Crossing the Horizon

by Laurie Notaro

  “That might not be so terrible,” Lady Inchcape said, laughing. “You love furs, Elsie.”

  “Yes,” Elsie said, smiling wickedly. “I do. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pushing boundaries. Just think if this sort of air flight was possible back and forth across the ocean.”

  “It would mean my company would go bankrupt,” Lord Inchcape grumbled. “And we’d all end up in a cave with no furs.”

  And then he smiled.

  “I know you understand what I mean, Father,” Elsie said, playfully slapping Lord Inchcape on his bony knee. “Your father was a great adventurer. He had that same spirit.”

  “And the Atlantic swallowed him,” Lord Inchcape said, looking directly into his daughter’s face. “My hope is that the Atlantic never takes anyone I dearly love again.”

  Elsie returned her father’s calm, unambiguous look, then took his hand and squeezed it.

  “Let’s go for tea,” Lady Inchcape suggested, rising from her seat. “I don’t care whether or not the lot of you is fine, but I am starving.”

  * * *

  “You said they’d be fools to leave now!” Mabel yelled into the phone. “And yet, Charlie, two women have taken off for Europe in the past day!”

  “It’s a death mission, I told you,” Levine said on the other end of the connection. “Just you wait and see. Now, I’m not wishing nothing bad on neither one of ’em, but, Mabel, it’s a crazy time to fly. Do you wanna be the Queen of the Air or do you wanna sink to the bottom of the sea? With all of that jewelry, you’d sink fast.”

  “I just can’t believe that little girl is on her way to Paris right now,” Mabel complained, walking across her bedroom, further pulverizing the ancient Chinese vase that lay shattered on the floor in a spray of pieces. “She’s stealing my crown, Charlie! Frances Grayson already landed in Newfoundland to fuel up and is taking off for Denmark at this very minute! I’ll tell you, the next time you talk to Acosta, tell him I want to go as soon as possible. Cuba, Paris, the Arctic, I don’t care. I just have to be out there flying somewhere soon.”

  “That made me think,” Levine said. “I think we should make flotation suits, too.”

  “They looked like water bugs in those suits!” Mabel roared. “I would rather drown than have my last ensemble make me look like a cockroach.”

  “We could put a diamond somewhere on yours,” Levine offered.

  “Have you been drinking?” she asked directly.

  “I will be soon,” he answered.

  “I can’t believe you let a little hick from Alabama beat me,” she said, looking for something else to throw.

  “It’s not over yet, Mabel,” Levine reminded her. “There’s some really terrible weather out there.”

  “Really?” Mabel squealed, at last feeling a glimmer of hope. “Well, thank God!”

  * * *

  “The most important thing for you, Mother,” Elsie said as she clasped her mother’s hands in both of her own, “is that you rest. Get plenty of sun, and make Father wait on you hand and foot.”

  Lord and Lady Inchcape were moments away from boarding the ship that would sail them to a climate Lady Inchcape required to make a full recovery.

  “I hate to think of you alone at the holidays,” she said, furrowing her brow. “It will be our first Christmas apart since, well, you remember. Since you came back.”

  “On the contrary, Mother, I promise you I shan’t be alone. I’m going to try to kidnap everyone and spend some time at Glenapp. I’ve the holiday pageant to organize. I will have my hands full, I assure you.”

  “Please give everyone in Ballantrae my holiday wishes,” Lady Inchcape said wistfully. “I know, with you, the holiday pageant is in wonderful hands. And I look forward to seeing you in the spring.”

  Lord Inchcape stood briskly behind her, tapping his silver-tipped cane against the wooden plank of the pier. He was always impatient when it was time to depart, particularly on one of his own ships.

  “I’m leaving everything in your hands, Elsie,” he said. “I know you can manage.”

  “I will always do my best,” Elsie replied. “Please take good care of Mother.”

  “Indeed,” he said gruffly. “And I am giving you one more project to helm. I want you to personally prepare the apartments for Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles on the Ranchi for their voyage to Egypt in March. I hope that you will be on board with them.”

  “Of course I will see to Princess Mary, and I will try my best to sail with her,” Elsie said. “If the Viceroy of India is completed by then, you shall see me.”

  “One more thing,” Lord Inchcape said. “Captain Hinchliffe is indeed a capable pilot. An expert. There’s no one better. Shot down six German aeroplanes, was in the battalion that conquered the Red Baron. Quite respectable, despite his injuries. But if I discover that you plan to fly alongside him, there will be no flight, do not doubt it.”

  And with that, he turned, took his wife’s arm, and started up the gangplank, his silver-tipped cane tapping at every step.

  * * *

  The American Girl had flown for six hours before it hit the first storm—right after the steamship American Banker had sighted the plane. Ruth and George approached it apprehensively; from the new moonlight that had just begun to show, they could see the tall stack of clouds waiting for them on the horizon, with nothing visible beyond it. It looked like the mouth of a monster, Ruth thought, ready to eat them in one easy bite.

  “You’ve flown through storms before,” George reminded her. “We knew this was coming. I’ll try to get through as soon as possible, but with almost all of our fuel still on board, we are nowhere near our optimum speed. Lindbergh flew through these same storms. He got through just fine.”

  “I’m not worried, George,” Ruth said, snuggled in her thick wool jacket. Despite the cabin heater, it was freezing in the plane. Both she and George wore their helmets, gloves, jackets, and scarves; they knew that the weather right off the coast, especially near the fogs of Newfoundland, would be the coldest of the trip.

  It began to rain far ahead of the dark tower in front of them, and the wind began to pick up, jostling the American Girl a little from the north. The weather remained steady as George flew onward, closer to the first ration of jeopardy that the Atlantic had waiting for them.

  Soon the jostling turned to bucking, and the rain that had pattered on the windshield was now slamming against it. George was relying solely on the instruments to tell him how high and where they were, trying to keep them at one thousand feet. Visibility was impossible: the blur of the constant downpour made it useless to try to see anything. George held on, pushing the plane forward as they surged deeper into the storm. As the seconds passed, more wind began to shriek around the plane that Ruth once thought so sturdy and big and safe. It now felt as if she were flying in a rattling Uneeda Biscuit tin with the top in danger of blowing off.

  The plane dropped into an air pocket quick enough to make Ruth lose her breath. George got it back up as the plane tipped from side to side, battling both the wind and the rain that were so desperate to hold it back. George asked Ruth to take the controls; the plane needed refueling. He scrambled into the back to fuel the plane from inside. It wasn’t easy; with the amount of fuel tins they had on board, George was forced to lie over the tins and attempt to fuel it from the inside that way.

  Ruth, now at the controls, struggled hard to keep the plane up; with its heavy load and the gale fighting against it, it took every ounce of strength she had to keep the yoke up and the plane out of the ocean below. Her arms were burning, her chest aching as the plane beat on, pitched at the whim of the wind.

  It was clear to George that ice was forming on the wings, which would be the most alarming and critical obstacle they could face. Ice alone—even without the winds that they were dealing with—could grow heavy enough to pull a plane into the waves with little effort, and nothing could be done to fight it. He had not anticipated hitting such an accu
mulation of ice so early in the flight, but he was powerless against it.

  After filling the tanks, he took the controls back from Ruth and realized how much rougher it was becoming even now. Ruth had managed to balance the plane despite the growing severity of the storm, to the point that he hadn’t spilled one drop of fuel.

  The storm was massive, with the American Girl fighting through it all night. Neither Ruth nor George needed the caffeine pills they had brought aboard; the adrenaline surging through their bodies in the struggle to keep the plane airborne was enough to keep them alert and awake. Nor did either of them dip into the hamper and pick out a turkey or cheese sandwich. Together by turns, they bounced through the storm all night, dipping, falling, rising, bumping. The wind was howling so loudly Ruth thought it would drive her mad; it had begun to sound like a crying baby.

  They were both exhausted after fighting the storm for hours. The engulfing darkness of the night did nothing to quell their fears, for they both wondered how much longer this storm could last and, more important, how much longer they could.

  “It has to stop soon,” Ruth said as the plane shook, dipped, and was knocked about. “That’s the nature of things: there has to be an end. If there’s a beginning, there must be an end.”

  But they struggled on, the fear of disaster now a constant, almost sitting behind them like a third passenger. When things seemed to be easing up, it would take only a second for another blast of wind to hit them, and the rain began to sound like gunfire as it struck the windows.

  Blast after blast assaulted them. The rain was coming from all directions, and had, as George feared, turned to sleet. He felt the plane getting heavier, and it became more of a fight to keep her up at a decent level. He was slowly losing altitude.

  The American Girl was sinking in the air.

  “Ruth,” he said calmly after dropping one hundred feet in a matter of seconds, “I want you to put your life suit on.”

  He didn’t need to tell Ruth why: she could see the instruments and had felt the drop.

  “Dump the fuel, George,” Ruth said quickly. “We have to dump the fuel. In ten minutes, if that, we’re going to be in those waves. We have to lighten the plane. It’s the only thing we’ve got.”

  “I know,” George said, beads of perspiration finally appearing both over his lip and on his brow. “I can’t keep her up, Ruth. The ice is dragging us down. Can you do it?”

  Ruth nodded and scrambled into the back. She grabbed for the tins, each at least twenty pounds, and brought them up, one by one, dumping them out the window. On the fourth tin, she dared herself to look down and see how far they were from the water, and gasped when she saw it was only a matter of twenty or so feet.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered to herself, not wanting to let George know that she was terrified enough to turn to ice herself. She glanced at the wings; they were encased in long, thick tombs of ice, horizontal icicles forming off the edges like deathly streamers reaching back at least a foot.

  In several minutes, she knew, they would be in the water.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FALL 1927

  Ruth Elder in the cockpit, 1927.

  No one had heard from the American Girl or spotted them in twenty hours.

  The reporters, although weary from sitting in a hangar for hours on end, watched the Elders and Mrs. Haldeman carefully. Weather reports from ships coming into port were not only discouraging but terrifying. The news relayed that ice had covered the decks of ships, and the sleet and wind was unrelenting. Sarah Elder, who was not holding up particularly well, did not want to hear this. She gasped loudly and then covered her mouth, conscious of making a spectacle of herself, but she was frightened. Her nerves had been shot after expecting a sliver of news from every person who walked by. She had begun to tremble, on the verge of tears. It took all the energy she had to retain her composure, particularly when she heard Eleanor Roosevelt comment about Sarah’s daughter, saying, “My personal feeling is that it is very foolish to risk one’s life. All the experts told Miss Elder that she should not try it, but she was determined to go ahead. It seems unquestionably foolish for a young girl to fly alone, with only a pilot, over such a long distance.” That was all Sarah needed to hear before she started feeling faint. Mr. Elder talked her into going back to the Garden City Hotel for a rest; she agreed, taking Joyce with her.

  Mrs. Haldeman, knowing that they were just barely into the flight, was in it for the duration. She would wait, but had lied about not worrying despite what she had promised George. He had never taken on a flight of this proportion, but he had flown under awful conditions and done just fine, she needed to remember. George was reliable, unflappable, and levelheaded. He knew flying inside and out and could respond to any situation that came to the surface. He was a natural pilot, she told herself again and again.

  Even when she read that Doc Kimball was quoted earlier as saying, “They will have headwinds, clouds, and storms for the greater part of the way. I advised them to ascend to ten thousand feet and fly over the area of the depression. They are facing the worst weather any flier ever has,” she still remembered.

  * * *

  Ruth returned to the window repeatedly, her shaking arms pouring out gallons of invaluable fuel into the ocean below. With no results after twenty gallons had been released, she simply picked up the cans and threw them out the window with as much strength as she could gather, several of them hitting the side of the plane with a substantial blow as they dropped. Twenty more gallons went out the window, and George wasn’t gaining anything.

  “Throw more!” George yelled as the wind whipped through the cabin and the rain stung when it landed. “Don’t stop until I tell you to!”

  Ruth tossed five, ten, twenty more. Thirty. She had offered up seventy gallons of fuel to the Atlantic in exchange for a little bit of a chance to survive that moment, and only that moment. Slowly, with each can after that tossed into the raging ocean, the plane began to lift by increments too small to measure, then just by inches, and finally enough that Ruth could no longer feel the spray from the waves on her face, just the pounding rain. The cabin was freezing and wet, the rain drenching every surface as if a hose had been turned on; and after George was satisfied that they had lightened the load enough, she returned to her copilot’s seat and buckled in, reaching for Felix the Cat, who was also drenched and soaked through.

  George flew the plane as high as he could, which was barely one hundred feet off the crests of the Atlantic. After a half an hour, it seemed as if they had made it through the most savage part of the storm, and the rain was no longer freezing. In an hour a good portion of the ice had melted as the warmer rain beat away at it and the winds began to ease. George was able to pick up speed and altitude, and after grueling hours fighting the storm, he turned the controls over to Ruth, relieved but weary.

  Ruth flew on for a little while longer as the storm let up, realizing that she had been foolish to disregard the weather; she’d had no idea what weather actually meant until just a few hours ago. She had never been so petrified and awed in all of her life. What was in the Atlantic, she understood, wasn’t anywhere else in the world. This was a sacred place of catastrophe and fear, and she had raced ahead like a little child, damning the nature of it and daring it to challenge her. Her apathy shamed her.

  After eight hours of unrelenting battle, the American Girl was suddenly thrust out of the wind and rain and into the last minutes of the night’s moonlight. The plane returned to a steady, smooth ride and Ruth finally exhaled the sigh of relief she had been holding in for the entire night. It was serene; it was quiet. The Atlantic, in that moment, was dormant.

  After a couple of minutes of tranquillity, she handed George a turkey sandwich and the flask of broth and suggested he eat it. He didn’t argue, seeing what she saw farther up, but still very present and directly in their path: a black, blue, and purple churning storm that covered the entire horizon, and flashing from inside with charges of light
.

  * * *

  ANXIETY INCREASING.

  No News of Fliers for 24 Hours

  NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY.

  The Atlantic Ocean tonight hides the Fate of Miss Ruth Elder and Captain George Haldeman, whose Stinson Detroiter monoplane American Girl has not been sighted since 10.45 last night, where it flew high over the steamer American Banker, about 423 miles east of New York. The monoplane blinked its lights in greeting and disappeared into the moonlit skies.

  More than 24 hours have elapsed since Captain Haldeman drove the maroon-and-orange-colored machine into the air at Roosevelt Field yesterday afternoon, while his youthful companion sat in the cabin chair, clutching her toy cat mascot, and praying that her dream to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic might be realized, and there is no disguising the fact that anxiety has increased here as the day passed with no further news of the ’plane.

  —Reuters, October 12, 1927

  * * *

  George did not like the look of the clouds ahead, standing tall and broad and impenetrable. He did not know if the plane had it in her to face another storm; the one behind them had almost brought the plane down, and it took a while before he himself felt that they were no longer facing an unavoidable death. It was true, he had taken the plane up into all kinds of weather; when he saw a storm approaching while at Roosevelt Field, he hopped into the plane and took her up into it. He had faced wind, rain, hail, and thunder, and felt that nothing could touch him inside. Those storms, however, belonged in a nursery compared to what they had just faced. The rage of it was what surprised him the most; the pitiless, dogged pummeling seemed nearly allegorical to him, almost as if the storm had been fabricated to simply and pointedly destroy them and only them.