The Spirit of ST Louis (37 page)

But those glowing lines and dots seem so much less tangible, so much less secure, than the stars overhead. The stars have always been there. I watched them through the screen of my sleeping porch when I was a child; I drove under them on Minnesota roads with my father and mother; flew under them night after night with the mail. I can trust the stars; they're always the same—familiar constellations following each other slowly through the heavens. As long as I can hold onto them I'll be safe—no nuts to slip, no bearings to jam, up there. Besides, there may be ice inside the clouds; the air has become much colder.

My engine's only turning 1625 r.p.m.; there's plenty of extra power. With a strong tail wind, I'm gaining on my estimate of fuel; I can afford to spend a gallon or two for altitude. I open the throttle until the tachometer needle touches 1650, pull the nose a little higher, and reset the stabilizer. In the morning, I'll regain some of that fuel as I glide down.

I think again of the cautious phrases in Dr. Kimball's forecast. He knew that airmen's lives depended on the wording he used. "Most Atlantic coast stations report the fog clearing," it said, "and indications are that weather along the route will continue to improve." That has all come true.

"A large high pressure area is forming over the North Atlantic," it continued, "and there are local storms off the coast of Europe."

A high pressure area over the North Atlantic. Then it's probably only a small storm ahead, nothing very high or dangerous. Possibly it will still turn out to be only a dense fog lying above the Grand Banks -- they have a reputation for always being foggy.

But how high can white mist rise and still be fog? I wonder. I recall Dr. Kimball's warning that my route lay too far north to depend on the accuracy of his forecasts. The ship lanes may be clear at the same time the great-circle route is covered with fog and storm. Well, I can detour southward to the ship lanes if I have to. There's enough fuel in the tanks to do that, and still take me on to Paris.

I'm flying with my head thrown back, looking up through the skylight at the handful of stars above me, glancing down at intervals to make sure my compass heading is correct. When you can see stars close to the horizon it's easy to hold on course. They draw you toward them like a beacon on the earth. But looking straight up for guidance is like dangling at the end of a rope; it's almost impossible to keep from turning slightly.

The stars blink on and off as haze thickens in places and then thins out again. I hold on to them tightly, dreading the blind flying that lies ahead the moment I let them go, hoping I can climb above the haze into the crystal blackness of the higher night -- hoping, climbing, and yet sinking deeper with every minute that I fly.

Soon haze becomes so thick that, except for those dim points of light, it might as well be cloud. At any moment those stars may blink their last and die, leaving me stranded thousands of feet below the surface, like a diver whose life line has been cut. I'd thought I could climb above the fog and leave it beneath me, a neat and definite layer. Now, I realize what a formidable enemy it is. Its forces have been in ambush all around me, waiting only for the cool of night to show their form.

Why try to hold on to those stars? Why not start in now on instruments? After all, they were put there so I could fly through fog. This game of hide and seek with a half-dozen stars is child's play. But if I start flying blind, God only knows how many hours of it lie ahead. It might go on through the entire night -- the monotony of flying with my eyes always on the instrument board; the strain of flying by intellect alone, forcing the unruly senses of the body to follow the doubted orders of the mind -- the endless bringing of one needle after another back to its proper position, and then finding that all except the one my eyes hold tight have strayed off again. The Spirit of St. Louis is too unstable to fly well on instruments. It's fast, and it has a greater range than any plane that flies; but it's high-strung, and balanced on a pin point. If I relax pressure on stick or rudder for an instant, the nose will veer off course.

And there's the question of staying awake. Could I keep sufficiently alert during long, monotonous hours of flying with my eyes glued to the instruments, with nothing more to stimulate my mind than the leaning of a needle? It was difficult enough to stay awake over the ice fields southwest of Newfoundland, when my eyes could travel the whole horizon back and forth, and with the piercing light of day to stir my senses. How would it be with fog and darkness shutting off even the view of my wing tips? It would be like a dream, motionless yet rocketing through space, led on and on by those will-o'-the-wisp needles, those glowing dials in front of me, always two feet away. A dream that could turn into a nightmare fully as alarming as engine failure. After I'd been flying for an hour or two or three, might I find myself struggling to keep upright, to hold my altitude, to bring my plane back under control (flapping my sleep-bound arms with superhuman effort in a vain attempt to stop the sickening fall)? Might I awake from my stupor to hear air screaming past my cockpit and see the turn indicator moving sluggishly, its venturi clogged with ice?

Then there would be no waking in a soft and comfortable bed. That fall would end -- how would it end? What do you feel in the rending, crashing instant that must exist between life and violent death? Do you experience excruciating pain? Have you time to realize that life itself has ended? Is all consciousness forever blotted out, or is there an awakening as from a dream, as from a nightmare; an awakening that for some reason you can't communicate freely back to living men -- just as you can't communicate freely from a dream? What waits after life as life waits at the end of a dream? Do you really meet your God, or does blank nothingness replace your being? --

I was once braced for the impact of death. I don't yet understand how it missed me. That was during my second emergency parachute jump, a few seconds after I left the cockpit. I had been running tests on a new type OX.X. 6-powered biplane, designed and built at Lambert Field. To gain passenger comfort the plywood-covered fuselage had been made unusually wide, and it was rather short in length. I'd been doing acrobatics at an altitude of about 2500 feet. In wingovers and banks, the plane answered its controls fairly well; but its stalls were mushy, and it had a tendency to fall off after certain maneuvers to the right.

Tailspins were the last items on my test list. I tried a right spin twice, unsuccessfully. The plane simply wouldn't fall into one. But it had snapped into a left spin, and snapped out just as quickly when I reversed controls. Then, I'd tried two full turns to the left, and found my controls useless -- blanketed out by wings and fuselage. Full rudder and stick had no effect. Bursts from the engine did no good. The plane kept right on spinning, nose high, flat, lunging slightly.

I don't know how many revolutions it made all told -- probably eight or ten. My mind was working too fast on other problems to count them. I rode it down for close to two thousand feet, fighting the controls. Then, a glance at the ground showed no more time. It was jump or crash.

I tripped my safety-belt buckle, got my feet beneath me, and rolled out over the high rim of the cockpit, pulling my rip cord the instant I passed under the stablizer. Dizzy spinning pressures stopped. But the ground was right there, leaping at me. Trees and houses looked tremendous. There seemed scarcely enough room for a parachute to string out.

My 'chute opened quickly; but I'd dropped faster than the plane. I was under the periphery of the spin. The canopy had no more than billowed open to check my fall, when I looked up to see the plane less than a hundred feet away, pointed directly at me.

Usually the stroke of death either passes before you're aware of it, or your senses are occupied with the fight for life, or there's good reason to hope you'll escape. That time I

saw it coming. I was helpless. No movement I could make would have effect. There didn't seem a chance for it to miss. I braced my body for the impact -- propeller, wing, or whatever death's instrument might be. Every muscle, every nerve, was tensed for the tearing blow on flesh. Danger had swept all unessential detail from my mind—it was clear as a pane of glass. It had no thoughts of past or future, or of the swinging parachute, or of the closeness of the ground beneath my feet.

If the hand of death ever cracks the door that lets life's senses peek beyond life's walls, it should have cracked it then. In mind and body I'd arrived at the very second of impact. But that door stayed shut. The parachute's shroud lines had gotten twisted in the jump, and they swung me around awkwardly. In the fraction of time it took to turn my head from right to left, the plane passed and somehow missed my body and my 'chute. I wasn't over 350 feet high when I jumped, some of the pilots told me later.

You couldn't come much closer to death than that. And yet I've known times when the nearness of death has seemed to crack the door -- times when I've felt the presence of another realm beyond -- a realm my mind has tried to penetrate since childhood --

It's Sunday in Little Falls. I press my stomach against a window sill of the yellow-brick Buckman Hotel and look out onto the dirt street, one story below. Several carriages are lined up in front, horses tied carelessly to the hitching rail. A farmer's heels click on the new cement sidewalk. The Minnesota sky is whitish blue. The morning is starting to get hot.

It's to be my first day in church. Mother has dressed me in a gray flannel suit, long black stockings, felt hat, and brown kid gloves -- they're terribly uncomfortable. Now we are waiting for our own carriage to drive up. Church! How I dislike that word, although I'm not quite sure what it means. It's keeping me away from the farm, where we usually drive on Sunday mornings. Before our house burned down last summer we lived on the farm all the time.

Why do I have to go to church? Well, my father is going to be a Congressman in Washington. He's going to represent all the people of the town and of the country around it for miles and miles. It's a very important position, and the family of a man who holds such an important position is expected to go to church. Besides, when you're five years old it's time for you to learn something about a mysterious being called God. Church is the place where you learn about Him.

It's even hotter in church than behind our team of horses on the crunching road. There's no movement of leaves outside the window. No breath of air comes through. A smell of too many people weights the sticky dampness. My legs itch under their tight stockings, and stiff edges of my new suit press sharply against skin. The words of the preacher echo back and forth between high wood walls, merging with each other until all are meaningless to my ears. Now and then he mentions God, and death, and another life; but I can't understand him.

What the preacher says is religion. Good people are religious. But you have to be grown up to understand religion. When you don't understand it, it's awfully uninteresting. Two miles southward, the bank of the Mississippi lies cool under the branches of our farm's great pines, and a breeze almost always moves across the water. When church is over, we'll spend the rest of the day there. And in the carriage is a basket full of lunch. Meanwhile I can lean forward and run my thumbnail across the bottom of the pew's woven cane seat. It produces a unique and pleasantly tickling sensation.

Through the years of my childhood, church was an ordeal to be cautiously avoided. God remained vague and disturbing. You heard of Him in story books, in the cursing of lumberjacks, in the blessing of an old aunt. No one could tell you what He looked like, and He seemed to have a lot to do with people who died -- there was nothing more disturbing than death. I pictured Him as a stern old man living in Heaven, somewhere off in the sky like clouds; knowing about and judging your every act. When you died, He might make you pay for all the things you did wrong, like staying home on Sunday, or scratching the bottom of a pew's seat.

On the sleeping porch of our new house, I lay awake in evenings, staring out at the sky, thinking about God and life and death. One might meet God after one died, I decided, but He didn't have much to do with life; no one I knew had ever seen Him, and the people who didn't believe in Him seemed to get along as well as those who did. If there were

no God, then how could man have been created? But if there were a God, how did He begin? He couldn't very well have made Himself up out of nothing. But how did the universe begin -- the stars, and space, and all the planets? It did. There it was. God wouldn't be more remarkable than that. But if God existed, why didn't He show Himself to people, so there'd be no argument about it? No, God was as remote as the stars, and less real -- you could see the stars on a clear night; but you never saw God --

They are dim, blinking, gone -- no, I can still see them. I rip through years of time, from a sleeping porch in Minnesota to a cockpit above the North Atlantic ocean. I feel a sudden desire to tear the pane out of the skylight, to remove all obstruction between my eyes and those points of light above. Glass forms too great a barrier between us. It seems to be holding me in, like prison bars. Through it, stars are but a picture on a flattened screen of air, devoid of true reality, unable to communicate their text. Seeing them through that window is like touching water through a rubber glove.

They blink off again. I open the throttle to 1700 r.p.m. It's best to get above the haze. After all, there must still be close to 300 gallons in the tanks, and in clear air I can make up in my own efficiency what I lose in fuel range by climbing. I may even gain a stronger tail wind at higher altitudes; but -- that's what worries me most -- maybe I won't; maybe there'll be a head wind aloft, or a side wind may drift the Spirit of St. Louis far off course and throw me south, or even north, of Ireland.

Subconsciously, without understanding the full significance of my action, I adopt a basic rule for the flight. Somewhere, in an unknown recess of my mind, I've discovered that my ability rises and falls with the essential problems that confront me. What I can do depends largely on what I have to do to keep alive and stay on course. If there were no alternative, I could fly blind through fog during all the night and day. The love of life is sufficient guarantee for that. But there
is
an alternative, the alternative of climbing faster; and that I choose.

My head is thrown back to look upward. My neck is stiff. But what of it? Hold on to those stars. Guide on them. Don't let them get away.

I was never convinced that going to church in Little Falls that Sunday had any effect on my father's job in Washington. I simply accepted the fact that his election to Congress brought certain changes in life for me, a number of which were disagreeable. Among the most disagreeable were the winters my mother and I spent at the nation's capital.

For me, the city formed a prison. Red brick houses replaced the woodlands on our farm. Concrete pavement jarred against my heels. The crystal light of sky crawled mangily into schoolrooms. It was the clank of street cars, not the hoot of an owl, that woke me at night. Through long winters, I counted the weeks and days until spring when we would return to our Minnesota farm.

Surely my father found interest in his work in Washington. His office was in a great marble building that covered an entire block. I used to roller-skate around it. Congressmen were tremendously important. People talked about how they were going to vote, and treated them with great respect. Hadn't that man in the Navy Yard given me a shaving from a cannon when he found out who my father was? Hadn't a policeman let me walk along a railing in the Capitol grounds when I told him I was a Congressman's son?

My father was often at his desk before dawn and late at night. Sometimes he even slept on a black leather couch beside it. But Congressmen's work seemed awfully boring to me. They spent most of their days indoors, dictating letters, and talking to people from home, and listening to long speeches on the floor of the House. They seldom felt wind or rain on their faces. They even had a tunnel built so they could walk back and forth to the Capitol without being exposed to weather. My father didn't like that tunnel. He used to take me for long walks outdoors whenever he had time. Then we'd plan a camping trip for the summer, or he'd tell stories about his boyhood on Sauk River. Sometimes we'd stop in the House lobby on the way home, and I'd get a ten-cent glass of apple cider, and we'd look at the weather map to see what the day was like in Minnesota.

I spent many hours on the House floor with my father. There were usually plenty of empty seats. Here laws for all the United States of America were made. Here, the future of the nation was decided. It was a wonderful opportunity for a boy to grow up in such an atmosphere, surrounded by great men and great ideas. People often told me that. But the House reminded me of church. It was always too hot, and rather stuffy, and its speeches went on and on like sermons from a pulpit; only instead of talking about heaven and hell, like ministers, Congressmen were more, interested in things like tariffs and trusts. Sometimes you got a headache as you listened --