And here was another one directly on its heels. If he were honest, he would have admitted to himself that he was terrified; but looking over at Ruth, sitting in her seat, looking straight ahead and still clutching the cat, he knew he had to take a breath and step over it. He had to get through this storm just like the last. It was clear due to its thickness that flying through it would be another fistfight, and there was no room between the sea and the clouds to get below it. If he brought the plane up to ten thousand feet, he might be able to skirt above it. Maybe.
“I’m going to try to go over it,” he said to Ruth, who nodded in agreement. She seemed a little shell-shocked, too. “It looks thinner at the top, don’t you think?”
Ruth leaned forward in her seat, closer to the windshield. No rain so far. The clouds were thinner, wispy at the peak, while the storm seemed thicker at the bottom, like a pyramid.
“We have nothing to lose, Haldeman,” she said in all seriousness, and it was the truth, almost. Any backup fuel was gone, and there would be no dumping this time if ice decided to drag them down. “Some easier route, huh? We should be right over the shipping lanes and I haven’t seen one ship yet.”
“We’ll just climb, Ruth. We’ll just climb,” he said, pulling the plane up as high as it would go. He passed eight thousand, nine thousand, ten thousand, eleven thousand feet. He was still facing a column of blackness with bursts of lightning, and he was shooting straight into the middle of it.
“Ruth,” he said as calmly as he possibly could. “You’re going to need to hold on. There’s just a whole bunch of madness in there and we’re headed for the thick of it.”
She nodded, and as the clouds got closer and blacker and darker, she held her breath as if they were heading for a huge stone wall, waiting for the impact.
Although the sun had begun to rise, as they passed into the column, it immediately swallowed them and shuttered out all light. The darkness was piercing, suffocating, so much that Ruth could not see out the window and could not make out anything in front of her even inside the plane. It was as if they had been eclipsed, swallowed up by a murkiness that didn’t allow shadows. The American Girl bucked as a gust of wind hit them straight on, almost the collision that Ruth had braced for. She held on as Haldeman still made an attempt to climb up and out, but with the oppressive wind, it was useless. A bright flash illuminated the cabin for a second with a crashing clap of thunder, and she saw Haldeman gripping the yoke, his lips tight, his focus directly ahead.
It’s as black as the water up here, Ruth thought. There’s nothing here but blackness. We could be in the water and not even know until it leaked in.
As if to prove her wrong, another flash cracked the sky like an eggshell directly in front of them, jagged and sharp, blindingly bright. Ruth flinched and swore she saw the clouds behind it come to a rolling boil.
The plane shook in the wind, heavy from the east, not so much blowing them but pushing them with a force that was futile to fight. The gusts screamed again like a train, leaning on them, shoving the plane with authority. Haldeman abandoned his attempt to climb and just tried to keep the plane steady, gripping the yoke until his knuckles hurt. He could not fly another eight hours like this if this storm was as large as the last. It was impossible. He wouldn’t make it, and the plane couldn’t bear it. As it was, the plane was stressed to its highest point, continually pushing back against the wall of wind. He would be amazed if it didn’t begin bursting apart from the pressure.
Ruth saw all of this on his face each time the light exploded in front of them, to the side of them, from behind.
“I’m sorry, George,” she called out. “I’m so sorry.”
A stab of lightning gave them light for a split second, combined with a loud slap of thunder.
“No!” Haldeman yelled back. “Don’t say that. Don’t say it!”
At the same moment they both saw the black fade into grey, then violet, then lavender. White streaks flickered about the cabin; the sun was out, just behind the last layer of clouds. The brightness lay right before them; it would be only moments before they could see it. Finally, the curtain dissolved, and there they were, in the light, in the sun, with a horizon they could see ahead and a sea they could see below.
* * *
GRAVE ANXIETY
HAS THE ATLANTIC CLAIMED TWO MORE VICTIMS?
NO NEWS OF FLIERS
Grave anxiety prevails in New York and also on this side of the Atlantic regarding Capt. Haldeman and Miss Ruth Elder, who started an attempt to fly the Atlantic in the aeroplane the American Girl.
Capt. Haldeman’s mother is bravely confident, but Ruth Elder’s mother is distracted.
No further news has been received of the American Girl. Special police have been sent to keep order at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris.
Weather reports received to-day are unfavourable. Wireless operators everywhere are alert, but nothing has been heard from the American Girl.
—Reuters, October 13, 1927
* * *
“What does it say, Dad?” Pherlie asked when her father came back with the latest edition of the newspaper.
“Nothing different than it said this morning, last night, yesterday afternoon, or yesterday morning,” he sighed as he shuffled across to an armchair and sat down. “It’s all the same. No word, no word, no word.”
The Elders were back in their suite at the Garden City Hotel. Waiting at the hangar had been difficult; it was cold, the reporters were constantly asking questions, and there was never any news. They couldn’t stay there any longer. Oscar had instructed Mr. Cornell to notify them at the hotel if anything had changed. There was news of the Dawn and Frances Grayson, however; after taking off from Newfoundland and flying hundreds of miles out over the Atlantic, her crew had insisted they turn back due to the treacherous weather. Grayson landed back at Old Orchard, and exited the cockpit in tears.
Oh, that Ruth, Oscar thought, looking at his wife, who was sedated and lying on the bed. What have you done? Had he known it would be like this—nothing but hours and hours of waiting, day after day—he would have tied her to a tree instead of letting her go. None of them had really eaten or slept since the morning of the takeoff.
Where was she? Why no word in over a day? The thoughts that whipped through his mind were too horrific to let them stay and take root. Were they in trouble? Were they lost? Was she already under the water? He rubbed his temple, rubbed his chin.
“Dad,” Pherlie called to him, and put her hand on his arm. “Don’t think it until we know for sure. Until then, she is alive and up there. Okay? She is where she loves to be.”
Oscar Elder looked at his eldest daughter, thankful that she was settled with a husband and baby. And no hobbies.
“Okay,” he said as he nodded. “Okay.”
* * *
“Woooooo!” Ruth yelled as she shot the plane over the waves at one hundred miles per hour. “George, George, George, this is glorious! Isn’t this glorious?”
“It sure beats rain, lightning, and the feeling you’re about to die,” he said, laughing.
“How far do you think we were blown off course?” Ruth said, still basking in the fact that there was only sun in front of her and no black, man-eating clouds. “I’m guessing at least a couple hundred miles.”
“I think more than that,” he said, not looking very happy anymore. “We’ve been up for twenty-five hours, and sure, the wind held us back quite a bit; but according to the readings, I’d say we are still five to six hundred miles from land. We’re still very much in the heart of the Atlantic. We might be six hundred miles off.”
“The oil pressure looks odd,” Ruth commented. “And the fuel is . . . the fuel is strange, too.”
“Hmmm,” he said, giving it a look. “Looks like it’s time to refuel.”
He worked his way to the back, where there was much more room now, since most of the fuel had been either dumped overboard or used.
He took a wrench and opened a fuel c
an, then fed it into the inside tank.
“How about now?” he called.
Ruth shook her head.
“No change,” she yelled back. “None at all.”
“And the oil pressure?” he asked.
“It’s dropped a bit,” she said. “Why would it drop like that?”
“I don’t know,” George said, trying to guess what would be the problem. “This plane took a beating. The oil reservoir could have cracked with the turbulence.”
“It’s not stabilizing,” Ruth said. “It’s dropping even lower.”
George came back to his seat, leaned down, and then was silent.
“What is it?” Ruth asked.
He held up a finger dripping with blackness.
“Shit,” Ruth barely said, her eyes just staring.
“After all of that,” George says. “The storm, the lightning, the wind, and this is what it comes down to? A broken oil pipe?”
“How much farther can we go?” Ruth asked, feeling a coldness creep up her spine.
“Not far enough,” George said, laughing half in panic, half in anger. “We are nowhere.”
He just sat, not knowing what to do. With no oil pressure, no fuel was getting to the engine. He knew the protocol: Climb as high as you can and make a slow glide down for a landing. Unless you were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on what was now a beautiful, sunny day.
“Climb?” Ruth asked, and he nodded.
“As high as we can, then we’ll hope that we’ll catch a good tailwind. Use as little fuel as we can,” he said.
They were able to fly on for several more hours, albeit slowly, but the pressure continued to drop; the oil was now all over the cabin floor and they were both busily scanning the horizon for any strip of brown or green or solid-looking thing.
There was nothing.
They flew in silence.
There was nothing below them but black waves tipped in white.
It looked so cold.
The knocking from the engine began slowly and not so loudly, but after another hour of flying, the pounding was almost paralyzing, sounding more like a clock that was counting down their last seconds than an engine struggling to keep a plane in the air.
Both of them tried to ignore it, but as the noise got louder and louder with each passing minute, it became impossible.
“The student pilot,” Ruth finally said, over the toll of the engine.
“What?” George shouted.
“The student pilot,” Ruth said again. “The crash must have knocked the line loose.”
“Yes,” George agreed. “And the turbulence cracked it. I know our oil reservoir must have been damaged with the flexing of the plane, the ice, the wind. All of it.”
“Is it time now to say I’m sorry, George?” Ruth asked again.
“No,” he said. “But you need to put your flotation suit on.”
Without a word, Ruth obliged, pulling the suit out from behind the seat, and did her best to scramble into it. It was much easier putting it on in a public bathroom than it was in the cabin of a doomed airplane.
“All right,” she said when she was fully buckled in. “Now your turn. I’ll take over.”
George shook his head.
“I can’t fly with that thing on; I can barely move in it,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“The hell you are,” Ruth said, reaching behind his seat and pulling out the rubber suit. “I hate them, too. But we’re going down, George. You have to put it on. We are still in this together.”
“Ruth,” he said sternly, “let me fly the plane as best I can right now. It will just get in the way. I need to use all of my attention on trying to make a water landing. Goddamn it, goddamn it.”
“You are not going to let me float in that damn ocean alone!” Ruth yelled. “Put it on, George. I am begging you. Put it on. I don’t want to be out there by myself. I need you to stay with me. That ocean is huge, George. I can’t do it alone. I just can’t. Please.”
“It won’t make a difference, Ruth!” he shouted. “I don’t know how to swim!”
“Neither do I!” she screamed back.
George’s eyes suddenly grew wider and he pointed his inky-black finger toward the windshield.
“What is that?” George said. “What is that?”
It took several moments before either one of them was sure that they were seeing what they were seeing.
“It’s a tanker,” George said incredulously. “Ruth, it’s a tanker!”
Below them, miles in the distance, was the Barendrecht, a Dutch oil tanker three days late leaving Rotterdam port and now headed to Texas.
It was long, lean, and white, riding the waves with its hulking shape, the only shape that George and Ruth had seen for the past thirty hours.
George knew he could get above the ship in a matter of minutes if he could keep the plane airborne that long.
“Take this fuse box,” he said, picking one up from his side and tossing it into Ruth’s lap. “Do you have paper? Find paper!”
Ruth rustled through everything within arm’s length; she found the clearance papers. “Good Luck!” she saw again in the clerk’s handwriting, right after the destination.
“Pen?” George shouted. “Pen!”
“I don’t have a pen!” Ruth cried in a panic, then grabbed the vanity bag she had kept next to her and pulled out her lipstick.
“Ready,” she told George.
“Write this: ‘How far to land, and which way?—Ruth Elder.’ ” he instructed.
Ruth scribbled the message onto the paper, folded it up, and put it in the empty fuse box.
“I’m going to fly as low as I can over the deck,” he told her. “You have to drop it onto the ship.”
Ruth waited until George got close, close enough to the tanker to notice sailors on the deck, waving and shouting at them. More of them gathered topside as they got closer.
George went lower, lower, dipping as close to the tanker as he could. Ruth rolled down the window, and when he shouted “Now!” she released the fuse box and their plea for help to the deck below.
The box plummeted downward for twenty feet until the wind caught it quickly and dragged it over into the waves, just missing the boat by inches.
On the second page of the clearance papers, Ruth wrote a duplicate note, then folded it again and placed it inside the next fuse box George threw at her.
He came back around the end of the ship, turned widely, ran parallel with the tanker, and when he got to mid-ship, swooped in so low he thought he might knock a sailor over.
“NOW!” he commanded, and Ruth dropped the note, this time directly on deck, where it bounced and landed at a sailor’s feet.
They both cheered as George climbed a little, then turned around to circle the ship again. This time they could see sailors running about the deck, although a few of them stood still and waved. By the time George made a third pass, the message on the deck of the Barendrecht was loud, clear, and painted in massive white letters: “TRUE S. 40 WEST, 360 MILES FROM TERCEIRA, AZORES.”
“We’re landing,” George said quickly, and turned the plane around one more time.
The plane, he’d noticed on the last pass, was beginning to list to the left due to the fuel still in the tank weighing it down. He wouldn’t be able to land without balance: if the wing dipped into the ocean first, it might crack off and cause the rest of the plane to spin around and possibly flip over.
“Move the rest of the gas tanks to the other side!” he yelled to Ruth. “The center of gravity is off. I have to come in straight on these waves; the sea is rough and those waves will rip us apart if I don’t.”
Ruth scrambled into the back, still wearing her rubber flotation suit, and moved fuel can after fuel can to the other side of the plane.
“That’s all I’ve got, George!” she shouted forward to him. “Is it any better?”
“Yes, slightly,” he answered. “But not enough to make a landing. Move whatever
you can over to that side!”
Ruth looked around; there was nothing left of any substantial weight to make a difference. The only thing she had left was their luggage, their parachutes, and the picnic hamper.
“That’s all I’ve got, George!” she shouted when she was done, trying to be heard over the ever louder knocking of the engine.
“This is not going to be good, Ruth,” he said. “Buckle up and hang on.”
Ruth headed toward her seat but only leaned over it.
“I have a better idea,” she said. “But I need you to pull back a little.”
She opened the window and began to climb out.
“Stop!” George hollered. “What are you doing?”
“No, it’s fine, I can do it!” Ruth yelled back against the force of the wind. “I can reach this brace! Just come down easy, George. I’ve got my suit on: I’ll be fine!”
Before her copilot could say anything further, Ruth was over the seat and had her hand on the bracing wire. The next moment she was gone.
Clutching the bracing wire with everything she had, she stood on the first brace, then realized she’d need to move to the second in order to get the best balance. Although only a couple of feet apart, she couldn’t reach the second brace without jumping—and even though George had slowed down quite a bit, she knew she’d never make it. With one hand still on the bracing wire and her knees straddling the first brace, she released the wire and fell forward, clutching at the brace with both arms. She looked like a bear shimmying up a tree, and had no choice but to look down into the sea, which was rough and full of grand, threatening crests.
The American Girl was coming closer to the Barendrecht now: the ship was only a couple hundred yards away. Ruth held on with every ounce of strength she had, down to her fingernails. A hard impact would bounce her off the plane and into those waves, where she would roll around like a ball.
She wanted to squeeze her eyes tight but she needed to be prepared, to know when they were getting closer to the water, and know the moment they would land.
They were only a few feet from the water now, lined up directly with the bow of the tanker. She figured that George would land somewhere in the center, which meant she had seconds.