Flyover Country

Ever since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of flying. Soaring high above the world, a thousand feet from any other person, with no limits or obstacles in my way, seemed like the ultimate form of freedom. When my parents would send me out to play with friends, I preferred to climb the tallest trees in my neighborhood and sit at the top watching the people pass by below with no idea that I was lurking there above them. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that when I grew up I chose to be a pilot.

I entered ATP training straight out of school, and as soon as I started earning, I started saving for my own single-engine prop plane. When I wasn’t flying for work, I was flying for fun. Going from one middle-of-nowhere airfield to another for no other reason than to enjoy the peace and comfort of my own company.

My longest solo flight was one that I had been planning for a long time. Going from Grant County, New Mexico, to Fairfield, Montana. Over a thousand miles of vast landscapes and empty wilderness without a single major population center on the entire route. I had taken some time off work that most people reserved for spending time with their loved ones to plan out the journey, get my plane fixed up and ready, and wait for the perfect weather forecast that would have me in clear skies for the entire trip.

I set off from New Mexico fully rested and with the same sense of adventure that had possessed me since childhood. Flying solo seemed to put me in a sort of trance state. Once I was free from the chatter of air traffic control, I could focus on the horizon and feel the ground drift away from under my feet as if there was no plane around me. It would bring me back to those dreams of floating high over my childhood home, effortlessly guiding my weightless body through nothing more than thought and gentle motion. I know that most people might find sitting in one place for longer than the average workday with nothing to entertain you but the drone of an engine and your own thoughts insufferable, but to me it was like heaven, and it always seemed to be over far too soon.

I glided north over the hard, lifeless landscape of New Mexico and watched it morph into gentler green plains and finally into sparse forest as I climbed into the mountains of Colorado. So far removed from the landscape, it was difficult to believe that those places really existed, that you could walk across every hill and field or spend a lifetime mapping every river and stream. From the sky, everything looked trivial.

When I estimated I’d been in the air for somewhere between fifteen minutes and five hours, I noticed the outline of a small town in the distance. This was a surprise to me, since it had been a long time since I’d seen any highway or infrastructure that would support a permanent population. I had assumed that I was flying over a national forest or just some area that was too barren and remote for anyone to have bothered settling, but as I approached, I could see more and more clearly that I was wrong. The main body of the town was built in a grid pattern; it had a few dozen houses, a gas station, a church with a graveyard, and even a small school. On the outskirts there were a few more isolated farmhouses with grain silos among dotted circular crop fields.

But within the town’s ordinary layout were details that made me question myself even more. Despite the season entering winter, the fields were overgrown, seemingly left wild. A massive silo that was part of a grain elevator had tipped over, spilling out guts of what looked like brown dirt growing grass. Flying lower to get a better look, I saw that many of the houses were run-down and crumbling. Rusted old cars sat in driveways, but the wide roads were empty. Across the whole town, there wasn’t any sign of movement from man nor animal. It was abandoned.

I was used to flying over empty countryside and endless fields, but I had never found a ghost town on one of my flights before. I was fascinated with the idea of what could have driven hundreds of people to just give up on their home and move somewhere else. The town looked pretty modern, and I couldn’t see any sign of large-scale disaster that might have caused an evacuation. Even if an economic downturn had forced people out, I would have assumed some people would stay behind out of stubbornness.

After circling the town, I decided to follow the main road out to see whether it was even still connected to the rest of the world, and sure enough, it met with a highway running north/south alongside a twisting river. Every now and then along the highway another road would split off down to a remote farmhouse, but as before the fields grew in chaotic patterns filled with green weeds, and tractors lay rotting beside collapsed barns.

Eventually the highway took me through another town, this one larger than the last. There was a cemetery, a junkyard, a high school with a large playing field, and even what looked like a rodeo arena. If I had to guess, I would have said that it had a population of one or two thousand, only it didn’t. There was no traffic on the streets, no children playing in the fields, and the lawns of the houses were all spilling out into the roads between them and in some places almost meeting in the middle.

I had never heard of a town this size being abandoned before. Maybe back in the 1800s, but not recently enough to have power lines in the streets, trampolines in the gardens, and cell towers just outside town. Of course it was possible that something like this could have happened without me hearing about it, but what wasn’t possible was the light grey smudge I could see on the horizon.

There were no cities on my flight path. I’d chosen this path specifically to avoid them. I’d plotted a course that would take me straight through the middle of nowhere. I had expected to pass over a few podunk towns that weren’t big enough to appear on the maps I used, but there was no way I would have missed a major city. And yet as I followed the highway north, the sticks and backwoods I was passing over gave way to sterile, repetitive suburbs, sprawling underneath me like some great net that could envelop me if I didn’t get away fast enough. The spiraling grey rooftops made dizzying, twisting patterns that were broken only by the signs of decay that betrayed their abandonment. Roofs collapsed in on themselves, fallen trees splayed their limbs into the road, a deserted cargo train languished at a two-platform station as if it were waiting for passengers that would never arrive. And all the while, the distant skyline grew closer, larger, and more detailed.

I began to make out the outlines of individual skyscrapers, perhaps a hundred of them, and gathered around their feet was a shadow of smaller high-rises. The skyline began to surround me on all sides, but it wasn’t a skyline I recognized from any movies or postcards, or even so much as a souvenir T-shirt. I didn’t know the silhouettes of the buildings or the names of any landmarks I saw; I didn’t even know the river that had widened and now split the city in two, littered with the corpses of boats still moored in their harbors. And just like the towns, there was no sign of life anywhere. The city could have been home to millions. It should have been home to millions, living in the crumbling apartment buildings below me, working in the countless offices of the high-rises, shopping, partying, and sightseeing in the downtown neighborhoods that now lay dark and silent as the grave.

As dusk began to fall, the city was engulfed in a total darkness. No streetlights came on to mark the existence of civilisation, no lights from windows or cars to give evidence of human life in the area. The skyscrapers were transformed into black shadows against the sunset, and I climbed to a higher altitude for fear of flying into one. Before long the city had entirely disappeared into the night, leaving no more trace of its existence than there had been before I found it.

I drifted on in darkness for some time after that, but far more uneasy than I had been before. The plane that I had once felt freed me from all constraints now felt like a cell that imprisoned me and separated me from the rest of the world. Alone. I began to worry that every city might be as empty as that one, that all humanity might have vanished from the Earth and left me as the sole survivor. But eventually I saw the lights of some small town or outpost come into view and pass below me, and afterwards more towns and well-lit roads before finally I came into view of Fairfield Airport, and when I radioed in my position and altitude, to my untold relief, they acknowledged and responded as normal.

I focused then on escaping my flying prison and returning to the land of the living. The entire procedure was so ordinary that I might have forgotten what I’d seen earlier in the night or written it off as some kind of waking dream. After landing I thought about asking the staff at the airport about the city; after all, they must have had people fly in from the south more times than I could imagine. Someone before me must have seen that city. But after consideration I decided against it. Assuming that I had seen what I’d seen, and it wasn’t somehow imagined or hallucinated, I couldn’t possibly be the only person who knew about it. If an entire city had been evacuated and abandoned for any reason, it would have been national news; it should be common knowledge even years later. The people who lived there must have gone somewhere; even if they’d simply vanished off the face of the Earth, they would have had friends and family all over the country who would have noticed their disappearance, and even ignoring all that, there was no way to explain why the city wasn’t known about before it was abandoned, why it didn’t appear on maps or history books, or even urban legends.

I came to the conclusion that if nobody knows about that city, it’s because they don’t want to know about it, or because someone else doesn’t want them to know about it, and in either case, I couldn’t see it doing me any good to go around asking about it. I have thought about going back by land to see if I could find anything in the city to shed light on what happened there, but unless I could find someone willing to investigate the city with me, I would have to make the journey alone, and above all else, I can’t stand being alone.

Credit: William Robin