Nomadland, and those the Badlands.
I'd just seen Ken Burns' magisterial five-part series on Ernest Hemingway and felt sure I had flown at some point into Rapid City, where the author late in life apparently tried to walk into a live propeller in an effort to do what he managed a little later anyway.
Seems, without checking the logbook, that I had. Checked into a motel where prior to turning in I took a walk around town in the dark and passed a used parking lot where there was a DeLorean the other side of the fence, which at the time was likely worth a lot less than they are now. The motel was near the railroad and I recall those poignant wailing horns and clanking crossings you get in the movies.
But prior to checking in I'd taken a flight, in a trusty Tomahawk, over those badlands at dusk. I suspected then what I got to see Friday evening... that an engine-failure was death or certain injury. The colours though were spectacular, the air so silky smooth that for the only time I can remember in an aeroplane I could trim it for an approach and it flew itself onward wholly undisturbed.
Which could not be said of the radar controller, checking on me from time to time like a mother its ducklings. I wish now I'd thanked him for doing so, as I do on those two occasions when the chances were, two others had saved my life.
Then why do it, fly a Russian roulette over a decidedly bad landscape, albeit with very long odds? For the same reason I guess that people die on motorcycles and fast cars, or in wingsuits or on skis. Because a life in which every minute is predicated on the need to stay alive is really no life at all.
As they say in the film, "You don't want to die with your sailboat still on the driveway."
Nor your giant-sized drone, come to think of it.
