The Spirit of ST Louis (32 page)

I'm tired of holding my plane up of the ice. I shift the stabilizer adjustment back again.

I was the only parachute jumper on the field at Lincoln after Charlie Harden left. Just as people used to say, "
There's
a pilot," when Timm or Biff walked by, they'd speak of me as "the parachute juniper" in still lower tones. And following the example of the pilots, I pretended not to notice the prestige we all enjoyed.

If flying was considered dangerous, wing walking and parachute jumping were regarded as suicidal. On my safety standards of three months before, I would have refused to do either one. But then I was an outsider. The hazards of aviation loomed high in the night of ignorance and shrank with the dawn of knowledge. If you were careless, you would certainly be killed. But if you kept alert, studied the rules, and flew within your skill -- well, Orville Wright, and Glenn Curtiss, and Eddie Stinson, and Ruth Law, and a dozen others showed what could be done. Right on the field at Lincoln there were Timm, Biffle, Bahl, and Slonniger, all old pilots, and all very much alive. Of course Turk Gardner had been killed, but he'd tried to land out of a tailspin -- that was asking for a crash.

The same principle applied to parachute jumping. Parachutes never failed to open if they were properly made and packed. You could usually glide a parachute out of the way of trees; and even if you did land in branches you weren't likely to get hurt badly if you kept your legs together. Just as with airplanes, most accidents were caused by errors which could be avoided.

That jumper who had been killed in Kansas, for example, should never have used a parachute made of pongee silk. The old-timers said there was something about a pongee silk 'chute that kept it from opening quickly -- static electricity, most of them thought. And the boy in Wyoming -- he hadn't even worn a harness. He'd just hooked his arm through the shroud ring. Of course the jerk of opening tore him loose. His parachute was too small anyway--only eighteen feet at the skirt -- a home-made affair of heavy rope and canvas. The pilot should never have taken him up. There was the jumper who had been killed in Nebraska, too. But his pilot circled and dove down so close to the parachute that the plane's slipstream blew the canopy inside out and got it all tangled up with shroud lines. Every one of those accidents could have been avoided. Look at a man like Charlie Harden -- he knew his business; he'd made dozens of jumps and was still alive.

As for wing walking, it was almost as easy to hang on to the struts and wires of an airplane as to climb up through branches of a high tree with the wind blowing hard. Of course you had to get used to the slipstream's whipping blast; but it didn't reach out as far as the inner-bay struts. After you got there, it wasn't bad at all. You could hold on with one hand and look around quite comfortably.

There were lots of tricks in exhibition work -- closely guarded secrets of professional circus flyers. Ownership of a parachute made me an apprentice in the craft, and gave me the right to be taught its skills. I'd made friends with a young mechanic called Pete, and carried him between factory and flying field many times on my motorcycle. In return, he handed me gems from his chest of aviation knowledge. It was from him I learned that a wing walker didn't really hang by his teeth from a leather strap attached to the landing gear's spreader-bar. He simply held the strap in his mouth while his weight was safely supported by a steel cable hooked to a strong harness underneath his coat. The cable was too thin for eyes on the ground to see, and the effect on the crowd was as good as though none were there. Certainly that didn't involve much danger, yet men who hung "by their teeth" from airplanes were called daredevils.

Of course in wing walking, as in parachute jumping, men had been killed; but here, too, it was usually due to avoidable mistakes. There was the performer who slid down under a Standard's lower panel to hang from its wing skid as his pilot flew over the heads of the crowd. Apparently the skid had been damaged in a recent landing. Anyway, his weight broke it off. Spectators told how he seemed to hurl it away in anger before his body hit the ground. The moral was that before you climbed down on a wing skid, you should tape a steel cable to it, with each end fastened firmly to a spar.

The day I stood on the top wing of an airplane while it looped, I was tied on as safely as though I'd been strapped in my cockpit. Dangerous as that stunt seemed to the man on the ground, there was really little danger involved. I had rigged up my own harness with several times the safety factors needed. I made metal heel cups, like those on roller skates, with straps to hold my feet in place. I wore a heavy leather belt around my waist, and attached it to four strong cables which ran to the wing-hinge pins. I might fall down (I did as we came out of the loop), but I could never fall off.

The tachometer needle is riding a shade too high. I bring it back to 1600.

As parachute jumper and wing walker, I again entered a new frame of values as far as danger was concerned. This occupation, that had seemed the sport of daredevils, could be carried on in reasonable safety if one used proper equipment and technique—and flew with an able pilot. The greatest danger lay in the choice of one's pilot; not in the leap off a plane into space, or in the wing walker's apelike stunt which appeared so death-defying to the fairground's crowd. Danger usually lay coiled in the hidden, in the subtle, not the obvious. I could choose and care for my own equipment. I could judge and control my own actions. But a single error on the pilot's part might easily end my life.

I studied every pilot who passed through Lincoln. Was he a "mechanical" flyer, or did he have the "feel" of his plane? How many hours had he logged? How many times had he crashed? What standards of maintenance did he hold? Was he afraid of wind and weather? Did he fly when he was drunk? Visitors who landed on our field never realized the care with which each detail of their lives was watched. And how we admired their qualities and criticized their defects: "He skids on his turns." "His tail's too high taking off." "He over-controls—did you see those ailerons flap when he was coming in to land?" "Boy, he always makes 'em three-point!" This man I would be willing to fly with; that man, I would not.

At last, I found my pilot and my airplane. In mid-July, 1922, the prophesied telegram arrived from Lynch, asking me to join him for the season, and to bring my parachute. I didn't expect to make much money, but I knew that all my expenses would be paid. And Lynch had skill and judgment, and a newly reconditioned plane. I settled my boarding-house bill, stored my motorcycle in the factory basement, packed up parachute and suitcase, and climbed on a hot, old, and grimy day coach that clanked slowly along the rails westward through Nebraska and Kansas. Bird City was almost at the end of the line—a few score houses, a few hundred people, completely surrounded by a sea of wheat.

Banty Rogers made a good living from wheat. He'd mechanized his ranch with tractor, gang plow, and combine. His profits had mounted until the summer of 1922 found him with enough surplus to buy an airplane. He and Lynch met my train at the station.

"You and I are going to barnstorm the towns nearby, Slim," Lynch said as we drove to the plane. "Have you tried out your new parachute yet?"

"No, I haven't had a chance."

"Say, how about startin' out with a jump at Bird City?" Rogers asked. "I'd like the people here to see you." He was grinning and enthusiastic.

"All right. Tonight?" I was anxious to get up into air again.

"No, let's make it tomorrow. I want to pass the word around."

"We've got a blowing valve to grind, Slim, before we do much flying," Lynch broke in. "I thought you and I might pull the block off in the morning."

I met another aviation enthusiast on Rogers' Ranch -- his black-and-white smooth-haired fox terrier, Booster.

"That dog just naturally takes to flying," Lynch said as Booster leapt into the car, his clipped tail vibrating like a fly's wing.

"He's liked to ride in my car ever since he was a pup," Rogers added. "But he'll leave the car any day to ride on my tractor. He chases rabbits that jump out of the wheat -- they're his greatest interest in life. What I can't understand is why he'll leave the tractor for the airplane. But he will -- every time."

Booster became the mascot for our Standard. At first, he rode with me in the front cockpit on cross-country flights. Then, we fastened a rubber mat to the turtleback and bought him a harness so we could snap him loosely into place. As soon as we started the engine, he'd jump onto the stabilizer, run up to his mat, and hook his forepaws around the cockpit cowling. The pilot's head formed his windshield. The danger of flight didn't exist for him. He had no sense of altitude or fear. Once, when we were coming in to land, he tried to jump off fifty feet above the ground to chase some big jack rabbits. There was an unmistakable expression on Booster's face when he saw rabbits, and a tenseness to his body. At altitudes of a thousand feet or so, cows brought the same reaction. As far as animals were concerned, he never seemed able to relate altitude to size.

During the rest of that summer and the early weeks of fall, I was wing walker, parachute jumper, and mechanic. We flew over the golden fields of Kansas, across the badlands of Nebraska, along the Big Horns of Wyoming, to the rimrocks of Montana.

"DAREDEVIL LINDBERGH"—that's how I was billed, in huge black letters on the colored posters we threw out above towns and villages. People came for miles to watch me climb back and forth over wings, and finally leap off into space. Ranchers, cowboys, storekeepers in town, followed with their eyes as I walked by. Had I been the ghost of "Liver-Eating Johnson" I could hardly have been accorded more prestige. Shooting and gunplay those people understood; but a man who'd willingly jump off an airplane's wing had a disdain for death that was beyond them. I lived in a world of clouds and sky, and the great geographical expanses of the West. I had a powerful engine to work with, and an airplane to carry me aloft. I was learning more about aviation each day. Danger? Of course there was danger, yet during that entire year I didn't come as close to losing my life as I had back on our farm at home.

Five years have passed now since I learned to fly. I've spent almost two thousand hours in the air—twice that average flyer's lifetime back in 1922. But there've been close calls—many of them. Vivid images flash through my mind—treetops rushing toward my underpowered plane during takeoff in Minnesota; tangled shroud lines above Kelly; a rudder bar kicked off its post in a bank near the ground at St. Louis; the blur and bump of air from a fighter missed by inches in a Texas sky.

I feel the swoop on shroud lines, hear the pistol-like crack of my parachute skirt in blackest night. With a flash of lightning, I see the wet white canopy above me, bulging here, indented there by translucent, swirling cloud and air. I twist back and forth, down through the black, flashing belly of the storm. How can silk threads stand such whipping? What happens to a parachute that's churned and soaked with rain? If the canopy collapses, will it billow out again? And how much will weight of water increase my rate of fall? Does field or forest lie below? How strong is the wind on the ground? I've jumped from my mail plane, out of fuel, thirteen thousand feet above the earth.

Wing walking, parachute jumping, pursuit planes, the night mail, and now this flight across the ocean—I've never chosen the safer branches of aviation. I've followed adventure, not safety. I've flown for the love of flying, done the things I wanted most to do. I've simply studied carefully whatever I've undertaken, and tried to hold a reserve that would carry me through.

Why does one want to walk wings? Why force one's body from a plane just to make a parachute jump? Why should man want to fly at all? People often ask those questions. But what civilization was not founded on adventure, and how long could one exist without it? What justifies the risk of life? Some answer, the attainment of knowledge. Some say wealth, or power, is sufficient cause. I believe the risks I take are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead. Yes, just being in the air on a flight across the ocean, to Paris, warrants the hazard of an ice field below.

I look down. The ice field? -- it angles off into the distance under my right wing. The sea ahead is covered with waves again, larger and colder, fit companions to the biting air and arctic sky. My shadow is becoming vague and far away. The wind, strong and almost west, blows me along swiftly. The horizon is still clear; no trace of fog. Only a dozen isolated clouds float high in the north. A few miles ahead lie the small French islands of Miquelon and Saint Pierre. Beyond, purple in the distance, the rugged mountains of Newfoundland are rising from the sea.

For thirty miles along Burin peninsula, my course parallels a coast of bare granite mountains, dented with bays and jutted with capes. A fishing schooner close to shore looks like a child's toy --a single pebble rolling down would swamp it. The sun is nearing the horizon. Why does it rush through those last degrees so fast, like a work horse trotting home to its oats after plodding slowly through the day? Already lengthening shadows cut sharp lines from cliff to cliff, and higher summits almost reach the sun.

I've never been as conscious of the minuteness of my plane or of the magnitude of the world. On my right, the ocean extends limitlessly, curving over the earth past a hundred horizons, and by some miracle, which seems beyond science's facile explanation, not spilling off the edges into space. On my left, sheer reddish walls of rock make the Spirit of St. Louis a speck against their background.

Nungesser and Coli may have crashed somewhere among those mountains. If they reached North America, it's barely possible they're still alive in a wilderness such as this. That crag rising high above the others—might they have struck it in a fog? Any one of those cliff-lined valleys could hold a shattered plane. Expeditions sent out to look for them haven't found a trace. But from the start it was almost a hopeless hunt. A plane is hard enough to find in the wilderness when you have some indication of where it crashed. Even then you may fly over the wreckage a dozen times without seeing it. For Nungesser and Coli, there was the northeastern corner of a continent to search, on the off chance that they hadn't gone down at sea. They might have flown, over clouds, far into Canada before running out of fuel. With no accurate clue to follow, searching was only a gesture, the payment of a debt felt by living men to their lost brothers who, by some miracle, might not be dead. When a plane is missing, you may convince yourself by logic that all hope for its crew is gone, yet the vision of injured and starving men haunts you into action, regardless of how futile it may be.

The gesture has been made. The searching parties have returned. Now if Nungesser and Coli are found, it will be through their own resources in reaching habitation, if they're alive; and by chance, if they're dead. If they crashed inland, they may still turn up at some lonely trapper's cabin; or a hunter in future years may stumble across rusting wires, white bones, and rotting spars. If they went down at sea, some floating fragment may reach a ship or beach in tragic confirmation.

I think of the day I saw Nungesser in St. Louis. He was clear of eye, quick of movement. He'd come to give an exhibition with his pursuit plane. I stood nearby, watching the great French ace, thinking of his deadly combats, of the enemies he'd killed, of the clashes from which he had so narrowly escaped. I wonder if he concluded that flying the ocean was less dangerous than, say, a single combat in the air.