The Shadow

His stores of small talk exhausted, The Shadow sits silent and thoughtful, sparing enough attention from his private ruminations to keep the plane safely on course. On the horizon the line of blue thickens, slowly rising and darkening into separate mountains of green. The morning fog is long gone by the time they are over the rolling hills that skirt the Catskills. As the plane begins a slow descent, the mountains seem to grow until they are first level, then rising above to one side of the plane. The view out her side is breathtaking, while to the pilot's side the land sweeps away lower and gentler, back the way they came. What he is angling down to is not precisely an airfield so much as an abandoned strip that only private pilots in the area even know exists. There is no tower, not even a hangar, simply a long strip of dirt and an empty shack that seems on the verge of collapse.
The landing is gentle but swift, the mountains grown from fuzzy shapes to gaze down upon to looming giants in a matter of minutes. The Shadow taxies the Beechcraft to a wide swathe of dirt at one end of the strip, and rolls to a slightly bumpy halt.