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

It wasn’t a rescue.

It was a pickup truck, bouncing across the playa with its high beams on, going much too fast. It stopped a hundred yards away. Two men got out with flashlights. Young. Loud. They’d been out on the desert drinking and had seen our X in their headlights.

“Hey!” one of them yelled. “You guys crash or something?”

I’ve never been so happy to see two drunk idiots in my life.

They had a satellite phone in the truck. They also had a cooler with nine cans of beer, one bag of ice and two bottles of Gatorade.

Mrs. Calloway drank a whole Gatorade and declined the beer, but only because, she said, she didn’t want to mix it with the excitement.

I called the Washoe County sheriff on the satellite phone. A helicopter from Reno picked us up at dawn.

As it came in over the playa, with the sun rising behind it, I stood in the middle of our big X waving my arms like a lunatic.

Mrs. Calloway sat on the cooler behind me in her pink sun hat, laughing.

“Wait!” she said, when the helicopter landed. “Wait. I haven’t done it yet.”

She picked up the cardboard box.

She walked out a little way onto the cracked white playa, in the cold gold light of morning, alone.

She opened the box. The wind took Harold out across the desert he’d spent his whole life studying, toward the ancient shorelines, toward the mountains.

She stood there for a long time.

Then she came back and handed me the empty box.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was perfect.”

The FAA investigated. The fuel line was from a recalled batch, which the parts supplier’s liability insurance covered, including the cost of retrieving my plane from the playa with a flatbed truck. The emergency locator battery had been defective, too. Same supplier.

Mrs. Calloway’s children were furious. With me. With her. With the desert.

She did not move into the assisted living facility.

Instead, she hired me again.

Every month now. A new place each time. Lake Tahoe at sunrise. The Ruby Mountains in the snow. A tiny airstrip in a ghost town in central Nevada where we ate sandwiches on the wing.

She brings her pills now.

And I always bring two bottles of water.