The Spirit of ST Louis (43 page)

"Ya see that hole over there?" asks Homer, pointing to an archway in one wall, "Floyd -- he's my brother -- he tried to reach the end o' that; but he ran outa time an' food."

Time? Who knows what time it is inside this planet, shut off from sun and stars. Here, time is meaningless. There's no sign of earth's rotation, no direction, twilight, dawn, or day. It's the surface of the world that belongs to man. Above or below, he finds adventure, but not sustenance. To the surface of the earth he must return to live -- to sleep -- to wake -- See the lanterns flicker on those crystal columns -- no, it's moonlight on the mist -- See the shadow in that passage slanting downward -- no, it's another gaping chasm in the clouds --

I look up at the compass to check my heading. Good; it's in one of its steady periods -- steadier than usual -- or -- yes, it's almost stopped oscillating! The earth-inductor needle, too, has regained some of its old precision -- it no longer wobbles from one side to the other with every bump of air. Am I getting out of the magnetic storm? Will it remain behind with the haze and the night's black masses?

The haze is almost gone. The compasses are now reasonably steady. I throw my flashlight out onto the wing struts. There's no trace of ice remaining. It's warmer in the cockpit; pleasantly warm. My hands are warm too, and moist. I pull off my mittens and press an arm out against the slipstream. That air hasn't blown down from the arctic wastes of Canada. It has more the feel of a tropical sea. It's changed completely within the hour, like the clouds. It's friendly, relaxing air -- no danger of ice; no pinpricks on the palm. I lay my mittens on the floor and zip down my flying suit.

The clouds are no longer impassable barriers of ice. They're only opaque masses of air. I can fly through them if the compasses hold steady, drop down into them, keep right on heading eastward though they rise Himalaya-high.

I'm about five hundred miles from Newfoundland. Maybe I've crossed the border of the Gulf Stream. Then the Labrador current is behind, with its icebergs and arctic climate. Down below, the water too will be warm. A man could live a long time in a rubber boat on the Gulf Stream -- especially if it rained a little.

It's like crossing the ridge of a stormbound mountain range to find a sun-bathed valley just beyond. It reminds me of a flight I made to California, two years ago this fall. I'd been bucking a head wind all day with a slow and aged biplane, detouring summits, buffeted by turbulent air, struggling to gain altitude with the under-powered engine. Nevada's sky was dull and gray. Finally, the great Sierras had risen up, a sheer wall in front of me, black clouds lying sharp across their snowcapped peaks. I'd wondered then, as tonight, whether clouds and pillars would merge to form a solid mass. But a pass tunneled through them, narrow, winding, and windswept; bouldered too -- the boulders deathlike in their immobility. It seemed that I'd followed the pass for hours, sandwiched between treetops and clouds, almost brushing precipices with one wing, leaving just room enough to pivot on the other and turn sharply back if storm met ground ahead. It was cold in that open cockpit. I hadn't dressed for such altitudes. Suddenly, as I turned a bend in the pass, earth and sky had opened like a stage. The storm remained on the mountains while I glided steeply down their western slopes, down from the chill of snowcapped ridges into the moist, welcoming warmth of the sun-flooded Sacramento Valley, carpeted with orchards and the lush green of irrigated farms.

Possibly I could glide down here too, if the moon were higher. Its slanting rays cut across great chasms in the clouds. Those chasms may extend all the way down to the waves, two miles beneath me.

But how could the warmth of water reach so great a height so quickly if a west wind is still blowing? I'm not sure exactly where the Gulf Stream runs out here; and even if it drifted in below to warm the upper levels of the ocean, that would hardly account for a sudden change in air temperature at ten thousand feet above the surface. No, a change in air probably means a change in wind. Warmer air must come from the south. A wind from the south would drift me up toward my great-circle route. Then there'd be no need to angle back by compass. But air that originates in the south may not be blowing toward the north. Rules of meteorology aren't that simple. There are all sorts of possible circulations to consider.

The wind bothers me. I think of old pilots' stories about winds aloft that reach velocities of more than a hundred miles an hour, winds which start from one direction and veer around the entire compass rose as you ascend, winds that drift you hopelessly off your course, and sometimes even blow you backward.

Now, I've burned the last bridge behind me. All through the storm and darkest night, my instincts were anchored to the continent of North America, as though an invisible cord still tied me to its coasts. In an emergency -- if the ice-filled clouds had merged, if oil pressure had begun to drop, if a cylinder had started missing -- I would have turned back toward America and home. Now, my anchor is in Europe; on a continent I've never seen. It's been shifted by the storm behind me, by the moon rising in the east, by the breaking sky and warmer air, and the possibility that the Gulf Stream may lie below. Now, I'll never think of turning back.

I let the Spirit of St. Louis bore its way on eastward. Unless the clouds below me break too, there's nothing to do until the sun rises except hold my heading, shift fuel tanks, and fill in the log each hour. The mixture control is well advanced, and the engine's throttled down as far as it's advisable to go. There's no need to watch dials carefully. Earlier in the night if their needles had forecast trouble, the sooner I noticed it and turned back the better chance I had of reaching land. Now, no matter what the needles show, I'll continue on my course as long as engine can hold plane in air. Before, I'd been flying away from safety. Now, every mile I cover brings me closer to it.

THE EIGHTEENTH HOUR

Over the Atlantic

TIME - 12:52 A.M.

Wind Velocity Unknown Visibility Unlimited outside of clouds

Wind Direction Unknown Altitude 9,600 feet

True Course 72° Air Speed 88 m.p.h.

Variation 33° W Tachometer 1625 r.p.m.

Magnetic Course 105° Oil Temp. 34°C

Deviation 1° W Oil Pressure 59 lbs.

Compass Course 106° Fuel pressure 3 lbs.

Drift Angle 10° R Mixture 4

Compass heading 96° Fuel tank Fuselage

Ceiling High Thin Overcast

Above Clouds

Seventeen hundred miles behind. Ninteen hundred miles to go. In one hour more I'll be halfway to Paris -- if the wind is on my tail. I should be north of fifty degrees in latitude.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis, and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds men to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm nor cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while this weightless element that has lived

within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which the circumstances I've gone through make possible.

Then what am I -- the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.

While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

In a period of physical awakeness between these long excursions, I find the clouds around me covered with a whiter light. In the area of sky where my plane is flying, night is giving way to day. The night -- so long -- so short -- is ending. This is the dawn of Europe, of Paris, of Le Bourget. But how dull appreciation is! Dawn -- It's tremendously important. I've waited for it the whole night through. But my senses perceive it only vaguely, separately, indifferently, like pain through too weak an anesthetic. It is intellectual knowledge, while my normal thoughts and actions are mechanical. In flesh, I'm like an automaton geared to a previously set routine.

The minute hand has just passed 1:00 a.m. It's dawn, one hour after midnight. But it's one hour after midnight only on the clock, and back at the longitude of New York where I set it before take-off in the morning—yesterday morning, it is, now. The clock simply shows the number of hours I've been in the air. It relates only to my cockpit and my plane, not to time outside. It no longer marks the vital incidents of day -- dawn, and noon, and sunset. My flight is disconnected from all worldly measures. It passes through different frames of time and space.

With this faint trace of day, the uncontrollable desire to sleep falls over me in quilted layers. I've been staving it off with difficulty during the hours of moonlight. Now it looms all but insurmountable. This is the hour I've been dreading; the hour against which I've tried to steel myself. I know it's the beginning of my greatest test. This will be the worst time of all, this early hour of the second morning -- the third morning, it is, since I've slept.

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.

Something's wrong on the instrument board -- the compass needle -- it's strayed ten degrees off course while I was making resolutions to hold it on its mark. I tense my muscles, shake my body, bounce up and down in the cockpit, bring the nose back onto its heading. I can't afford to waste time and fuel like this. Why spend weeks studying navigation and laying out charts precisely, if I'm going to let my plane swing ten degrees off course? I simply
must
keep that compass needle in the center—good God, it's off again. This is like a feverish dream.

I've got to find some way to keep alert. There's no alternative but death and failure. No alternative but death and failure, I keep repeating, using the thought as a whip on my lagging mind; trying to make my senses realize the importance of what I'm saying. I kick rudder over sharply, skid back into position. But there's no use taking it out on the plane; that's unfair; it's not the plane's fault; it's mine. I try running fast on the floorboards with my feet for as many seconds as the Spirit of St. Louis will hold to course. Then, I clamp the stick between my knees while I simulate running with my hands. I push first one wing low and then the other, to blow fresh air through the cockpit and change pressures on my body. I shake my head until it hurts; rub the muscles of my face to regain feeling. I pull the cotton from my ears, fluff it out, and wad it in again. I must keep glancing at the turn-indicator, hold the needle in center with my feet.

I'll set my mind on the sunrise -- think about that -- watch the clouds brighten -- the hands of the clock -- count the minutes till it comes. It will be better when the full light of day has broken. It's always better after the sun comes up. As that dazzling ball of fire climbs into the sky, night's unpaid claims will pass. The desire for sleep will give way to waking habits of the day -- That's always happened before -- And yet, I'm not sure -- It's never been like this before -- I never wanted so badly -- to sleep –