This Is This

We were flying into Vegas from the Grand Canyon in an eight seater propellor plane. I was about fourteen at the time. The trip over the hot air of the Mojave Desert was extremely bumpy and it felt like someone was smacking the top of the plane as we bobbed up and down on waves of turbulance.

Black clouds conspired all around us until the smallest one hit us with a lightning bolt that took our breath away. I reasoned - because reasoning is all you can do when you have no hope - that it was better to be hit by lightning off the ground than on.

A few years before, a thunderstorm broke out at baseball practice and in the sudden downpour, we ran into the dugout while forks of lightning hit the trees around the diamond. One friend of mine further back in the outfield was slower to get to the shelter and picked up a couple of aluminium bats. He ran across the open ground towards the dugout, bats flailing like bludgeons while thousands of volts charged above him, waiting to find the shortest route to the ground. We were cub scouts then and that was pretty much the extent of our knowledge about how the world worked, but it was enough to know he was in no small amount of peril, so we screamed at him to drop the bats. Conan the Barbarian had just come out - he was in his element and at risk of joining them. He made it to the dugout, where the administration of noogies was a given.

So I figured if you were going to get hit, the air was god’s way of giving you a big set of rubber boots.

Las Vegas emerged like a bruise a few minutes later on the horizon and the pilot asked us to quell our nervous chatter while he spoke to the air traffic controllers who would thread us into an approach between the monster 747s and DC10s.

As we came to touch down, the pilot looked in panic at his controls, hit a few switches - the same switches, several times, which can’t be good. He looked out every window he had, over his left shoulder and further back over my shoulder and climbed and banked hard to the left, looking up and around as he did. Two and three hundred-seater jets roared to our left and circled above us to the right.

We looked at the pilot who watched the skies and headed back out towards the desert.

He turned around and shouted: “That was interesting! We lost contact with the tower! Our radio went dead and you can’t land at an airport without a radio! Its too dangerous!”

We looked at him helpless. We watched him, the skies, then him, then the ground. I think at some stage we blinked, then watched the skies again.

“The radio is not functioning!”

“Oh don’t say ‘functioning’”,  I thought. People always use big words in a crisis. Biopsy,  severance, malignant, proceedings, collision. Say “it’s fucked” or something, but don’t use the big words.

“When you lose radio, there’s an automatic signal that goes out to say you’ve got no radio and they give you priority - but that’s not working either! We’re getting out of here!!”

The good news was that the Arizona skies had cleared to cloudless, and 20 minutes later we landed in relative safety at an airstrip in the desert, out of sight of Las Vegas or anywhere. The runway was barely big enough to land on, but we touched down and stretched our legs, relieved to be on the ground.

In the middle of nowhere.

With no radio.

In the days before mobile or satellite phones.

Where the only building we could see was a small one-room structure at the end of the runway with a chain and a padlock across the handles of the double door.

There was a payphone next to the building, and the pilot reached under his seat and pulled out a ziplock back full of loose change and headed towards the phone.

He turned and said, “Folks, I’m just going to call the office and tell them where we are and they are going to send an engineer and a bus to get you all back to your hotels.”

When he returned, he said: “They’re going to be a couple of hours.”

It was more like four, but we sat and talked and got to know each other. Some sheltered from the desert sun under the wing of the small plane until as the sun changed colour and dipped under the a darkening sky, a wedge of dust grew bigger and bigger until you could make a bus at the front of it.

The doors opened to a chorus of angels and a flurry of cokes, beers and apologies and we were back in the world we had grown to know.

—
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