Survivor: The Autobiography (64 page)

I’ve lost command of my eyelids. When they start to close, I can’t restrain them. They shut, and I shake myself, and lift them with my fingers. I stare at the instruments, wrinkle forehead muscles tense. Lids close again regardless, stick tight as though with glue. My body has revolted from the rule of its mind. Like salt in wounds, the light of day brings back my pains. Every cell of my being is on strike, sulking in protest, claiming that nothing, nothing in the world, could be worth such effort; that man’s tissue was never made for such abuse. My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart. It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out – and sleep.

I’ve struggled with the dawn often enough before, but never with such a background of fatigue. I’ve got to muster all my reserves, all the tricks I’ve learned, all remaining strength of mind, for the conflict. If I can hold in air and close to course for one more hour, the sun will be over the horizon and the battle won. Each ray of light is an ally. With each moment after sunrise, vitality will increase.

Shaking my body and stamping my feet no longer has effect. It’s more fatiguing than arousing. I’ll have to try something else. I push the stick forward and dive down into a high ridge of cloud, pulling up sharply after I clip through its summit. That wakes me a little, but tricks don’t help for long. They’re only tiring. It’s better to sit still and conserve strength.

My mind strays from the cockpit and returns. My eyes close, and open, and close again. But I’m beginning to understand vaguely a new factor which has come to my assistance. It seems I’m made up of three personalities, three elements, each partly dependent and partly independent of the others. There’s my body, which knows definitely that what it wants most in the world is sleep. There’s my mind, constantly making decisions that my body refuses to comply with, but which itself is weakening in resolution. And there’s something else, which seems to become stronger instead of weaker with fatigue, an element of spirit, a directive force that has stepped out from the background and taken control over both mind and body. It seems to guard them as a wise father guards his children; letting them venture to the point of danger, then calling them back, guiding with a firm but tolerant hand.

When my body cries out that it
must
sleep, this third element replies that it may get what rest it can from relaxation, but that sleep is not to be had. When my mind demands that my body stay alert and awake, it is informed that alertness is too much to expect under these circumstances. And when it argues excitedly that to sleep would be to fail, and crash, and drown in the ocean, it is calmly reassured, and told it’s right, but that while it must not expect alertness on the body’s part, it can be confident there’ll be no sleep.

The Nineteenth Hour

When I leave a cloud, drowsiness advances; when I enter the next, it recedes. If I could sleep and wake refreshed, how extraordinary this world of mist would be. But now I only dimly appreciate, only partially realize. The love of flying, the beauty of sunrise, the solitude of the mid-Atlantic sky, are screened from my senses by opaque veils of sleep. All my remaining energy, all the attention I can bring to bear, must be concentrated on the task of simply passing through.

The Twentieth Hour

The nose is down, the wing low, the plane diving and turning. I’ve been asleep with open eyes. I’m certain they’ve been open, yet I have all the sensations of waking up – lack of memory of intervening time, inability to comprehend the situation for a moment, the return of understanding like blood surging through the body. I kick left rudder and pull the stick back cornerwise. My eyes jump to the altimeter. No danger; I’m at 1,600 feet, a little above my chosen altitude. In a moment, I’ll have the plane levelled out. But the turn-indicator leans over the left – the air speed drops – the ball rolls quickly to the side. A climbing turn in the opposite direction! My plane is getting out of control!

The realization is like an electric shock running through my body. It brings instant mental keenness. In a matter of seconds I have the
Spirit of St Louis
back in hand. But even after the needles are in place, the plane seems to be flying on its side. I know what’s happening. It’s the illusion you sometimes get while flying blind, the illusion that your plane is no longer in level flight, that it’s spiralling, stalling, turning, that the instruments are wrong.

There’s only one thing to do – shut off feeling from the mind as much as your ability permits. Let a wing stay low as far as bodily senses are concerned. Let the plane seem to manoeuvre as it will, dive, climb, sideslip, or bank; but keep the needles where they belong. Gradually, when the senses find that the plane is continuing on its course, that air isn’t screaming through the cowlings as it would in a dive, that wings aren’t trembling as they would in a stall, that there’s really no pressure on the seat as there would be in a bank, they recover from their confusion and make obeisance to the mind.

As minutes pass and no new incident occurs, I fall into the state of eye-open sleep again. I fly with less anguish when my conscious mind is not awake. At times I’m not sure whether I’m dreaming through life or living through a dream. It seems I’ve broken down the barrier between the two, and discovered some essential relationship between living and dreaming I never recognized before. Some secret has been opened to me beyond the ordinary consciousness of man. Can I carry it with me beyond this flight, into normal life again? Or is it forbidden knowledge? Will I lose it after I land, as I’ve so often lost the essence of some midnight’s dream?

The Twenty-second Hour

Will the fog never end? Does this storm cover the entire ocean? Except for that small, early morning plot of open sea, I’ve been in it or above it for nine hours. What happened to the high pressure area that was to give me a sunny sky? The only storms reported were local ones in Europe!

I remind myself again that I didn’t wait for confirmation of good weather. Dr Kimball said only that stations along the coast reported clearing, and that a large high-pressure area was moving in over the North Atlantic. He didn’t say there’d be no storms. The weather’s no worse than I expected when I planned this flight. Why should I complain of a few blind hours in the morning? If the fog lifts by the time I strike the European coast, that’s all I should ask. The flight’s been as successful as I ever hoped it would be. The only thing that’s seriously upset my plans is the sleepless night before I started – those extra twenty-three hours before take-off.

Of course no one thought the weather would break enough to let me start so quickly. But why did I depend on what anyone thought? Why did I take any chance? I didn’t have to go to a show that evening. I didn’t have to go to New York. This is the price for my amusement, and it’s too high. It imperils the entire flight. If this were the first morning without sleep instead of the second, blind flying would be a different matter, and my navigation on a different plane.

The fog dissolves, and the sea appears. Flying two hundred feet higher, I wouldn’t have seen it, for the overcast is just above me. There’s no sun; only a pocket of clear air. Ahead, is another curtain of mist. Can I get under it this time? I push the stick forward. Waves are mountainous – even higher than before. If I fly close to their crests, maybe I can stay below the next area of fog.

I drop down until I’m flying in salt spray whipped off whitecaps by the wind. I clip five feet above a breaker with my wheels, watch tossing water sweep into the trough beyond. But the fog is too thick. It crowds down between the waves themselves. It merges with their form. A gull couldn’t find enough ceiling to fly above this ocean. I climb. The air’s rougher than before, swirling like the sea beneath it. I open my throttle wider to hold a margin of speed and power.

Before I reach a thousand feet, waves show again, vaguely – whitecaps veiled and unveiled by low-lying scuds of fog. I nose down; but in a moment they’re gone, smothered by mist. I climb.

While I’m staring at the instruments, during an unearthly age of time, both conscious and asleep, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences – vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane. I feel no surprise at their coming. There’s no suddenness to their appearance. Without turning my head, I see them as clearly as though in my normal field of vision. There’s no limit to my sight – my skull is one great eye, seeing everywhere at once.

These phantoms speak with human voices – friendly, vapourlike shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there. Now, many are crowded behind me. Now, only a few remain. First one and then another presses forward to my shoulder to speak above the engine’s noise, and then draws back among the group behind. At times, voices come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, travelling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles; familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.

The Twenty-third Hour

Sea, clouds and sky are all stirred up together – dull grey mist, blinding white mist, patches of blue, mottling of black, a band of sunlight sprinkling diamond facets on the water. There are clouds lying on the ocean, clouds just risen from its surface, clouds floating at every level through twenty thousand feet of sky; some small, some overpowering in size – wisps, masses, layers. It’s a breeding ground for mist.

I fly above, below, between the layers, as though following the interstices of a giant sponge; sometimes under a blue sky but over an ocean veiled by thick and drifting mist; sometimes brushing grey clouds with my wings while my wheels are almost rolling in the breakers’ foam. It’s like playing leapfrog with the weather. These cloud formations help me to stay awake. They give me something on which to fix my eyes in passing, but don’t hold my stare too long. Their tremendous, changing, flashing world removes monotony from flight.

Sunlight flashes as I emerge from a cloud. My eyes are drawn to the north. My dreams are startled away. There, under my left wing, only five or six miles distant, a coastline parallels my course – purple, haze-covered hills; clumps of trees; rocky cliffs. Small, wooded islands guard the shore.

But I’m in mid-Atlantic, nearly a thousand miles from land! Half-formed thoughts rush through my mind. Are the compasses completely wrong? Am I hopelessly lost? Is it the coast of Labrador or Greenland that I see? Have I been flying north instead of east?

It’s like waking from a sound sleep in strange surroundings, in a room where you’ve never spent a night before. The wallpaper, the bed, the furniture, the light coming in the window, nothing is as you expected it to be.

I shake my head and look again. There can be no doubt, now, that I’m awake. But the shoreline is still there. Land in mid-Atlantic! Something has gone wrong! I couldn’t have been flying north, regardless of the inaccuracy of my compasses. The sun and the moon both rose on my left, and stars confirmed that my general direction was towards Europe. I know there’s no land out here in mid-ocean – nothing between Greenland and Iceland to the north, and the Azores to the south. But I look down at the chart for reassurance; for my mind is no longer certain of its knowledge. To find new islands marked on it would hardly be stranger than the flight itself.

No, they must be mirages, fog islands sprung up along my route; here for an hour only to disappear, mushrooms of the sea. But so apparently real, so cruelly deceptive! Real clouds cover their higher hills, and pour down into their ravines. How can those bluffs and forests consist of nothing but fog? No islands of the earth could be more perfect.

The Twenty-fourth Hour

Here it’s well into midday and my mind’s still shirking, still refusing to meet the problems it undertook so willingly in planning for this flight. Are all those months of hard and detailed work to be wasted for lack of a few minutes of concentrated effort? Is my character so weak that I can’t pull myself together long enough to lay out a new, considered course? Has landing at Le Bourget become of so little import that I’ll trade success for these useless hours of semiconscious relaxation?
No; I must, I will
become alert, and concentrate, and make decisions.

There are measures I haven’t yet used – too extreme for normal times. But now it’s a case of survival. Anything is justified that has effect. I strike my face sharply with my hand. It hardly feels the blow. I strike again with all the strength I have. My cheek is numb, but there’s none of the sharp stinging that I counted on to wake my body. No jump of flesh, no lash on mind. It’s no use. Even these methods don’t work. Why try more?

But Paris is over a thousand miles away! And there’s still a continent to find. I must be prepared to strike a fog-covered European coast hundreds of miles off course; and, if necessary, to fly above clouds all the hours of another night. How can I pass through such ordeals if I can’t wake my mind and stir my body?
But the alternative is death and failure. Can I complete this flight to Paris? Can I even reach the Irish coast? But the alternative is death and failure! Death! For the first time in my life, I doubt my ability to endure.

The stark concept of death has more effect than physical blow or reasoned warning. It imbues me with new power, power strong enough to communicate the emergency to my body’s senses, to whip them up from their lethargy and marshall them once more – in straggling ranks, but with some semblance of order and coordination.
It’s life, life, life itself at stake.
This time I’m not just saying so.
I know it.

The Twenty-sixth Hour

Is there something alive down there under my wing? I thought I saw a dark object moving through the water. I search the surface, afraid to hope, lest I lose confidence in vision. Was it a large fish, or were my eyes deceiving me? After the fog islands and the phantoms, I no longer trust my senses. The
Spirit of St Louis
itself might fade away without causing me great surprise. But – yes, there it is again, slightly behind me now, a porpoise – the first living thing I’ve seen since Newfoundland. Fin and sleek, black body curve gracefully above the surface and slip down out of sight.