But off our left nose, Lordsburg Airport was clear of rain. In the evening over the high desert, in a darkening sky laced with rain showers all around and lightning flashes to the west and south, that simple, mile-long stretch of pavement was a beautiful sight.
I'm not used to flying in rain, and I worried about all that water being sucked into the engine. But my little Grumman AA-1B chugged merrily along, and soon we were turning out of the rain to line up with the runway.
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A strong wind was blowing as we parked, and rain started pelting us as we tied down the plane and closed up the canopy. We had left Dallas in the morning in hopes of reaching Tucson, Ariz., but we knew it was getting too late to continue weaving around thunderstorms, as we had been doing all afternoon.
But my partner, Ty Greenlees, and I were finally making progress on our two-week flight around the United States. Back in Georgia, we had been nearly stalled for two days by the remains of Hurricane Danny.
We waited all of Thursday morning for the fog to lift at Pickens County Airport, a cheerless little airfield in northeastern Georgia that smelled of a nearby chicken farm.
When the clouds finally parted, we roared off for Texas, two days behind schedule. We flew steadily, refueling every couple of hours and watching the landscape change as it slid under our wings.
The low mountains and rolling hills of Georgia gave way to flat, forested land in Alabama and swampy farmland in Mississippi. The Mississippi River was a sprawling tangle of green channels where we passed over it. We saw a barge threading its way up the river; it looked like a toy.
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We made a brief fuel stop at Hope, Ark., a big, old airfield which, the manager told us, had been a training base for B-17 bomber crews during World War II. We were slow to realize this was also President Clinton's old neighborhood.
We entered Texas just south of Texarkana. The Red River looked golden to us in the late afternoon sun.
As we approached Dallas, we stayed low and veered south to avoid Dallas-Fort Worth International and its teeming airline traffic.
The sun turned pink, then red, as we headed for Grand Prairie Airport south of Dallas. We touched down just as the sun sank below the horizon.
For once, we didn't have to worry about finding a motel and a ride into town. Katie Braun is a flight instructor and former corporate pilot we met a couple of years ago. We barely knew her, but when we contacted her to tell her we'd be in her area, she immediately offered to help.
It was almost 9 p.m. when we called her from the airport, but she and her boyfriend, Dale McCombs, drove out to pick us up.
We had run out of clean clothes days ago. We were groggy from hours in 90-degree heat, parched from sitting in a blast of dry wind blowing through our partially opened canopy, and we smelled from days of sweat.
But they didn't flinch. They drove us to Dale's house, handed us towels and a laundry basket and pointed us to showers. While we cleaned up, they grilled steaks and made salad and mashed potatoes. We all ate dinner at midnight.
Friday morning, I asked Katie if it's common for her to get called out of the blue from people who say they're coming to town and want to be taken care of.
"Occasionally, but more often I do that to other people," she said.
Dale also understood what it's like to be a pilot at the mercy of others. His father was an Air Force pilot and Dale flew Phantoms for the Marine Corps. Now he flies Boeing 727 airliners. But he also owns a little Piper Cub for pleasure flying.
They drove us back to Grand Prairie. We made a short hop to Arlington Airport, where we looked at Dale's Cub.
But it was time to be on our way. For the first time on our trip, we had a clear sky. We took off to the south and turned west along Interstate 20.
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The landscape quickly changed. Tree cover gave way to sparse prairie. We climbed steadily with the terrain. Soon, we saw the white gridwork of oil fields, white lines connecting white squares like modern geoglyphs. In the center of each square, the long, black arm of an oil well pump slowly dipped and rose.
We passed to the south of Abilene and Dyess Air Force Base, steering clear of their controlled airspace. We could see a dark row of B-1B Lancer bombers parked at Dyess, and we heard Dyess Tower clear a pair of the big bombers for takeoff. But we were well out of their path by then.
We were getting into Big Sky country. The land seemed to widen, the sky to grow. Instead of peering through dense haze, we could see for dozens of miles. Rocky buttes and low mountain ridges added texture to the landscape. Isolated thunderstorm clouds fanned into the sky on the horizons.
But the distances between airports were also growing. We couldn't count on having an airport in sight every five minutes. We had to pay attention to our fuel consumption, the distance we were covering and our time in flight.
Our flight guide listed Culberson Airport at Van Horn, west of Midland, as being attended 24 hours per day. When we got there, the place was deserted. We walked into the silent, stuffy office. We found a pay phone and a list of phone numbers to call for gas.
At the third number, we reached Larry Simpson at a Radio Shack and office supply store. He showed up a few minutes later to fill our tanks.
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Simpson, it turned out, was Van Horn's airport manager, office supply store magnate and weekly newspaper publisher. He flew helicopters in Vietnam and seemed to be trying to keep the airport open as a public service.
The old field didn't see a lot of business these days. One runway was closed and overgrown by short grass and bushes. "You're the first airplane that's come in here since Wednesday night," Simpson said.
We took off for El Paso. Afternoon thunderstorms were boiling up all along the Texas-Mexico border. We veered around one just west of Van Horn, climbing first to get over a line of jagged ridges.
The storm cloud was a tall pillar of ivory cumulus clouds, but underneath its dark shadow, a black shaft of rain drenched the desert. Lightning flashed through the rain, and we could hear the electrical discharges crackle in our headsets.
From El Paso we headed toward Tucson, but we planned our route airport by airport, eyeing the thunderstorms and estimating the daylight we had left.
Thunderstorms are dangerous to small planes, and we weaved carefully among widely scattered cloudbursts. The black rain shafts with the lightning stabbing down through the darkness was sobering, but we still saw these thunderstorms as things of astonishing beauty. They were all around us, but none was close enough to be a threat. We flew as if floating through a great room filled with columns. Above us, ivory clouds spread across a deep blue sky. Below, bands of rain deluged the parched earth.
Passing over Deming, N.M., we saw more thunderstorms to the south and west. One just to our south was particularly dark, fat, and full of lightning. Worse, we could see the clouds around us churning up fresh storms.
We closed up the plane and got inside the airport office just as a storm broke. Wind and rain swept over the airport for half an hour, while lightning flashed in a sky suddenly turned dark.
We knew we were done flying for the day.