Finding Page

This is one of the best reasons to go flying, one of the ways to fall in love with altitude and wings. Two thousand feet AGL in a Cessna 172 and the autumn world is calendar-art pretty. Forget the math and charts. This is a day for the eyes. The Maple and Sheyenne Rivers west of Fargo, North Dakota, glimmer in their meanderings. Yellow school buses deliver children to farmsteads while crop dusters finish off the season.

I'm flying with Justin Gustofson. In the backseat, our friend Nate Axvig is along for the ride. We're just sightseeing, really. Wandering one way and then another. Adding airports to the lists in our personal history. No hurry. No real destination either. I have my camera ready.

We leave Hillsboro, North Dakota, and turn toward Page. Twenty-one miles from 3H4 to 64G, a heading of 232 degrees. Twelve minutes, give or take, depending on what may call our attention on the way.

Justin reaches over and dials the airport code into the G1000 while I take pictures of a solitary tree in the middle of a harvested field.

"That's odd," he says.

I turn my attention back to flying. Justin dials the knob away from the code and then dials it back in.

The airport simply isn't there.

To be clear, there's no risk. Justin has an iPad and ForeFlight strapped to his leg. 64G is right there on his knee. I have a paper chart and a dusty E6B in my bag. And we're only 30 miles from Hector Field, the Fargo Jet Center and coffee we made ourselves that's likely still warm in the pot. We can see home ground. But we cannot see Page. On the chart, the word OBJECTIONABLE is printed in magenta just north of the runway.

Justin and I smile at each other. This is a small adventure. The runway at Page is 30 feet wide, 2,600 feet long, oriented 17/35. In other words, it's narrow, short and pointed almost directly north and south. We're coming in from the east. Can we find the airport at Page, North Dakota, just by looking? And which one of us will see it first.

There's no risk, but I'm not above teasing my friend who's not a pilot.

"Nate," I say, "we have an issue."

Even though I'm wearing a noise-cancelling headset, I can hear him sit up straighter. Or at least I imagine I do.

"Really?" he asks.

"Yep," I say. "The airport is not in our moving map. We're going to have to do the unthinkable." I pause. "We're going to have to actually look for it."

Nate knows I'm teasing, so now it's just fun.

We follow a pickup truck down a section road and head for a water tower in the distance. The town in front of us should be Page. But on the prairie, "town" is a fluid term. What looks like a collection of outbuildings can be a town. If what we see is Page, the airport should be on the east side. It should look like a driveway.

I'll admit the hunt makes me happy. When I learned to fly, getting lost was the inconceivable monster in the room. Crosswinds and bad planning meant getting lost. Getting lost meant running out of fuel. Running out of fuel meant falling out of the sky. I clutched my charts and stopwatch more dearly than breath, it seemed. To spot a waypoint meant I had some hope of reaching home.

There was a time when every airport, every grass strip, every field had to be discovered, when visual flight rules were the only rules. There was a time when people on the ground lit fires to show airmail pilots which way to go. Every takeoff was an act of confidence and hope. Every landing a type of discovered grace.

Of course, Justin finds the runway first. "Is that it?" he asks. Nate is quiet. "If not," I say, "we're about to give someone an interesting story."

Of course, it's the runway. We touch and we go, smiling all the way. But suddenly there is something deeper in the flying. The old way appeared again, gently. Flying has always been about looking out the window, finding the frontier, then finding home. We nod at our history and hold it close.

Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He holds the world and national records for the fastest flight across North Dakota in a Cessna 152. Scott's books include "Hard Air," "Never Land" and "Prairie Sky."