the signs.

"The Air Force ought to ban bicycles," says Lou Nicholas, now 48 and a teacher and tutor at CNM. "It gave me a lot more time to look and ponder."

Nicholas had already begun to question the research he was doing, though at the time more for wasteful spending and pointlessness than ethical reasons.

Every day he rode past Hosking's banners he said he grew more conflicted. On one hand, his career offered him such a comfortable life - a healthy salary, free education, support of his running career and wonderful camaraderie.

On the other hand, was any amount of comfort worth the discomfort of feeling like a hypocrite?

"Those people with the signs were constantly reminding me that I didn't want to be there," said Nicholas, who still chokes up at the memory of his ethical struggle. "I never stopped to talk to them because I was afraid, but I wanted to talk to them so bad.

"I wanted them to talk me out of the Air Force."

Spurred by a young airman, Nicholas spent long hours in an underground barracks reading and copying the words of Henry David Thoreau. He thought about Hosking and the others he saw at the gates and wondered: Could they be the living Thoreaus? And if so, do I dare join them?

He filled out separation papers from the Air Force, asking for a year to contemplate. Then he asked for another year. And all the time, he kept riding by those banners.

"The signs kept me reinforced," he says. "I kept them in focus to try to keep me from going back."

In the early 1990s, Nicholas left the Air Force for good. He "free fell," he said, with no job, little money and the emotional wreck of a divorce adding to the taunts of those who questioned his sanity.

Then he went to a Quaker event and met someone he realized was the "living Thoreau" at the Kirtland gates. Not long after, he held the end of a banner opposite Hosking.

One day, a clean-cut man who looked like he "could have been Air Force" stopped to talk to them. He asked for the men' names and permission to take some pictures. Nicholas panicked when Hosking graciously gave both.

"I was very paranoid, very cowardly," he recalled. "And Chuck laughed and said to me: `Don't worry about it. You're out.' "

Later an amused Nicholas would tell people who stopped: "I used to be in there." He took a perverse pleasure in their discomfort or disbelief. After hours of talking with Hosking, he was no longer afraid of putting his beliefs forefront.

"What are the odds of being in a war room at 3 a.m. with a young airman reading Thoreau?" he asked. "Or that Chuck would arrive in town three weeks after I did? There are always messages - if you're open to hearing them."

Carrying on

Despite the anniversary, Friday was "just another day" for Hosking. He doesn't consider skipping the ritual; only twice has bad weather stopped him.

"I don't think about whether I'm going or not," he said. "I just go."

He admits much of his "zest and zeal" for life have disappeared since his wife of 36 years - perhaps the only woman who could have lived his intensely frugal, principled lifestyle - succumbed to cancer in September.

Visiting Fiske in the hospital on a Friday afternoon, he looked up at the clock at 10 minutes to 3 and asked her if she wanted him to stay or go to the vigil.

"Go," she said. "And be sure you're there to represent me tomorrow," reminding him of an Iraq war protest scheduled for the next day.

They would be her last words to him.

So his habit overrules his heart, which isn't so much in it these days. It isn't weariness or discouragement or even the passage of time. (Ever the mathematician, when someone asks his age, he responds: "I'm in the eighth year of my seventh decade on this earth, but I'm barely in my fifties." Then he lets you guess wrong until he confesses to 58.)

Asked if he's lost his youthful idealism, he scoffs.

"I've never been an idealist," he said. "I would contend I'm an incredible realist. It's hopeless Pollyanna-ism to think we can design weapons of mass destruction and not use them. How realistic is that?"

Nor has he lost hope.

"There is a huge difference between hope and optimism. Optimism is the belief something is probable; hope is the belief something is possible."

And something is possible - as long as there are Fridays and bedsheets for signs and a man who believes "when you find yourself on the edge of a cliff, it's wise to define progress as one step backwards."

"All these things are caused by human beings," Hosking sighed. "So human beings can fix them all.

"It's just a matter of will."