Survivor: The Autobiography

by Lewis, Jon E.

  The realization is like an electric shock running through my body. It brings instant mental keenness. In a matter of seconds I have the Spirit of St Louis back in hand. But even after the needles are in place, the plane seems to be flying on its side. I know what’s happening. It’s the illusion you sometimes get while flying blind, the illusion that your plane is no longer in level flight, that it’s spiralling, stalling, turning, that the instruments are wrong.

  There’s only one thing to do – shut off feeling from the mind as much as your ability permits. Let a wing stay low as far as bodily senses are concerned. Let the plane seem to manoeuvre as it will, dive, climb, sideslip, or bank; but keep the needles where they belong. Gradually, when the senses find that the plane is continuing on its course, that air isn’t screaming through the cowlings as it would in a dive, that wings aren’t trembling as they would in a stall, that there’s really no pressure on the seat as there would be in a bank, they recover from their confusion and make obeisance to the mind.

  As minutes pass and no new incident occurs, I fall into the state of eye-open sleep again. I fly with less anguish when my conscious mind is not awake. At times I’m not sure whether I’m dreaming through life or living through a dream. It seems I’ve broken down the barrier between the two, and discovered some essential relationship between living and dreaming I never recognized before. Some secret has been opened to me beyond the ordinary consciousness of man. Can I carry it with me beyond this flight, into normal life again? Or is it forbidden knowledge? Will I lose it after I land, as I’ve so often lost the essence of some midnight’s dream?

  The Twenty-second Hour

  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 take-off.

  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.

  The fog dissolves, and the sea appears. Flying two hundred feet higher, I wouldn’t have seen it, for the overcast is just above me. There’s no sun; only a pocket of clear air. Ahead, is another curtain of mist. Can I get under it this time? I push the stick forward. Waves are mountainous – even higher than before. If I fly close to their crests, maybe I can stay below the next area of fog.

  I drop down until I’m flying in salt spray whipped off whitecaps by the wind. I clip five feet above a breaker with my wheels, watch tossing water sweep into the trough beyond. But the fog is too thick. It crowds down between the waves themselves. It merges with their form. A gull couldn’t find enough ceiling to fly above this ocean. I climb. The air’s rougher than before, swirling like the sea beneath it. I open my throttle wider to hold a margin of speed and power.

  Before I reach a thousand feet, waves show again, vaguely – whitecaps veiled and unveiled by low-lying scuds of fog. I nose down; but in a moment they’re gone, smothered by mist. I climb.

  While I’m staring at the instruments, during an unearthly age of time, both conscious and asleep, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences – vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane. I feel no surprise at their coming. There’s no suddenness to their appearance. Without turning my head, I see them as clearly as though in my normal field of vision. There’s no limit to my sight – my skull is one great eye, seeing everywhere at once.

  These phantoms speak with human voices – friendly, vapourlike shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there. Now, many are crowded behind me. Now, only a few remain. First one and then another presses forward to my shoulder to speak above the engine’s noise, and then draws back among the group behind. At times, voices come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, travelling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles; familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.

  The Twenty-third Hour

  Sea, clouds and sky are all stirred up together – dull grey mist, blinding white mist, patches of blue, mottling of black, a band of sunlight sprinkling diamond facets on the water. There are clouds lying on the ocean, clouds just risen from its surface, clouds floating at every level through twenty thousand feet of sky; some small, some overpowering in size – wisps, masses, layers. It’s a breeding ground for mist.

  I fly above, below, between the layers, as though following the interstices of a giant sponge; sometimes under a blue sky but over an ocean veiled by thick and drifting mist; sometimes brushing grey clouds with my wings while my wheels are almost rolling in the breakers’ foam. It’s like playing leapfrog with the weather. These cloud formations help me to stay awake. They give me something on which to fix my eyes in passing, but don’t hold my stare too long. Their tremendous, changing, flashing world removes monotony from flight.

  Sunlight flashes as I emerge from a cloud. My eyes are drawn to the north. My dreams are startled away. There, under my left wing, only five or six miles distant, a coastline parallels my course – purple, haze-covered hills; clumps of trees; rocky cliffs. Small, wooded islands guard the shore.

  But I’m in mid-Atlantic, nearly a thousand miles from land! Half-formed thoughts rush through my mind. Are the compasses completely wrong? Am I hopelessly lost? Is it the coast of Labrador or Greenland that I see? Have I been flying north instead of east?

  It’s like waking from a sound sleep in strange surroundings, in a room where you’ve never spent a night before. The wallpaper, the bed, the furniture, the light coming in the window, nothing is as you expected it to be.

  I shake my head and look again. There can be no doubt, now, that I’m awake. But the shoreline is still there. Land in mid-Atlantic! Something has gone wrong! I couldn’t have been flying north, regardless of the inaccuracy of my compasses. The sun and the moon both rose on my left, and stars confirmed that my general direction was towards Europe. I know there’s no land out here in mid-ocean – nothing between Greenland and Iceland to the north, and the Azores to the south. But I look down at the chart for reassurance; for my mind is no longer certain of its knowledge. To find new islands marked on it would hardly be stranger than the flight itself.

  No, they must be mirages, fog islands sprung up along my route; here for an hour only to disappear, mushrooms of the sea. But so apparently real, so cruelly deceptive! Real clouds cover their higher hills, and pour down into their ravines. How can those bluffs and forests consist of nothing but fog? No islands of the earth could be more perfect.

  The Twenty-fourth Hour

  Here it’s well into midday and my mind’s still shirking, still refusing to meet the problems it undertook so willingly in planning for this flight. Are all those months of hard and detailed work to be wasted for lack of a few minutes of concentrated effort? I
s my character so weak that I can’t pull myself together long enough to lay out a new, considered course? Has landing at Le Bourget become of so little import that I’ll trade success for these useless hours of semiconscious relaxation? No; I must, I will become alert, and concentrate, and make decisions.

  There are measures I haven’t yet used – too extreme for normal times. But now it’s a case of survival. Anything is justified that has effect. I strike my face sharply with my hand. It hardly feels the blow. I strike again with all the strength I have. My cheek is numb, but there’s none of the sharp stinging that I counted on to wake my body. No jump of flesh, no lash on mind. It’s no use. Even these methods don’t work. Why try more?

  But Paris is over a thousand miles away! And there’s still a continent to find. I must be prepared to strike a fog-covered European coast hundreds of miles off course; and, if necessary, to fly above clouds all the hours of another night. How can I pass through such ordeals if I can’t wake my mind and stir my body? But the alternative is death and failure. Can I complete this flight to Paris? Can I even reach the Irish coast? But the alternative is death and failure! Death! For the first time in my life, I doubt my ability to endure.

  The stark concept of death has more effect than physical blow or reasoned warning. It imbues me with new power, power strong enough to communicate the emergency to my body’s senses, to whip them up from their lethargy and marshall them once more – in straggling ranks, but with some semblance of order and coordination. It’s life, life, life itself at stake. This time I’m not just saying so. I know it.

  The Twenty-sixth Hour

  Is there something alive down there under my wing? I thought I saw a dark object moving through the water. I search the surface, afraid to hope, lest I lose confidence in vision. Was it a large fish, or were my eyes deceiving me? After the fog islands and the phantoms, I no longer trust my senses. The Spirit of St Louis itself might fade away without causing me great surprise. But – yes, there it is again, slightly behind me now, a porpoise – the first living thing I’ve seen since Newfoundland. Fin and sleek, black body curve gracefully above the surface and slip down out of sight.

  The ocean is as desolate as ever. Yet a complete change has taken place. I feel that I’ve safely recrossed the bridge to life – broken the strands which have been tugging me towards the universe beyond. Why do I find such joy, such encouragement in the sight of a porpoise? What possible bond can I have with a porpoise hundreds of miles at sea, with a strange creature I’ve never seen before and will never see again? What is there in that flashing glimpse of hide that means so much to me, that even makes it seem a different ocean? Is it simply that I’ve been looking so long, and seeing nothing? Is it an omen of land ahead? Or is there some common tie between living things that surmounts even the barrier of species?

  Can it be that the porpoise was imaginary too, a part of this strange, living dream, like the fuselage’s phantoms and the islands which faded into mist? Yet I know there’s a difference, a dividing line that still exists between reality and apparition. The porpoise was real, like the water itself, like the substance of the cockpit around me, like my face which I can feel when I run my hand across it.

  It’s twenty-six and a half hours since I took off. That’s almost twice as long as the flight between San Diego and St Louis; and that was much the longest flight I ever made. It’s asking a lot of an engine to run twenty-six hours without attention. Back on the mail, we check our Liberties at the end of every trip. Are the rocker-arms on my Whirlwind still getting grease? And how long will it keep on going if one of them should freeze?

  I shift arms on the stick. My left hand – being free, and apparently disconnected from my mind’s control – begins aimlessly exploring the pockets of the chart bag. It pulls the maps of Europe halfway out to reassure my eyes they’re there, tucks my helmet and goggles in more neatly, and fingers the shiny little first-aid kit and the dark glasses given me by that doctor on Long Island. Why have I let my eyes burn through the morning? Why have I been squinting for hours and not thought of these glasses before? I hook the wires over my ears and look out on a shaded ocean. It’s as though the sky were overcast again. I don’t dare use them. They’re too comfortable, too pleasant. They make it seem like evening – make me want to sleep.

  I slip the glasses back into their pocket, pull out the first-aid kit, and idly snap it open. It contains adhesive tape, compact bandages, and a little pair of scissors. Not enough to do much patching after a crash. Tucked into one corner are several silk-covered, glass capsules of aromatic ammonia. ‘For use as Smelling Salts’, the labels state. What did the doctor think I could do with smelling salts over the ocean? This kit is made for a child’s cut finger, or for some debutante fainting at a ball! I might as well have saved its weight on the take-off, for all the good it will be to me. I put it back in the chart bag – and then pull it out again. If smelling salts revive people who are about to faint, why won’t they revive people who are about to fall asleep? Here’s a weapon against sleep lying at my side unused, a weapon which has been there all through the morning’s deadly hours. A whiff of one of these capsules should sharpen the dullest mind. And no eyes could sleep stinging with the vapour of ammonia.

  I’ll try one now. The fumes ought to clear my head and keep the compass centered. I crush a capsule between thumb and fingers. A fluid runs out, discolouring the white silk cover. I hold it cautiously, several inches from my nose. There’s no odour. I move it closer, slowly, until finally it touches my nostrils. I smell nothing! My eyes don’t feel the slightest sting, and no tears come to moisten their dry edges. I inhale again with no effect, and throw the capsule through the window. My mind now begins to realize how deadened my senses have become, how close I must be to the end of my reserves. And yet there may be another sleepless night ahead.

  The Twenty-seventh Hour

  I’m flying along dreamily when it catches my eyes, that black speck on the water two or three miles southeast. I realize it’s there with the same jerk to awareness that comes when the altimeter needle drops too low in flying blind. I squeeze my lids together and look again. A boat! A small boat! Several small boats, scattered over the surface of the ocean!

  Seconds pass before my mind takes in the full importance of what my eyes are seeing. Then, all feeling of drowsiness departs. I bank the Spirit of St Louis towards the nearest boat and nose down towards the water. I couldn’t be wider awake or more keenly aware if the engine had stopped.

  Fishing boats! The coast, the European coast, can’t be far away! The ocean is behind, the flight completed. Those little vessels, those chips on the sea, are Europe. What nationality? Are they Irish, English, Scotch, or French? Can they be from Norway, or from Spain? What fishing bank are they anchored on? How far from the coast do fishing banks extend? It’s too early to reach Europe unless a gale blew behind me through the night. Thoughts press forward in confused succession. After fifteen hours of solitude, here’s human life and help and safety.

  The ocean is no longer a dangerous wilderness. I feel as secure as though I were circling Lambert Field back home. I could land alongside any one of those boats, and someone would throw me a rope and take me on board where there’d be a bunk I could sleep on, and warm food when I woke up.

  The first boat is less than a mile ahead – I can see its masts and cabin. I can see it rocking on the water. I close the mixture control and dive down fifty feet above its bow, dropping my wing to get a better view.

  But where is the crew? There’s no sign of life on deck. Can all the men be out in dories? I climb higher as I circle. No, there aren’t any dories. I can see for miles, and the ocean’s not rough enough to hide one. Are the fishermen frightened by my plane, swooping down suddenly from the sky? Possibly they never saw a plane before. Of course they never saw one out so far over the ocean. Maybe they all hid below the decks when they heard the roar of my engine. Maybe they think I’m some demon from the sky, like those dragons that decor
ate ancient mariners’ charts. But if the crews are so out of contact with the modern world that they hide from the sound of an airplane, they must come from some isolated coastal village above which airplanes never pass. And the boats look too small to have ventured far from home. I have visions of riding the top of a hurricane during the night, with a hundred-mile-an-hour wind drift. Possibly these vessels are anchored north of Ireland, or somewhere in the Bay of Biscay. Then shall I keep on going straight, or turn north, or south?

  I fly over to the next boat bobbing up and down on the swells. Its deck is empty too. But as I drop my wing to circle, a man’s head appears, thrust out through a cabin porthole, motionless, staring up at me. In the excitement and joy of the moment, in the rush of ideas passing through my reawakened mind, I decide to make that head withdraw from the porthole, come out of the cabin, body and all, and to point towards the Irish coast. No sooner have I made the decision than I realize its futility. Probably that fisherman can’t speak English. Even if he can, he’ll be too startled to understand my message, and reply. But I’m already turning into position to dive down past the boat. It won’t do any harm to try. Why deprive myself of that easy satisfaction? Probably if I fly over it again, the entire crew will come on deck. I’ve talked to people before from a plane, flying low with throttled engine, and received the answer through some simple gesture – a nod or an outstretched arm.

  I glide down within fifty feet of the cabin, close the throttle, and shout as loudly as I can ‘WHICH WAY IS IRELAND?’

  How extraordinary the silence is with the engine idling! I look back under the tail, watch the fisherman’s face for some sign of understanding. But an instant later, all my attention is concentrated on the plane. For I realize that I’ve lost the ‘feel’ of flying. I shove the throttle open, and watch the air-speed indicator while I climb and circle. As long as I keep the needle above sixty miles an hour, there’s no danger of stalling. Always before, I’ve known instinctively just what condition my plane was in – whether it had flying speed or whether it was stalling, and how close to the edge it was riding in between. I didn’t have to look at the instruments. Now, the pressure of the stick no longer imparts its message clearly to my hand. I can’t tell whether air is soft or solid.