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

I’ve made a lot of landings.

That was the best one I’ve ever made.

The Cessna touched down on the cracked white surface of the playa at sixty knots, bounced twice, rolled for six hundred feet and stopped with its nose wheel in a soft patch of alkali, tilted forward like a dog bowing.

Nobody was hurt.

Mrs. Calloway lifted her head, straightened her sun hat, and said, “Well. That was marvelous.”

Then she took another picture.

Here’s what I knew, sitting in that silent cockpit.

We were twenty-two miles from the nearest dirt road. Sixty miles from the nearest town. It was September, and by two in the afternoon it would be ninety-eight degrees on the playa with no shade but the wing.

I had filed a flight plan. When we didn’t arrive back in Reno, somebody would come looking. Eventually.

The emergency locator transmitter in the tail should have gone off automatically when we landed hard.

It hadn’t. I checked. The battery was dead. I’d replaced it eleven months earlier. It was supposed to last two years.

My cell phone had no signal.

The radio reached nobody.

And I had exactly one bottle of water. A one-liter Nalgene I’d tossed in my flight bag that morning.

One bottle. Two people. One of them eighty-one.

I climbed out and helped Mrs. Calloway down from the cockpit. She stood on the white playa and looked around at the mountains on the horizon in every direction, shimmering in the heat.

“Mr. Coulter,” she said. “Are we in trouble?”

I’ve never been good at lying.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We’re in a little bit of trouble.”

She nodded, very seriously.

“Then I should probably tell you something,” she said. “I have a heart condition. And I left my pills in the car in Reno.”