“Because they don’t get dirty,” Mr. Zdarsky says. “Plus, the badgers don’t see it.”

THERE are ghost towns, and then there are towns that are so deserted they aren’t even the ghosts of ghost towns. Lucin, in Box Elder County, is the latter. In the late 1800s, steam engines stopped nearby to take on water. In the 1970s, a few retired railroad workers were still living here, but they are long gone.

More significant to Mr. Zdarsky is the area’s military history — which may be the reason he found a mysterious 500-foot-wide, 4,000-foot-long runway on his property. During World War II, Wendover, 80 miles south of here, was a bomber training base and firing range, where the Enola Gay was housed. And the Utah Test and Training Range is about 50 miles from Mr. Zdarsky’s house. Even now, the reporter notices the side door shaken by a sonic boom.

“Bomb,” Mr. Zdarsky says, grinning.

Mr. Zdarsky’s hangar and airstrip are surrounded by an electric fence, with a skull-and-crossbones flag at the gate. Once you get within a mile or two, you can spot a tall building on the property that houses a navigational beacon for the Federal Aviation Administration, for which the F.A.A. pays Mr. Zdarsky a rental fee of $2,500 a year.

His home is divided into two 50-by-50-foot areas: one is for his planes, the other is his living space (the bathroom is a separate room). “I notice most people have a house which is usually smaller than my room,” Mr. Zdarsky says. “And inside this house is a bunch of little rooms, called bedroom, living room, whatever. If they want to do something on a computer you have to go in one room, you go to eat in another room. I have just one room, and I can watch the TV here, watch the computer here, eat here, and it is not claustrophobic.”

He points at one of the motorized hinged hangar doors, which can lift 10 feet off the ground. “If I need a bigger window, I can lift this.”

Oh, right, the reporter has just noticed that this house has no windows. Why is that?

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it or not,” Mr. Zdarsky says, quickly dismissing the subject of windows to continue with the joys of single-room living. “And normal people do all this, they have to navigate between all these walls. If I want walls, I can put walls here, but I haven’t found a reason for walling myself in.”

The reporter, always eager to work the psychological angle, offers a theory. Maybe this distaste for walls comes from being trapped in a Communist state? Though, come to think of it, many people lived under Communist rule, and you don’t see a lot of them out here.