Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [111]
Throughout the freezing, misty, moonless night, ghostly spirits crowded around him in the tiny cockpit, “neither intruders nor strangers,” speaking intangible messages of great importance, discussing the flight, offering advice, reassuring him. Dazed with exhaustion, Lindbergh accepted them as normal because he was so far removed from everyday life, existing only in “this strange, living dream.” The next day he could not remember a word the spirits had said to him.
Mirages of land appeared on the horizon in front of him alongside shimmering ice cakes and vast icebergs. For a time he flew with his head thrown back, looking up through the skylight at the stars just visible in the thickening night fog and the mountainous clouds, racing perilous ice-storms. He was entirely “conscious of the minuteness of my plane and of the magnitude of the world.”
“Aren’t my silver wings fully as remarkable as those Daedalus made of wax and feathers?” Lindbergh wondered. “Sometimes, flying feels too god-like to be attained by man.” The implications of his record-breaking solo flight, should he survive it, pressed upon him. “Will men fly through the air in the future without seeing what I have seen, without feeling what I have felt? Is that true of all things we call human progress—do the gods retire as commerce and science advance?”
Waiting for dawn in the unmarked night over cold unfriendly seas, on the second morning of his journey (and the third without sleep), he felt senseless, accomplishing only what he needed to do to survive in a state of semiconsciousness. After more than twenty hours of flight, Lindbergh remembered that he had smelling salts in his medical kit. He broke open one of the capsules but was so out of touch with reality that he could not smell it and his eyes did not water. He felt as though he was hanging in space, divorced from his body. Finally he saw beneath him harbingers of land: a porpoise leaping through the water, then a gull, then the black specks of fishing boats—and at last the emerald-green fields of the west coast of Ireland.
When he reached the mouth of the Seine nearly five hours later he remembered that he had neither eaten nor drunk anything since leaving New York. Someone had handed him five drugstore sandwiches as he left and he attempted a few mouthfuls before packing them carefully away. His mouth was too dry to swallow and he didn’t want to taint his landing with discarded sandwich wrappings. He flew over Paris, which looked like a “lake of stars,” and circled the Eiffel Tower (then the tallest man-made structure in the world) at 4,000 feet, waggling his wings.
Lindbergh’s moment of greatest confusion came when he arrived at Le Bourget airfield on the outskirts of Paris, just over thirty-three hours after he had lifted off. Where the empty field should have been was an erratic pattern of lights, dimming the beacons he was expecting to see, and a long string of pairs of lights reaching off into the distance. Flying past a second time, he realized that these were the headlights of thousands of Parisians coming out to greet him.
In the crowds beneath him were Harry and Caresse Crosby, marveling at the crowds, the colored flares and the great floodlights sweeping the sky. Lindbergh’s engine whirred like a toy as he circled the field in preparation for landing. Lost and then captured in the moving lights, the Spirit gleamed and flashed in the night sky like a shark darting through water. A mood of suspense built as they waited for his approach. “Then sharp swift in the gold glare of the searchlights a small white hawk of a plane swoops hawk-like down and across the field—C’est lui Lindberg [sic], LINDBERG! And there is a pandemonium, wild animals let loose and a stampede towards the plane . . . thousands of hands weaving like maggots over the silver wings of the Spirit of Saint-Louis . . . scratching and tearing.”
The 150,000-strong crowd surged on to the runway as Spirit landed and the mob lifted