The Spirit of ST Louis (46 page)

It would be awfully difficult to work down there with waves breaking over the fuselage and whipped by a gale of wind. The cockpit would probably fill up with water a few seconds after I landed. I might have to hold my breath until I could crawl out through the door and up on top of the plane. Then, I'd have to cut through the roof of the fuselage to get at the raft, and hang on to something while I pumped it up. After that, there'd be the problem of getting my equipment unlashed from the steel tubes under water, and getting it lashed again inside the raft.

Suppose I could get the raft pumped up and loaded. What then? While I was in San Diego planning the flight, I considered using the plane as a sea anchor and signal of distress if I were forced down in the Atlantic. The silver wings would be more likely than my small, black-rubber raft to attract the attention of any ship that passed.

But there's not likely to be a passing ship at this latitude. Looking down on the wilderness of broiling water, I realize that mooring my raft to the plane would cause the waves to break over it -- if the cord held in such a sea. It would be better to cut loose and drift with the wind, southeast toward the ship lanes. At least then I'd be going somewhere. That would be preferable to waiting in one spot, watching an empty horizon, anchored to a sinking plane up in this northern ocean.

But there are other things more important than imagining forced landings; and now that I possess my senses, I must keep them disciplined. It's essential to take stock of my position; to lay out a definite plan of navigation for the day. The wind aloft is probably stronger than it is down here. If it also is from the northwest, and if it didn't shift during the night, I must be well ahead of schedule and south of my course. In that case, I should be about over the middle of the ocean.

The middle of the ocean! I glance down at the chart -- somewhere in that empty space between the continents, somewhere among those small black numerals which represent mountains and valleys under sea -1600 fathoms -2070 fathoms-1550 fathoms, the figures read. Yes, there's ground down below, just as contoured and distinctive as the ground of which continents are made. Water is like fog, hiding the earth from human eyes. If I could see through it, I might locate my exact position from some submarine mountain range.

What wouldn't I give for a high cloud's shadow on the surface to tell me the wind drift aloft! Now, whatever estimate I make is just a guess, a probability on which I can base -- only hope. But right or wrong, I've got to make some estimate. What should I allow for the wind, for the swinging of the compasses, for those detours around thunderheads? And what bothers me still more, how shall I allow for the inaccuracy of my navigation -- for those swerves to right and left of course during innumerable minutes of unawareness? When I left Newfoundland, I set my heading ten degrees northward to compensate for drift. Should I now allow five degrees more? I look at the waves again. The wind streaks are really more tail than side -- my route curved southward during the night. Fifteen degrees might be too much. Then for over an hour I haven't reset the compass at all. That leaves me headed an extra two degrees toward the north.

I have a strong feeling that I'm too far south to strike Ireland unless I change my heading. But there aren't enough facts to back it up. I must consider only the known elements in navigation. If I give way to feeling, that will remove all certainty from flight. Suppose I crank in five degrees to the earth-inductor compass, then if I don't make a landfall by ---

The waves ahead disappear. Fog covers the sea. I have only time to reset the altimeter and start climbing. A hundred feet above water, in rough air, is no place for blind flying. Turbulence is severe. The safety belt jerks against me. Needles jump back and forth over dials until I can follow only their average indication with controls. I push the throttle forward, and hold 95 miles an hour until the altimeter shows 1000 feet. I watch the tachometer needle. It's steadier, and tells the position of my nose on the horizon more accurately than the inclinometer and the air-speed indicator put together. Problems of navigation fade into the immediate need of holding the Spirit of St. Louis level and on course. Adding and subtracting degrees, and keeping one result in my head while I consider some related factor, is too much. And to work with pencil and paper at the same time I watch those needles is out of the question. I'll figure it all out accurately after the fog has passed.

The fog doesn't pass. I go on and on through its white blankness. I'm growing accustomed to blind flying. I've done almost as much on this single trip as on all my flights before put together. Survival no longer requires such alertness. Minutes mass into a quarter-hour. A quarter becomes a half; then three-quarters. Still the waves don't appear. I'm flying automatically again through eyes which register but do not see –

No! No, I can't lie down and sleep! No! No, I can't get out and walk. Rub your eyes, shake your head. You're over the middle of an ocean!

But I’m not over the middle of an ocean. I'm not in an airplane flying through the sky. I'm ---

"CHARLES!"

I hardly hear my nurse's voice above my heartbeat. I've slipped away from her guard to stare fearfully around the gray barn's corner.

"CHARLES, COME BACK!"

A huge column of smoke is rising from our house, spreading out, and blackening the sky. Then that's what the shouts and noise all meant. That's why I was jerked away from my play so roughly and rushed down the kitchen steps. Our house is burning down!

"CHARLES!"

A hand grasps my arm and pulls me behind the barn. "Charles, you
mustn't
watch!" My nurse is excited. She thinks it's too terrible for me to see. Where is my father -- my mother -- What will happen to my toys? ---

Right rudder, five degrees.

"Father will build us a new house."

I hold Mother's hand tightly while she speaks, looking down on the still smoking ruins. It's the next day. Our entire house has sunk into the stone walls of its basement. I recognize our cookstove, under pipes beside the furnace. Next to it are twisted bedsteads. There's the hot-water boiler. There's the laundry sink. Everything is covered with the gray snow of ashes. Right at my feet is a melted, green-glass lump that was once a windowpane. Out of the pit, smoke-smutted but sharp-cut against thick leaves and sky, rises our brick chimney, tall and spindly without a house around it. And on the

chimney mantelpiece, midway up its height, where the big living room once ended, is Mother's Mexican idol -- a small, red-clay figure -- the only object to pass undamaged through the fire. Of course some clothes and books were saved, and the men carried out a few pieces of furniture. But my toys, and the big stairs, and my room above the river, are gone forever ---

The compass needle is leaning again. I must swing the nose right with my rudder.

It was a dreary winter that came after the burning of our house, in 1906. We rented a small flat in Minneapolis. The crisp days of autumn were interesting enough -- rustling leaves, bonfires, and games with children next door. But in icy weeks that began with December, I missed the roomy freedom of my home on the farm. Why go outdoors when you're so heavily dressed you can hardly move? -- when woolen layers bow your arms out from your body, when cold bites into your cheeks and pinches your ears, and you can't get your mittens off to blow your drippy nose. I spend hours on end in dry, heated rooms, with stuffy head and whitening skin. I grow tired of books and toys, and pressing my face against a frosted window. I move aimlessly about, experiment in strange new fields. Why can't I hold ten marbles between ten toes? How long can a cream-filled chocolate last if I eat it with a pin ---

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 1600 feet, a little above my chosen altitude. In a moment, I'll have the plane leveled 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 spiraling, 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 maneuver 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?

I'd had measles in Minneapolis that winter -- drawn window shades -- glasses of bitter medicine -- four days in bed. It's the only time in my life I can remember having a doctor come to see me. The zero-cold months which followed left colorless space in my mind. It now seems that I spent most of them under a flowerpot, with Peter Rabbit, in Mr. McGregor's garden. When spring finally broke the weather, Mother and I made streetcar trips to the city parks, to the shores of Lake Minnetonka, to the falls of Minnehaha.

Summer found us back in our home town of Little Falls. The new house wasn't built yet. We had to live in a hotel. But Crook, our skittish driving horse, trotted us over the two miles of road to our farm almost every day. It was always an exciting ride, for he shied at rustling bushes and wind-blown bits of paper. Once he got so quivery that he just sat down between the shafts and snorted.

One of the carpenters working on our house made me a wooden ladder. It wasn't very long, but with it I could reach the lower scaffoldings, and climb over fresh-smelling piles of lumber. I watched Bolander, the architect, roll out his drawings from which a house would grow. I stood near Chelson, the mason, while he shaped his granite blocks with drill an51 hammer. I kept at a safe distance from Hendrickson, the farmer, while he swung his keen-edged scythe.

Lillian and Eva, my half sisters, were with me on the farm that summer. My father had been married before, and his wife had died. We often went to secret, violet-guarded dells where great pines strained wind through needles, and poplars filtered off the sun. The girls were a little big to play with, but they showed me lots of things, like making teacups out of acorns, and barnyards out of twigs. We'd sometimes go swimming together, and they'd blow up my water wings.

Father didn't have much use for water wings. He thought I'd try harder and learn more quickly without them. He'd often carry me on his back to a mid-river island, telling me to get down in the water and kick hard with my legs to help him buck the current.

I was with my father when I learned to swim. I was eight years old then. We were near our big, red granite "drying-rock," and stripped naked. We almost never wore bathing suits on the river bank, for there was rarely anybody within sight. One day, I waded out neck-deep on the slimy, smooth-stone bottom, and slipped into a hole that was over my head. When I broke surface and coughed in a breath of air, I was startled to find that my father wasn't running toward me. He just stood on shore and laughed. And then I realized that I was swimming by myself. The current quickly carried me to shallow water.

After that, Father and I often went on expeditions to rivers, creeks, and lakes. Now that I could both shoot and swim, I became his partner ---

My senses tell me the left wing is low. Let them think so. Ball and needle are in center.

"How many do you want, Boss?"

My father dumps another turtle into the boat with his oar. It's the summer of 1911. The lake is full of turtles, red, green, and yellow, sunning themselves on top of a thick growth of weeds. They try to dive as we approach, but some become entangled in the matted stems, and these we catch.

"Get that little one, Father!"

It flips in beside me. Sizes vary from summer-hatched babies to thick-shelled, snapping grandfathers. We'll let the big ones go before driving home; but I want the babies for my pen—a series of sandboxes, dishpans, and stone-islanded tubs that I've connected with special turtle walkways.

Father always calls me "Boss." I don't mind; but he's not fooling me. I know who's going to decide when we'll start home, and when we'll go on the next expedition. If I were really boss, we'd stay here tomorrow too, and go to Squaw Lake next week. Squaw Lake has the best fishing I've ever seen -- just like the wilderness lakes of his boyhood, Father says.

Father taught me how to fish, just as he taught me how to handle turtles, and to swim and hunt. But it was Grandfather Land who started me off with a gun. He made me a present of a Stevens single-shot, .22-caliber rifle when I was six years old, and my Uncle Charles, just back from moose country, up in Canada, showed me how to shoot it at a special target in the basement. Whenever you'd hit the bull's-eye there was a clank and an iron bird jumped up. Father thought six was young for a rifle, but the next year he gave me a Savage repeater; and the year after that, a Winchester 12-gauge automatic shotgun; and he loaned me the Smith and Wesson revolver that he'd shot a burglar with. He'd let me walk behind him with a loaded gun at seven, use an axe as soon as I had strength enough to swing it, drive his Ford car anywhere at twelve. Age seemed to make no difference to him. My freedom was complete. All he asked for was responsiblity in return.

The air speed's down to eighty miles an hour, and the nose is sixteen degrees off course!

I warn myself of relaxation's dangers. It's all very well, I argue, to go half asleep in high clear air, but flying blind at low altitude is a matter of life and death -- life and death! It's no use. There's a power beyond my will's control which refutes these claims of my conscious mind, a power which knows exactly where the danger limit lies, and which realizes that as I become more skilled in using instruments, the need for concentration accordingly decreases. Simply telling myself that I must hold those needles on their marks has no effect. That power, that third being, has taken over the direction of my flight, knowing better than I how far down the wing or nose can drop before an emergency has to be declared and the alarm given to my ordinary senses.

I looked forward with great apprehension to long periods of flying blind under conditions of extreme fatigue. I was afraid that needles would jump around the cockpit more with each quarter-hour that passed, and that the plane might get completely out of control. Instead, the needles seem to quiet down. They stay reasonably well in place. The Spirit of St. Louis doesn't vary much in altitude, doesn't stray hopelessly far off course. Annoying as my compass errors are, they're no greater than they were above the clouds before I started flying blind. My errors seem to have certain definite limits, regardless of the condition of pilot, instruments, or air.

With each minute, my confidence increases. At first, my conscious mind didn't trust its ghostlike, newly made acquaintance. But now, when crises come, when sleep presses close and hard, it gives over command entirely, as an ailing man gives over a business he once thought no one else could run.

I climb to 1500 feet. If I fly higher I'm too likely to miss the pockets of clear air below the clouds. If I fly lower, more than half asleep, there'll be too much chance of crashing into water. I wish I could blow up the air cushion. But I can't fly blind with only my knees against the stick. The seat is hard and painful. Pain doesn't help to stay awake, as I once thought it would.