Circling the Sun by McLain, Paula
“I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know—that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. These I learned at once. But most things came harder.”
—BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night
“We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.”
—KAREN BLIXEN
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4 September 1936
Abingdon, England
The Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I’ve known, and somehow mine to fly. She’s called The Messenger, and has been designed and built with great care and skill to do what should be impossible—cross an ocean in one brave launch, thirty-six hundred miles of black chop and nothingness—and to take me with her.
It’s dusk when I board her. Storms have hunched over the aerodrome for days, and what light there is now is stingy and wrung out. Rain beats on the Gull’s wings in timpani, and the wind gusts sideways, and yet I’m told it’s the best weather I’m going to get all month. I’m less worried about weather than weight. The Gull’s been fashioned with a special undercarriage to bear the extra oil and petrol. Tanks have been fixed under the wings and to the cabin, where they form a close-fitting wall around my seat with petcocks I can reach with two fingers to switch over the tanks mid-flight. I’ve been instructed that I should let one run completely dry and close it off before opening the next, to avoid an airlock. The engine might freeze for a few moments, but will start up again. I will have to rely on that. I will have to rely on a good many other things, too.
All over the tarmac puddles stretch out the size of small lakes, their surfaces whipped white. There are fierce, unremitting headwinds, and low brooding clouds. Some journalists and friends have gathered for my take-off, but the mood is undeniably dark. Everyone who knows the real nature of what I’m about to do has tried to convince me not to. Not today. Not this year. The record will still be there when the weather turns more favourable—but I’ve come too far to turn back now. I stow my small basket of food, tuck the flask of brandy into the hip pocket of my flight suit, and wedge myself into the cockpit, snug as a skin. I have a watch on loan from Jim Mollison, the only pilot who’s ever attempted this particular feat and lived. I have a chart that traces my route across the Atlantic, Abingdon to New York, every inch of icy water I’ll pass over, but not the emptiness involved or the loneliness, or the fear. Those things are as real as anything else, though, and I’ll have to fly through them. Straight through the sickening dips and air pockets, because you can’t chart a course around anything you’re afraid of. You can’t run from any part of yourself, and it’s better that you can’t. Sometimes I’ve thought it’s only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too—a mile-long runway and nineteen hundred pounds of fuel. Black squadrons of clouds muscling in from every corner of the sky and the light fading, minute by minute. There is no way I could do any of this and remain the same.
I steady my position and lean into my stick, roaring past the onlookers with their cameras, and then the series of markers towards the single red flag that means the point of no return. I have a mile of runway and not an inch more. And she might not make it, of course. After all the planning and care and work and mustering of courage, there is the overwhelming possibility that the Gull will stay fixed to the earth, more elephant than butterfly, and that I’ll fail before I’ve even begun. But not before I give this moment everything I’ve got.
After five hundred feet of runway, her tail comes up, ponderously. I urge her faster, feeling the drag of gravity, the impossible weight of her, feeling more than seeing the red flag growing nearer. Then the rudder and elevator finally come to life, swinging her nose up, and she’s left the earth—arrow straight. A butterfly after all. We climb the dimming sky and the rain over green-and-grey-chequered Swindon. Ahead lies the Irish Sea, all that dark, dark water ready to grip and stop my heart. The smeary twinkling that is Cork. The hulking black of Labrador. The constant sobbing of the engine doing the work it was built for.
My nose bouncing, I drive hard through the wet spatter, thrusting into the climb and the shudder of pressing weather. The instincts for flying are in my hands, and the practical work of it, too, and then there is the more mysterious and essential thing, how I’m meant to do this and always have been, to stitch my name on the sky with this propeller, these lacquered linen wings, thirty-six hours in the dark.