The road took me east, away from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The strip malls and businesses thinned out, and the blocks became more sparsely populated. Warehouses and industrial buildings popped up. I rode along streets lined with chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. When I got to 40th and Ulster, the road petered out. I pulled over and killed the engine. I was parked outside the gates of an airplane salvage yard. A tall, blue corrugated steel building stood on the other side of a fence. The fuselages of long-retired planes sat in pieces around the site. The building sat on 15 acres of land, a lopsided rectangle mostly covered with weeds and the remains of dilapidated airplanes. Some were military aircraft dating back to World War II. Others were broken husks of planes that had crashed and now lay around, waiting to be picked apart for parts. In the 1960s and ’70s, the land had served as a rental car maintenance facility.
