10.Other Atlantics
“If you follow the inner desire of your heart,” she had said in a magazine article, “the incidentals will take care of themselves.” For four long years she had waited to justify herself to herself. She wanted to prove that she deserved at least a small fraction of all the nice things people had been saying about her as a flier. She had the credit, to spilling and overflowing, for already having flown this ocean; she now wanted to make the credit good by making a large deposit, by flying the Atlantic alone.
“Illogical?” She tried to explain with reasons from her heart. “Perhaps. Most of the things we want are illogical!”
Under the left wing she watched a ship knifing slowly through the water toward Newfoundland. She reached for the light toggle and blinked her navigation lights. There was no answer from the ship.
Amelia swallowed. Her mouth was dry. She reached down for a can of tomato juice, punched a hole through the top with a screw driver, and inserted a straw. She sipped slowly, letting the juice moisten her tongue and the inside of her mouth, then she swallowed a mouthful.
“Adventure,” she had always felt, “is worth while in itself.” Even when she was a little girl in Kansas, playing with her sister Muriel and her cousin Lucy Challiss, she had often gone to play “bogey” in the barn in back of the house in Atchison. The three girls would sit in the old buggy. Amelia would pick up the mildewed whip and crack it over the heads of the imaginary horses. They would ride wildly over a cobbled road, the buggy swaying. The horses galloped; the girls were in a hurry to getto Vienna. A knight in shining armor came riding out of the woods—toward them.
“Who’s that?” Lucy shrieked.
“Dispatches, Sir Knight!” Amelia shouted at the man on horseback; she was not afraid. “For the Congress of Vienna of Treves, in favor of the Holy Grail.” Undaunted, she continued, “Crusade about to start—unless we get through, the Pagan may prevail!”
The knight put up his lance and let them pass.
“Women can do most of the things men can do,” she had written. “In anything that requires intelligence, coordination, spirit, coolness, and will power (and not too heavy muscular strength) women can meet men on their own ground.”
She grinned as she remembered. She had once climbed upon a delivery horse, had explored the caves in the cliffs overlooking the Missouri River, had invented a trap and caught a chicken, had jumped over a fence that no boy her own age had dared to try, had even popped bottles off a fence with a rifle. If it was new and if it was different, she couldn’t wait to try it, especially if some boy dared her.
She had twenty-eight different jobs in her life and she hoped to have two hundred and twenty-eight more.
The restless urge. Better than any college education was it to experiment, to meet new people, to find out what made them tick. Adapt, please, anger, study: these were better than any classroom. The unexpected by adventure became the inevitable. Even the small things, if they were an invitation to hop out of the rut, meant just as much—as flying the Atlantic.
She stamped her feet on the floor of the cockpit. Then quickly she lifted herself from the seat and tried for a more comfortable sitting position. The motor purred steadily. The phosphorescence of the numbers and dials of the instruments was the only light. Outside it was night. The moon shone over plane and sea.
There had been many “Atlantics” before—things she had wanted very much to do, against the opposition of tradition, neighborhood opinion, and so-called “common sense.” Therehad been the time she left Ogontz School before graduation to become a nurse in Toronto. Learning to fly in California had ostracized her among the more conventionally minded girls. By driving a truck to deliver sand and gravel, to earn money to fly and buy her own plane, she had become a simple nobody. Such things were simply not done, not by a girl.
“The girl in brown who walks alone.” Now she was the girl in brown leather flying suit and helmet, flying alone across the Atlantic Ocean. She looked at the smooth and worn leather of the arm of her suit, and grinned as she remembered her first flying jacket, how she had slept in it so it would have a used look. At first she had been shy about flying.