Wedged into a coffinlike cockpit, writer Laurence
Gonzales and photographer Jonas Dovydenas set
out to explore the biggest bunch of nothing the
U.S. has to offer: the deserts that blur the border
between Nevada and Oregon. It's all in the
January/February issue's "Empty America:
Beyond the End of the Road." Well, almost all of
it.
As Gonzales reveals here, when the assignment
ended, the adventure raged on.
When [ADVENTURE] received the article and saw the
photos, they liked [the story] very much and wanted it to be
on the cover. We had one shot that was perfect for the cover
except it wasn't shot as a cover—it was just a snapshot,
basically.
We had landed the plane on a dry lakebed and spent the night
there, and I had built this huge fire. The plane was in the
background, and the sun was going down. I was sitting
there in front of this great bonfire. ...But it wasn't framed
right, and it didn't have space for cover lines and was just a
little 35mm shot. So they sent us back to reshoot it for the
cover.
We jumped in the plane again and flew 11 hours back to
Nevada to go out to the same spot and do the same thing and
shoot the cover. We got to Elko, Nevada, which is our base
of operations and jumping-off point for this great vast empty
area. ...then got up the next morning and got our gear
together to go out to the desert and land on the same dry
lakebed.
As we were getting ready to go we noticed that the wind was
picking up and the sky looked kind of bad. ...The weather
briefer told us there wasn't supposed to be any rain until
seven o'clock, and we figured that allowed us enough time. ...
The thing about that dry lakebed is it's this extremely fine
powder that hardens to the consistency of concrete. But if
you put any water on it at all, it immediately turns into this
incredible muck. It's like quicksand. And so we had this
image of ourselves setting the plane down there and it
starting to rain and [us never getting] out—you know, our
skeletons will be found a thousand years from now encased
in this mud.
Anyway, we rushed out to the airport and started getting
ready to shoot on out to the desert when this flight instructor
came in from a flight. We asked her how it was and she said
there was a wall of dust from the surface up to 7,000 feet
(2,134 meters) tall, just rumbling in over the mountains as
she hightailed it back to the airport.
...We raced back to the hotel, got all our stuff, raced back to
the airport, dumped [our stuff] in the airplane, hot-fueled the
airplane ...got fuel put in it while the engine was running.
We called the tower to get clearance for takeoff. As we were
doing that we could see this wall of dust, which was the
leading edge of the storm, come barreling over the nearest
ridge. At the same time the wind picked up to about 30
knots.
The guy cleared us to take off and we rolled down the
runway with a direct crosswind of probably 40 knots. They
were calling nine miles (15 kilometers) visibility as we were
rolling. We took off and turned away from the storm and he
called four miles (6.4 kilometers). ...As we climbed out
over the first ridge ...we saw this wall of dust enclose the
airport. The airport literally disappeared from sight as we
were climbing away.
That was about the closest call as pilots that we had had with
some major weather. We did't take any pictures,
obviously—we got out of there and headed home. We
were going probably 170 miles an hour (274 kilometers an
hour), so we were able to outrun the storm. But we basically
outran it all the way across the country—chased by
demons out of Empty America. ...
Some weeks later [ADVENTURE] had a local photographer
[Mark Gamba] out on the West Coast go out there with
another airplane. ... The photo was actually "faked." ... It
wasn't our plane and it wasn't our shot.
By Laurence Gonzales, as told to Ted Chamberlain
Chased by Demons