The Beast

The Beast is Hig’s cream-and-blue 1956 Cessna 182, a four-seat aircraft whose continued usefulness depends on fuel, maintenance, and careful judgment. It is more than transportation: its side-by-side seating makes room for a companion, while its ability to cross mountain and desert distances turns it into a means of reaching other survivors. As Hig’s journeys grow more ambitious, the old plane becomes both a working machine and a fragile link between isolated lives.

Identity and Configuration

Hig describes the aircraft as a small Cessna 182 and as an old four-seater. Its cream-and-blue finish and age do not make it expendable; he expects to die before it finally gives out. He calls it the Beast, a familiar name that sits between affection and acknowledgment of the machine’s demands. It is useful precisely because it can carry more than a single pilot, even though Hig sometimes considers whether a smaller, more agile aircraft might be better suited to short takeoffs and landings.

The deciding feature is the seating arrangement. The seats are side by side, allowing Jasper to sit as copilot rather than behind Hig in a tandem aircraft. Hig talks to him throughout flights, while Jasper pretends not to listen. The plane’s configuration therefore shapes the companionship its use can accommodate: a technical choice about cabin layout becomes a repeated shared practice.

The aircraft also depends on surviving infrastructure and salvaged supplies. Hig hand-pumps 100 low-lead aviation gasoline from an old airport tank, using the truck that had delivered fuel. When the sun is not shining, he transfers fuel from the tank; with local flights in mind, he has more than the Beast could burn in his lifetime. That calculation rests on a restriction as much as abundance: he plans to keep his sorties local. The plane can remain serviceable only if fuel is available and its use is controlled.

Operating Practices and Navigation

Hig treats preparation as part of flying, not an optional precaution. Before an expedition, he makes two reconnaissance flights, one by day and one at night using night-vision goggles. The goggles can show people as pulsing green shapes through trees when the canopy is not too dense. He then loops south and east and returns from the north, surveying open prairie, old farms, broken windbreaks, and scattered green growth. A destination thirty miles away represents at least a day’s travel on foot, so the plane’s ability to inspect a route changes what Hig can know before approaching it.

The Garmin GPS mounted on the yoke still receives signals from satellites and warns when the aircraft approaches high ground. During a later flight toward Grand Junction, its stored frequency lets Hig call the airport tower, where he had received the beginning of a message three years earlier. He identifies himself over the radio as Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha, six miles southeast and inbound. The GPS is not merely a surviving convenience: it connects navigation to the earlier signal and helps Hig orient himself toward a place whose condition remains uncertain.

Hig also relies on paper procedures and arithmetic. The 1956 Pilot Operating Handbook contains takeoff and rollout tables, which he handles as a precious artifact. For an airfield elevation of 7,500 feet, an air temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and no headwind, the handbook gives a takeoff distance of 950 feet to clear a 50-foot obstacle at empty weight. Before carrying Pops, Hig retrieves the aircraft’s certified weight-and-balance sheet and works through the loading problem. These calculations make the aircraft’s limits explicit: passenger and cargo decisions must be reconciled with altitude, heat, runway length, and the possibility of needing to get airborne quickly.

Fuel planning is similarly deliberate. Before flying to Grand Junction, Hig loads two six-gallon gas jugs behind his seat, a load of less than 75 pounds. With 55 gallons usable in the tanks, the additional fuel would provide just under an hour, but not enough to cover scouting along the way and still return. He carries a 30-pound survival pack with ten days of food and five gallons of water, although the destination is named for its position at the meeting of two rivers. The desert setting and uncertainty about reaching the water make the reserve necessary. Hig takes no more fuel than he does because a lighter aircraft may be able to land and take off in a short space.

Long Flights and Their Risks

The Grand Junction flight carries Hig across the Continental Divide, over burned Boulder and the scarred ski slopes at El Dora. Empty chairlifts swing below the aircraft; on a snowy ridge, Hig spots the tracks of a single large animal. The passage gives the Beast a view over both human and ecological damage, but it also exposes the difficulty of the crossing. The aircraft bumps in the air as it passes over the snow saddle, and Hig recognizes that they are flying high enough to be caught out if conditions or engine performance turn against them.

At Grand Junction, the airport’s long east-west runway appears smoother and better maintained than the broken strips Hig has seen east of the mountains. He reduces power, sets 20 degrees of flaps, and brings the Beast down in a controlled approach. Only after landing does he see that the fuel-flow gauge shows two gallons remaining, at most ten minutes of flight. The near-empty gauge gives a sharp measure of how narrow the margin has become: the aircraft reaches the runway, but the fuel reserve has almost disappeared.

On another leg, Hig and his companions use fuel found at the airport, checking it through a clear plastic tube for water and particles before starting the engine. The Beast runs smoothly. They fill six more five-gallon cans, then take off; Pops spots three bison grazing at the end of the strip, and Hig banks away from them. Later, with just enough fuel to reach Erie, Hig still turns back to land near Winter Park and take on an additional reserve. He and Pops fill the cans beside the town, about seventy yards from its edge, before continuing. The brief stop reflects a recurring tension in Hig’s flying: conservation of fuel matters, but so does refusing to treat a minimum estimate as a safe margin.

Crossing the Continental Divide becomes more fraught on the return route. Hig usually keeps 2,000 feet of clearance over the high terrain, where snow, dead pines, and a long drop to clearings make an engine failure especially dangerous. This time he aims for a low point in the pass, watching the lower country rise behind the ridge as the Beast clears it. After landing, he taxis directly to Bangley’s house, shuts down the engine, and runs inside. The aircraft has carried him back, but the urgency of the landing underscores the exposure built into every crossing.

Passengers and the Aircraft’s Changing Use

The Beast’s cabin and load capacity become essential when Hig helps Cima leave the canyon. At the aircraft, Cima expertly hogties two small sheep, and they secure the animals on packs behind the seats. Hig and Cima fasten their shoulder harnesses, buckle in, and use the checklist clipboard. Cima gives a thumbs-up; Hig checks the trim wheel and oil pressure before advancing the throttle and releasing the brakes. The sequence brings passenger, animal, pilot, and machine into one tightly managed departure, with the checklists and restraints making the risks of the flight tangible without halting its purpose.

Pops is initially waiting beside the road after the group crosses the river, seated on his pack with his rifle between his knees. Hig lands across from him and stops the plane. Later, Pops flies with Hig in the Beast, learning the local landmarks from the air: the tower, the river, the cutbank that forms a defensive moat, the usable ford, and the surrounding roads and families. The aircraft has changed from Hig’s means of solitary reconnaissance into a vehicle for showing another person the geography of their shared life and defenses.

The Beast’s use also shifts as Hig moves beyond the local flights he once intended to make. What had been a carefully rationed asset becomes the means of crossing the mountains, locating a possible community, carrying people and livestock, and returning to Erie. Its endurance is never assured: fuel calculations, weather, elevation, runway condition, and load all constrain what it can do. Yet it repeatedly makes contact possible where a day’s journey on foot would otherwise separate people.

Meaning and Ecological Context

Hig’s dependence on the Beast is set against a world in which familiar forms of life have disappeared. He remembers flying over mountain country where seasonal patterns no longer offer reliable guidance: some winters bring snow, while in two successive years the peaks held almost none. The loss of trout and other animals, and his fear that ecological change may prove more frightening than violence or disease, give the aircraft’s flights a double perspective. From above, the living world can be surveyed, but it cannot be restored by seeing it.

The plane’s continued operation depends on old machines and remnants of the former world: the airport tank, the fuel-delivery truck, the GPS satellites, the preserved handbook, and an airstrip still capable of supporting a landing. Those systems have not vanished all at once; instead, their usefulness is partial and precarious. The Beast gathers them into a working arrangement with Hig’s skill and caution. Its importance lies not in making the post-collapse landscape safe, but in allowing Hig to cross it, carry companions, and act on the possibility that someone may still be waiting beyond the horizon.