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E M P T Y A M E R I C A One: Terra Incognito We came into that land from the rich and concupiscent Midwest with its green and rolling fields. The smell of cut hay and fresh manure drifted up through the air vents, as Jonas and I took long turns flying an airplane whose interior was so tight that it felt sometimes as if we reclined side by side in twin coffins. Over Nebraska,the land grew severe,and as we rattled on through a barometric monocline at , feet above mean sea level, it rose to meet us.We climbed to ,, and a harder emptiness beckoned.Vast spaces like a whirling vortex. Though we were yet on its farthest edge, we could feel its inexorable pull. Who would go looking for true wilderness in the United States outside the boundaries of national parks and designated wild areas with names and regulations? And where would he find a true and lawless frontier? Look in the front of a big Rand McNally Road Atlas,where it shows the whole United States caged in a web of interstate highways.It looks like a sad old bear,snared in a reinforced concrete net. Even the spaces between the interstates are crazed with a cyclone fence of two-lane blacktop. But as you draw your finger out west to about the th meridian, there’s one spot at about the nd parallel where it looks as if the bear could get a whole paw through. I- veers up toward Portland, and I- dives toward San Francisco, leaving a great swath nearly untouched. It was there we had set our compass: the last empty place in the contiguous United States. Though we felt increasingly lost, hour after hour as the land rose, we were intent on becoming more lost still, climbing and climbing , until at last we were dodging peaks that leaped above our altitude.  The air felt like hard waves beneath a speedboat, as the mountains thrust it up to hammer on our hull. On day two, we came into the Great Basin after an overnight in Cheyenne and saw a desolation so complete that neither eye nor airplane could measure it. Higher and higher we climbed into skies marked only by the smoke from range fires,and yet we could see nothing man-made from pole to pole. Oh, a few scratchings, overblown by dust or overgrown by sage. But the airplane does not lie: Praeter solitudinum , nihil video. Looking for a way in, then, we had selected the only dirt road we could see and dove at it. Down and down, hitting  miles an hour, I leveled off ten feet above it,where we could feel the ground effect like the rapids of an invisible river. The world meshed like gears around us.I had to concentrate not to get lost in staring and let a wingtip touch the earth. That would hurt. The blur of the world flashed past as I hugged the dusty two-track, which vaulted over rises in the land and dipped back into draws. We call that nap-of-the-earth flying, and by the height of the bushes down its middle, we could see no way to set the plane down on that road. It was hardly a road anymore. We had wanted to land on a road. It is, after all, such a quintessential American symbol: the Open Road. Nowhere else is the road so much a part of who we are. But we flew on beyond the place where the bad road got worse and then ended altogether, where not even the most passionate follower of Neal Cassady would venture. Just west of a reef of rock beyond the Black Rock Desert,we found our portal to the heart of Nowhere. We spotted the first few white patches from a distance of fifty miles, so brilliant that we thought they must be water. Then we dove down to investigate and saw what appeared to be dry lakes.We surveyed several and selected one between Jungo and Sulfur. For landing and takeoff, a quarter mile would have done nicely, and half a mile would have been extravagant. This nameless place was about nine miles long and clear of obstacles except for a double row of greasewood bushes cutting across it at an angle. But since most of the official information that we’d been given about landing sites was fatally wrong, we inspected...

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