Ghost Plane

78 years ago a young man sat on the edge of dusty forever. His airplane's wheels dug into dry prairie. He didn't know the grass would soon lift from the earth, carve across the Great Plains in clouds of fury and death. You can see this man against an interior wall in the Las Vegas, New Mexico Railway Depot, his handsome face covered in aviator's goggles, encased in framed glass. Two men stood behind the fuselage. They hugged one another, dark intertwined shadows against the drought-scarred land.

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce leased the parcel beneath his plane one year before, plunked down earnest money for a 40-acre pasture. They drove out herds of thin cattle, a small handful of poor squatters, declared the parched earth an airfield. A local booster club gathered their men, carried buckets of thick white paint and heavy boar's hair brushes to the pasture. They followed Herbert Hoover's strict orders to label their space, painted "Las Vegas" on the hills, a careful circle around the airfield, on the evaporated land so that future aircraft would know they would be welcomed with home-cooked meals, a stuffed cotton bed. The paint dried quickly in the New Mexican sun. The men looked at their creation, added an arrow so that wayward pilots could find the landing strip, even though one was not yet smoothed into the crusty surface.

The residents of Las Vegas patted each other on the back. Not many cities in the Southwest sported an official runway, a place of potential international commerce. Men visited the spot, sometimes taking wives sporting reed-woven picnic baskets filled with chili and tortillas. No planes touched down, not then, not yet, but the city people knew it would soon happen. They added gates at both ends of the field for fuel trucks, and a tall wind sock made of tight white canvas.

The budding airfield caught the eye of Transcontinental Air Transport. TAT sent a courier to north east New Mexico with an important letter. Las Vegas may be one of our official stops, the letter read. Your town may be famous, a place where weary travelers stop on coast-to-coast journeys. We're sending our president, the letter continued. Expect a visit from Charles Lindbergh on October 23rd.

Thousands of Las Vegans packed the airfield. Children carried tiny American flags. Women wore their Sunday best and gently pressed fancy combs of glazed horn into their hair. The sun shot patterns of long-legged men across the soil as the people held handkerchiefs to their noses as Lindbergh landed in a black plume of exhaust.

This moment echoes forever in the Depot's waiting room. The hugging men speak for Las Vegas, for a future not yet realized, not yet understood, a future desperately wanted. The TAT didn't share that hug. They choose Clovis as their official stop. Las Vegas didn't stop leaning into the prairie wind. They caught Lindbergh's passion for flight, and eleven years later - after depression, after a decade of sifting dust - opened the airfield to regular traffic.

Lindbergh never visited Las Vegas again. But somehow he still lives here, on the edge of the grasslands, just behind the train tracks, on a quiet wall only travelers see. His face is hidden in shadowbox glare, but his adventurous spirit radiates, flies past the perceptual boundaries of time and space, lands in the hearts of all Las Vegas' people.