AE on Norwich Island Part 19

Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island

Part 19

August 7^th, 1937

The moist, tropical darkness was almost palpable, a soft cocoon of utter blackness.  But not quiet.  Birds hunted through the treetops, with raucous whoops and screeches.  Crabs, rats, and who-knows-what scrabbled in the deadfall.  A branch fell with a prolonged crash.  All sound sources were invisible, all sounds magnified. 

The sounds of the night on Norwich Island.  She lay back in her hammock and watched the moon flickering through the leaves.  Waiting for The Lady.

Who appeared without seeming to come from anywhere.  One moment she was not there – or at least not visible – and the next she was.  Comforting, without communicating.

Though there was communication.  Her movements communicated, and her sonorous voice, incomprehensible as her words were.

If they even were words.  And the hand movements, almost more than movements just of the hands – a sort of surging upward of the whole filmy being.

“You want me to go up, somehow.” 

Had she said it aloud, or just thought it?  The ghost did something that seemed affirmative.  Had she nodded her head?  Shook it?  Something in between?  Something entirely different?  Whatever she had done – or not done – it seemed like an affirmation.  Amelia swung her feet out of the hammock and into her stiff, salt-encrusted shoes. 

“OK, I’ll go up.”

She walked a few paces over the moon-dappled ground to the base of a large, many-limbed tree – one of the great gray oak-like specimens – and began to climb.  It was easy enough; there were plenty of limbs, and they were mostly strong enough to hold her weight.  She ascended steadily. The Lady was with her, though when she looked around she didn’t see her.

Finally she was well up in the canopy, seated comfortably on a branch, swaying gently in the wind.  Surrounded by leaves, shimmering in the moonlight, alive with breeze-movement.  Beyond them the sea, dark and sparkling, and overhead the gigantic silver moon, its craters and mountains and seas plain to see.  Still beyond that, diminished by the moonlight, a powdery swath across the sky, the Milky Way.  Down to the south, the top of the Southern Cross.

Why had The Lady brought her here? Had she brought her here?  It didn’t matter – she felt wonderfully content.

“Happy…”

The soft swaying, the flickering moonlight through the leaves, the moon and the vast distances all around brought her to a strange state of alert somnolence, almost asleep yet wonderfully awake, alive to everything around her.  And there – there was The Lady, who seemed to smile and gesture still further upward. Amelia smiled languidly.

“I can’t climb any higher. The branches won’t support my weight.”

The Lady smiled in return, and gestured upward again. Then drifted toward the ground, and Amelia followed.

Halfway down, The Lady’s name came to her.  She had no idea how, or where it had come from, but there it was.  She paused between branches?

“Boo-Ka?”

The Lady smiled, affirmatively somehow.  They descended together.

August 12^th, 1937

I have been at what I call Lagoon Camp for upwards of a week, I think.  I fear I have gotten bad at keeping track.  The days are all so much the same.  Up in the morning, find food, prepare food, eat food.  Maintain the camp, find firewood, sleep, chase crabs away, above all distill water, sleep.  Only the occasional passage of a rain squall, and my frantic scramble to set out every possible thing to catch water, brings variety to my days and nights.  That and visits from Boo-Ka, whose company I find tremendously comforting despite our inability to communicate. 

And, of course, my knowledge that she is a figment of my imagination.  Her name is proof of that, when I think about it logically.  What ghosts say, combined with the Egyptian name for the soul?  Ridiculous!  But still she is a great comfort to me, and I don’t want to do anything that might cause her to go away, stop visiting me.

Soon, though, I will have to move again.  I’m running very low on firewood within easy distance, and the boobies are getting shy.

Not the crabs, however; they seem to become more numerous all the time, but I have stopped letting them worry me.  I smash them with rocks whenever I can, and grill their meat.  Even the little ones yield a bit of sustenance – sort of an hors d'oeuvre.

The really tiny ones are in a way the most annoying.  Hardly bigger than insects, wearing the most diminutive of pilfered sea shells, they get into everything, and are every bit as voracious as their larger brethren. Maybe more so. Growing children.

I have found that the fruit of the dark gray-barked trees is not poisonous; whether it is life-sustaining is another matter, but I eat it now for variety.  Finding no purslane in this area, I have also begun making “salads” from the fleshy leaves and small white fruits of the ubiquitous shoreline shrubs, and simply grazing on them whenever I feel hungry.  Not much to them, but they haven’t made me ill, and they provide a modicum of fluid.

What else to write about?  She nibbled the end of the mechanical pencil, sitting on the bank overlooking the narrow lagoon beach.  Write about her near-nightly tree climbing, or the phosphorescence on the beach?  She had done that already.  Should she report on her health?  That she seemed – as far as she could recall – to have had no sinus problems since landing here?  No, no, too prosaic and personal.  About how sometimes she awoke from sleep unsure who and where and even what she was?  That she sometimes lost track of whole days at a time, wasn’t sure where or what she had been?  No, that was too – startling; it needed sorting out.

“You’re just what we all are, tastycakes.”

“Oh damn, you again?”

“You, me, the little guys, the fish, the birds.  You eat me, I eat you, the trees….”

“Go chase yourself!”  She jumped up, and the bank gave way under her.  She tumbled down to the beach, a tangle of arms and legs.  Her log-book sprang open; note pages and pencil went flying.

“Owww!” 

She was sitting on the beach, back to the rubbly bank. One foot in the water, holding her left ankle.  It hurt like the devil.

The crab peered at her over the bank. Waggled its eye-stalks. 

“Oops.  Took a tumble, you did.  Poor Meelie.”

She levered herself to her feet.  The crab continued his soliloquy.

“Oooo – twisted your little tootsie, maybe scraped it too.  And cock-a-doodle-doo, just look what you did to your shoe!”

Her left shoe was ruined. Stiff and cracked from repeated soakings and dryings, and infused with salt, it had split up the side and the upper had pulled most of the way off the rubber sole. A sharp piece of coral embedded in the bank had gashed her foot.  She pulled off the shoe, threw it at the crab, who ducked back over the bank with his usual chortle.

She sat for awhile, nursing her foot.  Not a deep gash, but a lot of abrasion, and certainly stressed tendons. It was going to swell, become hard to fit into a shoe.  And make it painful to walk.  But walk she must.  It was time and past time to move to someplace with a fresh supply of firewood.

She hobbled along the beach collecting her papers, but the pencil was nowhere to be found.  Perhaps it had gone into the lagoon. 

What was she going to use to write?

“The compass.” 

The bow compass and leads clipped into the lid of the sextant box.  One of Fred’s clever adaptations, to keep as many of his tools as possible in one place. 

“Oh Fred…  Little did you know…..”

The ring binder in which she had kept her log was ruined – hopelessly sprung – but it had been on the verge of giving out for some time, and she had an alternative.  Arranging her papers in order, she struggled up the bank and put them in the sextant box.  Limped back to the fallen tree that formed the core of her camp, dabbed her cut foot with mercurochrome – the bottle was almost empty – and began to take stock.

In the rubberized bag, which was wearing thin: St. Joseph liniment (half full), hand lotion (about a third full), an empty Mennen skin bracer bottle (good for holding water), the unopened Benedictine bottle, the empty but useful freckle crème jar.  Her thermos with its useful cup.  The flare gun and two remaining flares. The salvaged beer bottle.  Five full cans of – something, the last of the Can Camp supply.  Her Alka-Zane bottle, empty; she kept it as a water holder but discarded the top. The last little vial of vegetable concentrate, almost empty. The flashlight. Sunglasses. Down at the bottom of the bag, forgotten till now, some broken glass tubes from – what were they from?

“Oh, yeah, sling psychrometer.” 

It seemed lifetimes ago that the instrument had been part of the “Flying Laboratory’s” kit, used to record moisture content in the air.  Useless now; she scraped the pieces out of the bag and tossed them on the ground.  Three small crabs inspected them but found them of no interest.

Outside the bag, both first-aid kits, the sextant box, of course, and ten empty cans, including two big biscuit tins.  Half or more of the cans had rust holes in them that made them unusable as water holders – she tossed these after the psychrometer tubes.  The others she would take along, together with the sextant box and its contents, her cooking gear, and of course her dutch oven still.   

Both first aid kits would travel with her to the next camp, though it would soon be time to consolidate what was left in them into one.  The sextant box too, with its precious papers, compass and leads, and inverting eyepiece to make fire.  The bone-handled knife, the wire, the little wedges of steel from the shipwreck that she used to open clams when she could.  The sheet of steel for cooking. The two water bags, now empty but fillable.

Clothes.  Not many left.  She was wearing Fred’s shirt and slacks (the seat wearing thin).  She had one more shirt of Fred’s, some kerchiefs, his coveralls.  Her one remaining flying shoe, her Swiss walking shoes, and a pair of Fred’s.  Some rags.  Fred’s helmet, thin and battered.  Her well-worn toothbrush and Vince can, empty for all practical purposes.  Fred’s belt and the sheath for her lost Javanese knife; she fingered its intricate pattern of decorative beadwork; there was no reason to let it go just yet.

Her hammock, some ropes, some extra canvas.  The windowscreen, some of it cut up and crumpled for ready use in the tide pools, a small roll yet to be cut.

What to do for shoes?  Her Swiss shoes were tight in any event, and with her injured foot certain to swell… She wrapped it in rags and pushed it into Fred’s left shoe, laced it up tight.  It supported her ankle well; she thought she could walk without limping, almost, and without too much pain.  Her right shoe would just have to last awhile longer.

“Until……” 

Never mind.

Everything loaded on the travois, she hauled it back along the channel to the ocean beach, and continued the trek south.  As usual, the beach was backed by a ridge of coral rubble, thrown up by storm surges.  Were there big crabs peering over its lip?

“Probably nudging each other and chuckling. But they are not going to eat me!”

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Notes

“…the fleshy leaves and small white fruits of the ubiquitous shoreline shrubs…” Scaevola frutescens, called “mao” in Kiribati.

“She went through the contents of her rubberized bag…” See Earhart’s Shoes Chapters 12 & 15. The Aukaraime Shoe Site (or Bivouac Site) produced a broken sling psychrometer, the top of an Alka-Zane bottle, the heel of a man’s shoe and the remains of a Blucher-style oxford, apparently of the type worn by AE on the World Flight though larger than those measureable in contemporary photographs. Whether the shoes could have been associated with AE remains in doubt, but I have chosen to associate them for purposes of this story.