Her Last Flight(37)

“Watch the shore,” calls Lindquist. “That’s how you get your bearings. The waves will carry you one way, so it’s up to you to counter the drift.”

I think I understand her. The board rises and falls with the incoming waves. I lie down on my stomach and rest my cheek against the slippery wood, so that my whole body moves in this delicious rhythm, surging and then idling, the sun baking me from above. Some small effort’s needed to keep from wandering off, but even that’s beyond me. Haven’t I struggled against the current all my life? Haven’t I fought and scrapped and survived? And all along there was another way. To lie on a strip of wood and allow the ocean to determine my course; to simply exist, lulled by the infinite strength of nature. Probably this is the meaning of heaven. You search and search, you think you glimpse it from time to time, in the aftermath of lovemaking or the bottom of a bottle of good champagne, and always it eludes you. Until now, perhaps? Here on the surface of a pacific ocean?

A round of screeching from the tadpoles. I lift my head and see a wall of approaching water. Lindquist yells something. Just hold on to your board, or something like that. Start paddling.

I look to the kids, who lie on their tiny stomachs like me, brown arms paddling for Jesus, sweet little lungs screaming out delight. I do what they do, except my screaming is not delight. It’s just terror. This monster rises up behind me and gathers me up in its mighty jaws and spits me to shore in a jumble of board and bone and hair and salt water, and somewhere in the middle of it, I lose the desire to live. I just figure I’ll die, and what I know and all I’ve seen will die with me, and maybe that’s what God intended all along.





Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)





July 1928: Hawaii



The island of Oahu lies about two thousand five hundred and sixty miles by air from Los Angeles, assuming you travel the shortest possible route over the curve of the globe. (That’s a hundred miles farther than New York, for reference, although a thousand miles shorter than Lindbergh’s historic flight to Paris.) The average cruising speed of Octavian Rofrano’s revolutionary new twin-engine Centauri was about a hundred and forty miles an hour, which represented a 30 percent improvement over the single-engine Lockheed Vega, considered the fastest plane aloft in the middle of 1928. Divide one by the other, subtract three hours to account for the rotation of the earth, and Sam and Irene could expect to arrive in Honolulu at six-thirty the next morning, or approximately eighteen and a half hours after taking off.

Eighteen and a half hours is a long time to spend in an airplane, especially without stops along the way to stretch your legs and smoke a cigarette. Moreover, the Centauri was flying over the Pacific Ocean, which presented the same featureless, mirage-inducing landscape as a desert. The monotony was not improved by the weather that day. Shreds of fog appeared about a half hour out of Burbank, which soon turned to a bank of cloud so high and thick, Sam pulled back the stick and sent the Centauri climbing all the way up to twelve thousand feet, which was as far as they could safely go without requiring additional oxygen. They now flew above the clouds, but without the ability to drop smoke bombs to measure the wind drift, Irene couldn’t rely on dead reckoning to determine their position. Instead, she tuned the radio to the frequency on which the navy broadcast its navigational beacons. As long as the pings came back in a steady rhythm—as long as Irene could still hear those pings—they were on course.

To pass the time, she wrote a note to Sam.

Radio beacon steady. Hold course.



He wrote back, Nice weather we’re having.

Here at twelve thousand feet in the air, the temperature was cold, about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Both Irene and Sam had already put on their scarves and their fingerless gloves, and still Irene’s fingers were almost too stiff to hold the pencil and scratch out a reply.

First she wrote, Nice to meet your wife at last. She crumpled that up and threw it in the wastebasket.

Next, she wrote, Improvement expected. Clear skies currently in Hawai’i. She crumpled that up too.

Finally: Your daughter takes after you.

Sam pulled this note from the clothesline and held it between his finger and thumb for some time. Irene looked over his shoulder. There was a photograph stuck into the instrument panel, a snapshot of a small, towheaded girl wearing a large bow in her hair. Irene couldn’t tell if Sam was looking at her note or the photograph, or both at once.

After a minute or so, Sam picked up his pencil and wrote on the back of Irene’s note.

Better she turns out like you.





In a well-built airplane like the Rofrano Centauri, ably piloted in decent weather with adequate navigational guidance, fatigue was the chief danger. Every pilot had his own method of dealing with this condition. Most favored coffee. Others appreciated the stimulant effect of chewing gum. Singing was popular, or (among the pious, anyway) the recitation of Bible verses, or (for the mathematically minded) the solution of complex equations. In the account of his famous Atlantic crossing, Lindbergh claimed to resort to propping up his own eyelids.

Now, Sam and Irene were fortunate to share this burden of staying awake during their audacious voyage across the Pacific. They had filled several Thermoses of coffee and packed some sandwiches, though not many because nothing sent you to sleep so quickly as a full stomach. Since Sam flew the airplane, it was Irene’s job to supply cup after cup of java, and also to look the other way when this gluttony reached its inevitable conclusion. (A pair of milk cans, if you have to ask.) She was also supposed to pass notes every ten minutes, to which Sam was supposed to answer back. After six hours of steady and uneventful flying, however, Irene had run out of both technical observations and small talk.