Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [110]
After ten days, Lindbergh heard that the overcast weather was forecast to break the next day and he decided to leave the following morning—before his rivals, who he guessed would wait until they knew for sure that the cloud cover was clearing. Only a mail pilot, with flying experience in all weathers, would have dared start his journey in such uncertain conditions.
After a sleepless night, Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field at 7.51 on the windless, rain-sodden morning of 20 May in front of a crowd of several hundred. Spirit, fully laden with 451 gallons of gasoline, bounced along the runway and cleared the telegraph wires at the end of the field by just twenty feet. A newspaper plane flew alongside him as far as Long Island Sound. News came over the wire that Lloyd’s of London were not taking bets on Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris because they considered he had too slim a chance of making it. Fortunately, without a radio he would not have heard it.
The thirty-five-mile stretch of ocean between Long Island and Connecticut was the longest expanse of water Lindbergh had yet flown over. When he reached the Atlantic coast, “looking ahead at the unbroken horizon and limitless expanse of water,” he was “struck by my arrogance in attempting such a flight.” His little Spirit resembled nothing more than “a butterfly blown out to sea” but to him she felt more like “a living partner in adventure than a machine of cloth and steel.”
America held its breath. “Alone?’ demanded Harold Anderson in the New York Sun. “Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Enterprise? . . . Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?”
For the next twenty-eight hours Lindbergh fought off sleep, kept awake by the instability of his plane—“this little box with fabric walls”—an unexpected blessing because it meant he could not switch off for a second. He preferred not to eat, knowing that his empty stomach would also keep him alert, and kept the plastic windows out of their frames, fearing the barrier they would create between him and the outside elements, the crystal “communion of water, land and sky.”
He was acutely conscious of his vulnerability as he flew over Newfoundland. “Nine barrels of gasoline and oil, wrapped up in fabric; two hundred and twenty horsepower, harnessed by a layer of cloth—vulnerable to a pin prick, yet protecting an airplane and its pilot on a flight across an ocean, between the continents—suspended at this moment five hundred feet above a frigid, northern land.”
And yet there was also a strange sense of security and peace. Life had suddenly become wholly simple. His cockpit was tailored to him “like a suit of clothes”: “Each dial and lever is in the proper place for glance or touch; and the slightest pressure on the controls brings response.” The only thing he had to do was fly, and that felt “like living in a hermit’s mountain cabin after being surrounded by the luxury and countless responsibilities of a city residence.” He became minutely conscious of every detail of his surroundings—the weld marks on the tubing, a dot of paint on the altimeter’s face—and “the grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life.” He was utterly alone.
The urge to sleep was strongest in the dark, when he was over open water. It felt like a leaden coat pressing down upon his shoulders. He forced himself to squeeze his dry eyes open and shut, to stamp on the floor of the cockpit, shaking the tiny plane, to flex his cramped muscles as he sat. Concentration was his only weapon against sleep—the power of his mind over his body. Relentlessly he made himself think of possible problems and how he would deal with them, created