How an Aviating Loner in a Ghost Town Helped Me Rediscover Freedom

Out here in the Great Basin where we prefer vast, uninhabited landscapes, I met a hermit named Ivo whose ingenious escape story left me astonished and inspired.

Ivo Zdarsky, pioneering aviator, tinkerer and unabashed loner, taking off on a dry lake bed. (Photo courtesy of Ivo Zdarsky) | Edited by Noah Rosenberg

A prehistoric lakebed. Former islands stranded high and dry on the desert. A ghost town. An abandoned militia camp. A landscape so incomprehensibly vast that a distant train whistle is often the only thin signifier of human existence.

Welcome to almost uninhabited Lucin, Utah, home of Ivo Zdarsky. Ivo is a hermit, an aviator and a refugee from former Communist Czechoslovakia, as well as the subject of my recent Narratively story, “The Man Who Pierced the Iron Curtain in a Flying Go-Kart – and Left Civilization Forever” (a finalist for Narratively’s inaugural Profile Prize), which debuted on Thursday. In 1984, at the age of 24, Ivo became the first person to successfully escape the Communist Eastern bloc in a homemade aircraft, a motorized glider he MacGyvered together out of a two-stroke car engine, motorcycle gas tank and wheelbarrow wh…