All You Have to Fear is Fear Itself and A Half Dozen Assault Weapons
A gripping yarn from the days they paid me to write.
Some people get lonely when they travel, but I never do, because I am always accompanied by my old friend, Galloping Anxiety. This was especially true when I was a newspaper reporter heading out of town and had a lot on my mind: Do I have my research print-outs and all my power cords? What about my backup power cords? Notebooks in case my laptop dies? This doesn’t feel like normal turbulence to me.
I also got nervous when I was driving long distances on highways out west with no other drivers on the road. It made me think that I could be lost and that if something went wrong with the car I would have to pull over to the side of the road, where I would die of dehydration. This was not an entirely unfounded fear. I had a terrible sense of direction and sometimes spent half an hour trying to find my way out of the airport. The GPS was a gift from the gods, although it never had the feature I wanted; the reassuring voice.
Yes, Joyce, that was exactly the right exit and now we are on precisely the right road. We have four hours left of daylight and your destination is only one hour away. You did not leave your laptop in the car rental office; you do not need to pull over and make sure it is in the trunk. Yes, you are compulsive but not clinically so. Your galloping anxiety is another matter.
The anxiety disappeared as soon as I got to the subject’s home. I was generally eager to talk to the artists and eccentrics and independent thinkers I traveled around the country to see. Except for this one time in a ghost town in Utah, where I became concerned that the guy I was interviewing might want to kill me.
Wayback Machine: Set the date to March 2012 and the destination to Lucin, Utah. No, you don’t need a street address, there are no streets. There’s no house, either. Just keep an eye out for an airplane hangar. And while we’re time-tripping, let me give a few words of advice to the Journalism School Young ‘Uns out there.
J-School Young-Uns: I don’t wish to be discouraging, but ARE YOU INSANE? Has no one told you that newspaper jobs dropped over fifty percent in the last fifteen years? But if you do manage to get one of the few reporting spots left and you hit a dry spell, i.e. August, there are two words that will always enable you to find a story: Sole inhabitant. Make those words your friends and hold them in your heart forever. It was these very words that allowed me to find the thrilling tale I am about to share with you.
I am, at the time this story takes place, working in the Home section of The New York Times, although I have no design or architectural background. My reporting cupboard, as happens when you know nothing about the field, is once again bare, but having spun counter-clockwise three times, invoked the magic words “sole inhabitant” and consulted with the Great God Google, I find a sensational story.
It deals with an aviation engineer I will call Karl who, as a student in Communist Czechoslovakia in the early ‘80s, builds his own aircraft – basically a hang glider with a motor – and flies to freedom in Austria. Then he moves to Los Angeles and starts an aircraft propeller company. In 1997, flying over the Utah desert, he spots the ghost town of Lucin, with a mysterious 500 foot wide, 4,000 foot runway. Maybe it’s not so mysterious. During World War II, the town of Wendover, 80 miles south, was a bomber training base, where the Enola Gay was housed. It’s an ideal spot for Karl, who is building an experimental aircraft which is part helicopter, part plane.
As there are no houses left in Lucin, Karl builds himself one and thus becomes — wait for it — the town’s sole inhabitant. Maybe the word ‘house’ is misleading. It’s actually an airplane hangar, half of which is Karl’s living quarters, half of which is his aeronautics workshop. Aesthetically, it looks exactly like a hangar — it doesn’t even have windows. This makes it a tough sell for the Home section, but — sole inhabitant — not impossible.
I fly to Salt Lake City and drive three hours through largely empty highway to a run down casino/hotel in Wendover, Nevada, which announces itself with a 63 foot neon sign of a cowboy named Wendover Will.
I cannot tell you how happy I am, when driving in wide open country, to see 63 foot neon signs. I wish the entire west was plastered with them.
Next morning, I drive north to Lucin. The highway is fine until I get onto the county roads, which are both desert and deserted, and see the bleached bones of the reporters who have come before me. No, sorry, that was a steer. And finally, when the road has become a dusty impression, an echo of a road, I spot my subject’s home.
I am not rattled by the black flag with the skull and cross-bones outside Karl’s home. I have spoken to Karl on the phone, he’s a funny guy and a skull and bones flag is a detail any feature writer would appreciate. A savvy subject, awaiting an interview, might even order a skull and bones flag from Amazon. I’m also not concerned about the six or seven rifles Karl has lying around his place.
“I use them for the badgers,” Karl says. “You cannot imagine the damage those badgers do to my runway.”
Sure, it’s a lot of artillery for little badgers, but I grew up in the country, I’ve been around people who hunt. I figure Karl is just a guy who likes guns, the way I like shoes. With his encouragement, I pick up one of the shinier rifles to make friends, the same way I make it a point, when reporting, to pet a subject’s dog or cat.
“Nice little Belgian sniper rifle. So sweet.”
“That’s a .308 sniper rifle,” Karl tells me, as I meet the family. “That’s a .223 sniper rifle. There is a shotgun if the badgers get too close. There is a Belgium FS2000.”
Threatening? Karl, who wears camouflage patterned pants, and has covered a lounge in a similar pattern, is absolutely charming. He tells me a very funny story about the time, after test-flying his home-made plane in Czechoslovakia, that he was stopped by the police. Luckily, he was flying east at the time Karl says, and not too many people try to escape to Russia. He shows me the helicopter/plane he is working on, in the adjoining room. He cooks me home-shot antelope for lunch, asking how I like it. (Medium rare, in case you’re thinking of asking me over.)
When I’ve run through my questions, Karl takes me up on the roof of his home and shows me a large plastic tub, three feet high and three feet wide, that he has filled with dirt. The walls of his hangar are thin, Karl says, if someone starts shooting at him bullets will go right through them. The tub would give him something solid to hide behind.
What?
There’s a crazy man out here, Karl says, who’s been shooting at people.
Galloping Anxiety has been napping back in the car. It won’t wake up till I’m back at the airport. But I am standing on the roof in the middle of the desert, nobody is out there. A man shooting at people is sounding a little paranoid. Anxiety, in the car, stirs.
“Karl” I say, trying to keep it light. “You sure you don’t have a survivalist thing going on here?”
“No, no,” Karl says. “I don’t have one year of food.”
No matter, Galloping Anxiety is out of the car and up the stairs.
“This is getting weird,” Anxiety says. “And there are seven fricking rifles downstairs. Who needs seven rifles? Is he going to shoot badgers with two hands and a foot? Find an excuse to leave this minute and get out of the goddamn house.”
I know, rationally, that Karl is a good guy. Eccentric, perhaps, what with his two identical station wagons and camouflage upholstery, but thoughtful – would a psycho ask how you like your antelope cooked? But the problem with me and anxiety is once it gets into my head, I can’t let it go. Especially as I’ve got the story.
I thank Karl for a lovely afternoon and say I must be going, but Karl has something he’s insistent about showing me: This desert was once ocean, he says, he’s found fossils with the imprint of fish vertebrae in the hills. He’s got to drive me out to see them.
Maybe this is where it goes wrong for women. Faced with the choice of being murdered by someone you’re starting to think could be psycho or being impolite, you get into the car. We head out and when we get to Fossil Hill, Karl reaches into the back and pulls out an assault weapon that has been hidden under an old red towel.
Oh, shit.
“I saw a mountain lion up here the other day,” Karl says.
Galloping Anxiety, naturally, has flipped.
“You are in the middle of nowhere, with a guy who just pulled a hidden weapon out of his car,” it shrieks. “What if he’s planning on killing you? Okay, it would be really stupid, killing a New York Times reporter, especially when people know you’re out here, but since when are psychos rational? Okay, very important, look calm. NOT LIKE THAT, DAMN IT, CALM! Pretend to be worried about the mountain lion, not him.”
“Take. The gun,” I tell Karl. “And get back. In the car. I don’t want to get eaten by a mountain lion.”
Then we go back to his place and I leave, Galloping Anxiety replaced, when I’m thirty miles down the road, by I Am So Fucking Neurotic.
When I get back to New York, I call the local sheriff, who’d I been unable to reach before flying out, to get some background.
Karl?, the sheriff says, great guy. He’s used his plane to help the police with search and rescue missions; he’s got a better arsenal than the sheriff, sometimes the sheriff comes out and they target practice together. Yes, there was a crazy guy in the county who was running around, randomly shooting at people, the sheriff tells me. He lived in the shell of a car he had partly buried in the ground. But that’s another story.
I was laughing out loud.
I have a lifelong acquaintance of GA as well; you portrayed it brilliantly.
next time go with your best first instinct: xanax
bet that skeleton once had a prolific rear end lol