(NOTE: I wrote this back in January 2017. It’s been making the rounds with friends, so I finally decided to post it here so it would have a permanent public home. Small planes can take you some surprising places — but this remains one of my most surprising adventures so far.)
Flight Training Notes — January 25, 2017
I’ve been in Las Vegas since last Thursday, doing transition training to get myself familiar and comfortable with my new airplane. My Diamond DA-40 is quite a bit different than the Cessna 172s I trained in — low wing instead of high wing; stick controls instead of a yoke; a strange castering nose wheel that makes it taxi like a shopping cart; and very different characteristics in landings, turns, and stalls. The procedures for everything from startup to shutdown are different, too. So I’m on the learning curve to get on top of the differences. Five days in, it’s really starting to click.
Today, we did some long-distance cross-country flying, getting me up to speed on the autopilot and the old-style VOR navigation systems that are still used when GPS isn’t available. My instructor and I flew from Vegas northeast toward St. George and then Cedar City, UT, crossing Bryce Canyon National Park just under a layer of clouds that’s probably now dropping snow on those cities.
It was cold and beautiful, blankets of clouds and columns of sun playing on the red rocks and their snowy shrouds. As we headed south out of Cedar City after lunch, heading for the Grand Canyon, I was annoyed to realize that I needed a pee break (too much iced tea at lunch), which as you might imagine takes on a whole new dimension of hassle when you’re hanging 9500 feet over the middle of frozen, rocky nowhere.
Modern glass cockpits are like Google — they know everything — so with a couple punches of a button, I located the nearest airport that was more or less near our route. Just 15 minutes away, the Garmin avionics informed me, I’d be over the tiny border town of Colorado City, AZ/Hilldale, UT.
And this is where the story gets weird, and a little personal. Ten years ago, I was doing a lot of writing about the Fundamentalist Mormon sects, which are strewn the length and breadth of the intermountain west, from Mexico into British Columbia (where I was living at the time), and from Nevada to Missouri. But the most famous colony of them all is Colorado City/Hilldale, the city owned and run entirely by Warren Jeffs before he was arrested. Nobody lives there who isn’t FLDS. Nobody goes there without being tailed by their cops, or harassed if they try to stay. Though they fund themselves by defrauding the government in dozens of different scams, and are basically a veal pen raising generations of young women who will be delivered into a lifetime of sexual slavery, very few attempts to prosecute them have ever succeeded for long — and none have been able to shut the place down. The town has been there for over a century, during which the population has become so inbred (everybody is a first cousin or closer to everyone else) that they are riddled with genetic defects that are virtually unheard of anywhere else.
I’d always wanted to check this curious community out; but believe me: I did not wake up this morning planning to land a plane in the middle of their town.
The landing was uneventful, except for the aerial view of the enormous, barnlike polygamous houses, endlessly added on to, most of them with parts unfinished (on purpose; it’s a tax dodge), all of them depressingly ugly. They looked like warehouses, which is in a way what they are: places where the patriarchs warehouse their vast stores of women and kids. The airport, by contrast, was sumptuous — very big for the tiny size of the town (no doubt due to one or another of their funding scams), with sophisticated lighting and full taxiways (both incredibly rare in small-town airstrips). The airport terminal building was also very grand, featuring a lofty lounge with enormous bank of windows that took in a breathtaking view of the airport and the hills beyond. I parked on the ramp near the building, and Jamie and I scurried in to find the facilities. When I wandered back out into the big lounge, I found myself alone with two local men who were doing some kind of bookwork at a table.
They wasted no time registering their surprise at the fact that a woman had just landed a plane in their town. “So, are you the pilot of that thing?” one of them asked, gesturing out the window. The other one said, “We heard your voice on the radio. Were you actually flying it?” A few more questions in this vein followed: they genuinely were struggling to wrap their heads around the fact that this woman with cropped, wind-wrecked red hair, standing there in black leather jeans and engineer boots (I suddenly felt *very* oddly dressed) had descended from the outside world in this shiny, pretty high-tech bird. There were questions — about the plane, which is not the usual ancient beat-up Cessna, Piper, or Beech you find at small airports in the western bush; about where I was from, and where my husband was; about who that (tall, young, Gary Cooper-handsome) man I was with was. I saw them stifling their obvious judgment on my being alone in the outback with a man 20 years my junior who is not my spouse — a commonplace that doesn’t even occur to me, but I suddenly realized painted me as some kind of wanton Jezebel. I realized, with a frisson of silent glee, just how obvious it was that I am everything that these very men are trying so hard to prevent their own women from becoming.
It was all very polite — friendly, even -- but it’s hard to imagine another corner of the country that would have felt more alien; or a more bizarre way to arrive there. After a long while, Jamie finally emerged. Together, we answered some questions about the weather we’d encountered on the way over, then said our good-byes and hustled back out to the plane. As I pulled the sleek domed canopy down over our heads, a woman pulled up in a big black dually pickup (so iconic in these parts that they’re known locally as “plyg rigs”), and strode purposefully into the office where the men were. She wore the long prairie dress and absurdly elevated braided hairdo that are the uniform of this sect's women. I wondered if she was on Prozac: the women of this community have the highest rate of anti-depressant use of any population in the entire country.
“Colorado City traffic, Diamond seven-two-eight-Delta-Echo taking runway one niner for southbound departure, Colorado City,” I said, slowly and precisely, in my best low radio voice, my benediction to those men sitting back on the ground, listening to this curious object of horror return to the skies from whence she came. I turned the plane onto the runway, aimed her nose at the far hills, dropped my feet off the brakes, and shoved the throttle forward to the wall.
We spent the next two hours flying directly over much of the western third of the Grand Canyon, following its course back toward Lake Mead, arriving in Las Vegas just as the evening lights on the Strip began to light up the twilight. Another world, indeed.