Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island
Part 23
August 24th, 1937
Morning dawned bright and hot. By afternoon there would be no problem
starting a fire. She circulated around
the ridge-crest clearing, picking up things, saving water when she could,
hanging things up to dry, seeing what was missing. The thermos was nowhere to be found, and the
flashlight was dead. She thought she had
lost her roll of windowscreen until she found it lodged, head-high, in a small
tree. Fred’s helmet was gone, and that
was a serious concern. She searched high
and low for it, in the northeasterly direction that had been downwind during
the storm. She finally found it lodged
in a bush that nodded over a gurgling brook.
A gurgling brook?
She stood staring at it. Perhaps a foot wide, flowing out of a clump
of bushes and running almost straight down toward the beach. Tentatively, hesitating, she dropped to hands
and knees, cupped her hand and captured some of its water, tasted it.
“My God, it’s fresh!”
She scrabbled in the bushes and found its source
– literally a hole, a crack, a vaguely vulva-like opening in the semi-cemented
coral rubble that made up the ridge. The
water was gushing out, clear and cold and oh, so fresh! She drank till she could drink no more, lay
back and felt it coursing through her body, swelling up her cells.
She followed the stream downhill, right to the
beach and across it, and she could see that it fanned out across the reef
flat. The fresh water – not just today’s
stream but water flowing over the years, perhaps centuries – had killed the
coral and created a shallow, almost invisible depression in the reef.
“Fresh water is lighter than salt. So when it rains hard…..”
When it rained hard, the rain would sink into the
ground, but it couldn’t sink too far because it would encounter salt water
infiltrating from the sea, so it would have to burst out in springs like this
one.
“Prob’ly forms every time there’s a really heavy
rain.”
And she hadn’t seen it when she crossed it on her
first walk down the beach because…..
“It hadn’t rained. It wasn’t flowing.”
Which meant she should take advantage of it while
it was flowing, but she had already filled virtually every container she
had. Where could she get more?
August 25th, 1937
It took me about two hours to hobble back to Camp
Can. There I collected every can that
looked like it would hold water, cut each open with my knife and dumped the
contents – even if they were edible, the priority now was water storage, and
besides, most were either mackerel (always spoilt) or mutton (which might as
well have been). I saved one can of
mutton for variety, dumped it and a dozen empty cans in the faithful rubberized
bag, and lugged them around the end of the island to what I am now calling
Freshwater Camp.
I found my little rivulet already sadly depleted,
but it was still running strongly enough that I could rinse out all my cans and
fill them with water. Gleefully, I
carried them back to the clearing – only about twenty or thirty yards away –
and stacked them carefully, the top ones in each stack covered with rags or
leaves to prevent things falling in.
Between these cans and the containers I had already filled with
rainwater, I calculate that I have enough to keep me comfortable for several
weeks, if I am thrifty. What a relief!
She dipped the freckle crème jar into the
diminishing rivulet again and sipped. Toasted a booby that was watching her –
perhaps Dr. Karla, though she thought not.
“Here’s to avoiding dehydration. No wonder I got
strange in the head.”
She refilled the jar and drained it.
“My God, talking crabs!”
“Pretty
crazy, all right.”
It was a big one, hanging sideways on the trunk
of a gray-barked tree. She leaped up to
face it, ignoring the stab of pain in her foot.
“You are not talking!”
“Have
it your way. Je ne parle pas.”
“In any language!”
“Strange
in the head, strange in the head. D’you
think The Lady is part of being strange in the head, too?”
Boo-Ka was such a comforting presence. But the crab – or crabs – were something
different.
“I’m not going to dignify you by talking to
you. You’re a figment of my
imagination.”
“Or
you’re a figment of mine, or we’re both figments of The Lady’s imagination, or
maybe…..”
“Oh, just please go away!”
“….
we’re all figments’ of the trees’ imagination….”
“Shut up!”
She grabbed for a rock. He
grappled up the tree trunk out of reach, and continued to offer alternatives as
she stumbled away, through the brush toward the beach.
“….
or the birds. D’you know how imaginative
a Frigate Bird is? Or how about the
coral?”
She hobbled down to a tide pool, sat on its edge
and unwrapped her swollen left foot. It was startling. What had seemed a
relatively minor abrasion on her ankle when it happened – heavens, was it two
weeks ago? Three? – looked much more
serious now.
“Infected, no question. S’pose the sprain masked the pain….”
Soaking it in salt water would help, and the tide
pool was a lovely one in which to soak.
A big, mostly blue and yellow brain coral on the seaward side, some
delicate staghorns. She dipped her feet, suspended them in the clear water. Lots
of little multi-colored fish came to nuzzle, eating the infected flesh. It felt rather good.
“Therapeutic, I s’pose.”
How imaginative was a Frigate Bird? Pretty imaginative, maybe. At least they were creative in the way they
robbed boobies flying home from the sea with fish in their beaks and throats.
But coral? Did coral – or corals – have imagination? Did they – it – think? Dream?
“Are we the coral’s dream? The island’s dream?”
She slapped the rocky shelf on which she sat –
all made of coral skeletons.
“Balonus!
I am not going to philosophize with a crab!”
------------------
Notes
“…the flashlight was dead
…” In our 2010 excavations at the Seven Site, we recovered what appears to be
the terminal end of a flashlight-sized battery.
“The fresh water … had killed the coral and created a shallow,
almost invisible depression in the reef.” Some such
modification of the reef flat appears to be shown in a 1942 aerial image of the
reef offshore of the Seven Site. See Amelia
Earhart’s Shoes, p. 150.
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