The helicopter circles the floating target board on the Sea Range. It's a morning in 2008. Gina Perez leans out the open door with her camera, scanning the water below.
A shape moves near the target. She looks closer. A young fin whale circles the anchor line, again and again. So she keys the radio. "You are not going to shoot. We have a whale at the target site."
The operational team in the Sea Range control room is ready to go. A second, larger whale appears, the mother come for her calf. Both endangered. The test holds for 45 minutes while Perez gets the photo before the Sea Range proceeds with the launch.
The picture still hangs blown up in the hallway down from her cubicle.
In that cubicle, Mickey Mouse is everywhere. Pinned to the walls. Stuck to the monitor. But there's also notebooks. Stacks of them shoved under her desk, going back to the '90s. She's captured much of the last 35 years in those pages.
But one image doesn't need a notebook. It goes back to 1976. A garage across the street from her house in Oxnard.
Her mother packed tomatoes at Oxnard Produce. Her father worked at the Allis-Chalmers tractor plant. They married in 1946 in The Colonia, an Oxnard neighborhood. They spoke Spanish at home and pushed their children to speak English first.
Across the street a woman named Joy converted her garage into a dance studio. It grew into MacKinnon Dance Academy. Perez played outside, got to know her, and became her first student. Ballet, jazz, tap, Highland and even Disco from age 9. Shoes clicking on wood. Joy was her other mom.
"I was going to be a big star," Perez said. "Short legs and all."
She danced until she was 19. Then the math became clear.
"Dancing wasn't going to support me, right? So I got to get a real job."
Art Preston watched his daughter dance at the studio. He worked at Point Mugu. After class one day, he crossed the studio floor. "Would you be interested in a job?" She took the typing test.
In October 1985, Maria Regina Perez walked onto the base as a GS-3 clerk typist. A dancer from Oxnard with a high school diploma, typing score and not much else.
She be-bopped around those early years, meeting all kinds of different people, getting to know what they did.
Running mail across the base. Picking somebody up at the gate and bringing them in. Whatever they needed. Clip-on badges instead of Common Access Cards. Doors stayed unlocked. Sperry PCs without internet. Fax machines humming.
She worked Targets. She worked human resources at the beach. She worked Electronic Warfare. She was executive office manager for Threat/Target Systems, then public affairs. Five careers before she found environmental. She never left the command considering the many reorganizations Point Mugu had gone through.
In October 1996 she coordinated the trade show for Point Mugu's 50th Anniversary Air Show. More than 100,000 people came across two days. Staff weaved golf carts through the crowd.
"That was the first trade show they'd ever done for an air show," Perez said. "I was real proud of that."
One of her bosses called her the glue of the office.
She was already helping with the Environmental Impact Statement while still working public affairs. Then Steve
Schwartz sat down in the cubicle next to hers.
Schwartz, a archeologist on the first Sea Range EIS team, pulled her in. No degree. No environmental background.
"I just learned along the way," Perez said.
So she moved from environmental protection assistant to environmental protection specialist.
The girl who was Joy's first dance student now decided whether the Navy could fire weapons over the ocean while protecting the marine life below.
But the job was never the hardest part.
Divorce left her a single mother of three boys, William (now 36), Randall (34) and Christian (25). On San Nicolas Island she would eat at the club, have a few drinks, then get up at two or three in the morning for marine mammal monitoring. She hit a rough stretch where the weight nearly pulled her under. Fourteen years of quiet struggle. Fourteen years of showing up anyway.
In 2014 she found the Employee Assistance Program.
"12 years sober," Perez said. "I really want people to know in the government that if there are things going on, the government can help you."
She stayed. She rebuilt. They gave her the room to do both.
"I've grown up here," Perez said.
Today she manages operational site approvals. Nothing tests on the Sea Range without her compliance work along with her Sustainability Team.
The Point Mugu Sea Range covers 36,000 square miles of ocean, roughly the size of Kentucky. San Nicolas Island, 65 miles offshore, hosts launch pads that fire GQM-163 Coyote targets at Mach 2.5 and various weapons under test.
During breeding season, 170,000 sea lions, elephant seals and harbor seals pile onto the beaches, barking and shoving. The beaches are brown with bodies. The second-largest pinniped rookery in North America shares an island with supersonic launches.
Before every event her team monitors behavior for the National Marine Fisheries Service. If an endangered species enters the zone, the launch holds. On San Nicolas, they walk the beaches. Most animals startle, look up and go back to what they were doing.
"It's really interesting how we do all this weapons testing and still live with our environment," Perez said. "We do a good job."
The whale photograph still hangs in the hallway. A fin whale calf beside a floating target board. A mother retrieving her calf. She held the line for both of them.
Every morning she drives an hour from Ojai before the sun comes up. The newer people come to her now. Forty years of knowing where everything is. She calls it helping. Not mentoring. Helping.
She'll retire at 62, two years from now.
"As much as I'm ready to retire, I'm a little nervous," Perez said.
But this wasn't her whole life. There was a garage first.
Joy is 90 now. The studio closed during the pandemic. But recently they sat in Joy's living room with cups of tea. Perez and other classmates who started with her as kids.
There's something she's been thinking about. Something she walked away from at 19.
"I'm hoping that when I get out I can spend more time with my boys, family and friends. And maybe start dancing again," Perez said.