The Spirit of ST Louis (47 page)

THE TWENTY-FIRST HOUR
Over the Atlantic

HOURS OF FUEL CONSUMED
NOSE TANK

¼ + 11111 + 1

LEFT WING CENTER WING RIGHT WING

¼ + 1 ¼ + ¼ + 1

FUSELAGE
11111 11111 1

Four twenty! It's a half-hour late for instrument readings. But I can't control those needles at the same time I'm making entries in my log. It's not worth the effort anyway. I'll let it go until the air's clear again -- let resetting the course go, too. I'll just mark the hour of fuel consumed. If I hadn't run thirty minutes over on timing, I'd shift to a wing tank. I reach forward and add one more line to the group under "nose tank." The altimeter moves up a hundred feet, and the turn-indicator leans over to the right as I put the pencil back. My route has curved eastward four degrees since I changed course. I offset that much of my compass.

Shall I go on blind, or climb above the clouds? The monotony of this chargeless, opaque mist, and the overwhelming desire for sleep, create a longing for either sea or sky. Since I'm completely shut off from the sea, my mind grasps at the idea of giving up the frustrating hunt for its surface to climb back into sunlight and the crystalline upper world. Now I know which way the wind is blowing, now I've followed in body the excursion my mind made a hundred times during the night and early morning, why tunnel through this dismal fog when I have it in my power to reach the mountain peaks?

"It's clear up above."

"But you've been there all night long."

"It's better than this fog."

"The fog may lift at any moment. Then you'll have the sea."

"It's been an hour now and no lifting."

"It can't go on forever. Any second may bring the waves again."

I decide to continue blind for one hour more. There ought to be another clear spot by that time. If not, then I'll climb up above the clouds. At least the climb will be faster with every hour of fuel consumed.

I reach for the canteen. No, just reaching throws the plane off balance. I don't need water. What if my throat is a little dry? It's more important to keep the needles centered; every time I use an extra muscle they go jumping off.

Maybe if I dropped down to 1000 or 500 feet I'd find it clear right here below me. Maybe I'm flying in a layer of cloud lying well above the sea. Now that my altimeter's properly set, I know exactly how low I can fly in safety. But to go down through the mist, watching the altimeter needle so carefully, and at the same time keeping other instruments where they belong, between glances out to look for waves, seems a superhuman effort.

I continue boring through the fog at 1500 feet, while my mind weaves in and out through time and life ---

EUROPE NEEDS FOOD!

CHILDREN STARVING!

CROPS CAN WIN THE WAR!

Every day new headlines appear in the papers. It's April, 1918, and our high school superintendent has offered full scholastic credit to students who leave classes to work on farms. I'd like to join the Army and fly a Scout, like Eddie Rickenbacker and the pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille; but I'm only sixteen -- too young to enlist -- so I'm going to help raise the crops to make the food we need to win the war. Father has bought a carload of Western heifers, and another of Western sheep. We'll make our hundred-and-twenty acres of field and woodland produce all the food they can.

I'm taking my books with me --- mathematics, civics, English, history -- for I'll graduate this spring; but it's a gesture; there won't be much studying after a full day's labor on the farm; not even our superintendent expects that. There'll be examinations, of course, but they won't be difficult to pass.

Father's going to buy a tractor too, so I can plow and seed our fields. He'll be away most of the time. He has a law office in Minneapolis, and business interests often take him East. I'll have charge of the detailed running of the farm. I must start right in and work hard, for there are fences to mend before the sheep come, and the barn needs fixing for cows ---

Eight degrees right rudder.

B-b-b-a-a-a-a. The sound comes from a hazel-bushed hollow. I duck my head and scratch through dripping branches, glazed with sleet. B-b-a-a-a-a. It's weak and plaintive. I pick up the staggering lamb, sticky-wet from its mother's womb and the melting snow, and start back toward our house. Its legs hang awkwardly against my coat as it nuzzles around for milk. The sky's already darkening for night. I've spent over an hour searching, since the ewe came back with the flock, thin, bloody, and bleating. this lamb wouldn't have lived till morning. It's the fifth I've found abandoned, two of them dead; and more than half the flock must still give birth to offspring. These first-time mothers often leave their young.

It's a hard job keeping orphan lambs alive. You have to dry them off, keep them warm, and feed them cow's milk through a nipple at morning, noon, and night. It takes time, time you haven't got to give them when you're organizing a farm, breaking in new stock, and trying to get the ground prepared for crops in spring ---

Twelve degrees right rudder.

Now it's-mid-September.

"Sixty-four I'm bid. Sixty-four I'm bid. Who'll make it sixty-five? Make it sixty-five! --- Fresh last month and going at sixty-four dollars! --- She's worth ninety if she's worth a cent --- going at sixty-four ---going at sixty four --- sold to Charles Lindbergh at sixty-four dollars!" The auctioneer points his stick at me and turns to the next animal.

I'm buying cows for our milk herd. This roan is mixed as a mongrel dog. She's nothing to be proud of; but her udders are full and her veins are large. She'll run up our check from the creamery. The Western heifers Father bought won't help us much this winter. They're bred for beef, and only a few will even be worth milking.

Some day we hope to have an all-Guernsey farm. We're starting with a thoroughbred bull from the Williams herd, and one registered cow ---

Five degrees right rudder.

Leaves flutter in the wind around us as we lift a barked poplar log, glistening with sap.

"Nay, he rubs in the center. Turn him half-vay 'round." Daniel Thompson scores a four-foot length with his axe, and wedges off the chips. We're building a log house for our Duroc-Jersey hogs. Next week I'll lay the roof and chink the cracks.

Thompson is a tremendous help around the farm. He was born in Norway about seventy years ago. When he first came to this country he worked in logging camps up north. Now he lives in a corner room of the vacant house that we used to rent to tenants. All he wants is a quiet place where he can spend his final years.

It's a month since September's killing frost warned us of a northern winter. The crops are in; our lofts are filled; we're working on the buildings. Walls must be thick and banked with earth. Our animals will have no stoves, and cold is ruthless in central Minnesota ---

Seven degrees right rudder
.

Light from my kerosene lantern throws soft shadows on the floor. The sun went down more than an hour ago. The year of 1919 is two weeks old. My fingers strip out last drops of milk. It's stuffy here in the barn. Air reeks of cows' breath, body, and manure. Tongues rasp up last scraps of bran. Teeth go on munching hay. I don't dare let in more air tonight. It's thirty-seven degrees below zero outside. Steam puffs out from nostrils, and windows are a half-inch thick with frost.

I separate cream, feed calves, check stock in the lower barn. There's Billy, one of my four pet rams. That quarter stick of dynamite he ate doesn't seem to have damaged him. Snow squeaks against my boots as I cross the road and follow the path to our chicken coop. Each breath of air puts frost on my nose hairs that melts when I exhale again. A tree cracks through the night's silence, like a rifle shot. A million stars light up the sky.

There's a honk as I shine my lantern into the goose house. Hooligan, Fanny, and Matilda stretch necks belligerently. No need to worry about them. Of all our animals and birds, they're the only ones that like such cold. Why, this afternoon when I brought them water, they splashed about and preened themselves till each feather was coated with ice.

I leave a lantern burning in the chicken coop, stack hardwood logs on the fire in our house's basement furnace, throw extra sticks in the stove upstairs, undress, and climb in between the blankets of my bed. Sheets are too cold in such weather. Wahgoosh, my fox terrier, jumps up and cuddles at my feet ---

Swing the nose back south.

I slip teat cups on the last two cows and pull out my watch -- half past four in the morning! Today, I'm taking a train to Minneapolis, a hundred miles away. At midnight I'll milk again. It will be a long wait for our animals, especially the fresher cows. But it's the only way I can make the trip and have enough time in the city. This afternoon I must interview prospective tenants for our farm. I've got to find someone who'll take charge of fields, machinery, and stock, for I'm to enter University of Wisconsin in the fall. It's June of 1920. I don't like to think of giving up the animals I know so well, of strange hands moving the levers on my tractor. I may never farm again myself, for I'm going to be a mechanical engineer.

I didn't plan on running the farm permanently. I started because of the war, and kept on because I loved the life and our Minnesota home. But two years out of school are enough. Even now I may be too rusty to keep up in the strict classes of an engineering college. I have my high school diploma; but I haven't studied on the farm, and I've forgotten a lot about procedure, formulae, and rules.

I don't want to go to college very much. But Father and Mother went to the University of Michigan, and they think I ought to be a college graduate too. Everyone says it's important to have a diploma. "It helps you get along in later life."

Suppose I fail to get through the university? Even then I won't come back to the farm. And I'm not going to follow my father into law or politics. I've seen enough of life in Washington to know it's not for me. I'll never forget my father saying, "A lawyer's tied to his office and his desk." And then, after a pause, he added, "It isn't the kind of work you'd like."

Whether I graduate from the university or not, there are two things I want to do. I want to pilot an airplane, and I want to go to Alaska. Vilhjabnur Stefansson says Alaska is our modern frontier, like the West of a generation back. It holds adventure, and opportunity -- and I'm not afraid of cold. Maybe someday I can learn to fly, and then fly to Alaska ---

I’m twenty degrees off course!

I shake my head and thumb my eyelids open. It seem impossible to keep the earth-inductor needle centered. Is it going out of commission again? No, the liquid compass is steady and off in the same direction. Why does the needle insist on riding to the left of its lubber line? Time and again I've centered it with the rudder; but in a few seconds it's back where it was before. In the past my errors have averaged up; they've been as much one way as the other. Now, they have as definite a drift as the wind, and there's apparently nothing I can do about it. In moments of relative awareness this fact causes me much concern; but to the strange new apprehension I've developed, it seems of little import. Let the turn-indicator move excessively from center, and my muscles react to press the rudder; but ten degrees left on the compass causes them not the slightest stir.

THE TWENTY-SECOND HOUR
Over the Atlantic

HOURS OF FUEL CONSUMED
NOSE TANK
¼ + 1-1-1-1 1-1

LEFT WING CENTER WING RIGHT WING

¼ + 1 ¼ + ¼ + 1

FUSELAGE

Four fifty-two. I grope for the pencil in my pocket, and take my eyes from the turn- indicator long enough to add another mark to the group under "nose tank." There are an impressive number of those leaden marks now, on the instrument board -- twenty of them -- and an extra hour using the top gallons from the tanks. I'm twenty-one hours from New York. I switch over to the right wing-tank -- time to lighten it a bit. Log entries can go until the air's clear.

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 takeoff.

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.

Sometimes, shut in by fog, the impression of movement ceases, and I seem to be just hanging in space -- unrelated to any outside point of reference, hypnotized by the instruments, deluded by the noise and vibration of the engine into the belief that I'm flying rapidly across an ocean between two great continents of the world. How fantastic it is to think that if I just sit here long enough, juggling these needles, France will lie below -- like a child's imaginary travels in a parlor chair.

Over and over again, I fall asleep with my eyes open, knowing I'm falling asleep, unable to prevent it; having all the sensations of falling asleep, as one does in bed at night! and then, seconds or minutes later, having all the sensations of waking up. When I fall asleep this way, my eyes are cut off from my ordinary mind as though they were shut, but they become directly connected to this new, extraordinary mind which grows increasingly competent to deal with their impressions ---