My Plane Went Down in the Nevada Desert With an 81-Year-Old Woman in the Passenger Seat. She Said It Was the Most Fun She’d Had in Years. We Had One Bottle of Water

The engine quit at 6,500 feet.

No warning. No sputter. One second the propeller was a blur, and the next second it was a still black blade in front of the windshield, and the only sound in the cockpit was the wind.

“Oh,” said my passenger. “That’s new.”

Her name was Mrs. Winifred Calloway. She was eighty-one years old. She was wearing a pink sun hat and holding a cardboard box in her lap.

The box held her husband.

I’m Briar Coulter. I’m 47, divorced, and I fly a little Cessna 182 for hire out of Reno, Nevada. Hunters. Surveyors. Mining engineers. Rich people from Lake Tahoe who don’t want to drive four hours to their ranch.

And sometimes, widows who want to scatter ashes.

Mrs. Calloway had booked me two weeks earlier. Her husband, Harold, was a geologist who’d spent forty years studying the Black Rock Desert, a hundred-mile-long dry lakebed in the middle of nowhere in northern Nevada. He’d asked her to scatter him over the playa from the air.

We were forty minutes out of Reno, directly over it.

I did what you’re trained to do. Airspeed. Best glide. Fuel selector. Mixture. Mags. Restart.

Nothing.

“Mrs. Calloway,” I said, very calmly. “We’re going to land on the lakebed. It’s flat. It’s hard. It’ll be bumpy. Put your head down and hold on to the box.”

She looked out the window at the white, endless desert coming up at us.

“Harold would *love* this,” she said.

Then she pulled a little camera out of her purse.

“Do you mind if I take a picture?”