AE on Norwich Island Part 30

Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island

Part 30

October 7^th, 1937

Another morning’s light filtered through the trees.  The birds stirred, made their murmuring waking-up sounds.  Spread their wings and sailed out to sea.  The surf boomed.  The trade wind tickled her face.

She opened her eyes slowly; the lids seemed to stick together. 

The diarrhea had come in the night and she had only narrowly made it to her biscuit-tin toilet, and back to her hammock.  Soiled herself anyway. 

What might have brought it on?  What had she eaten? 

It all seemed to blend together.  Crabs, clams, fish, birdmeat, turtle meat, hog apples, canned mutton.  What had she eaten, when? 

“Doesn’t matter.”

Out of the hammock, to the dead fire around the dutch oven.  Time for a drink of water from the freckle crème jar, then re-fill the still, build up the fire.  She lifted the inverted pot lid.  Stared inside.

“Oh no.”

The freckle crème jar had broken.  Its three shards lay on the bottom of the cooled, salt water in the dutch oven.  She stared at them stupidly.  Picked them up and held them in her hand, looking at them.  Could she repair it?  Patch it together somehow?

Tape.  There was adhesive tape in the small wooden first aid kit.  Carrying the jar fragments, she hobbled over to her cooking fire and pile of gear.  Sat down and opened the kit.  Yes, a roll of adhesive tape was about all that was left in it. 

She dried the shards carefully with the remains of her shirt.  Peeled the tape off its roller.  God, how her hands shook!  She pressed the pieces together and wrapped tape around them, as tightly as she could.

It peeled off in her hands.  It had lost its adhesive in the heat and humidity.

“Oh, damn.”

She sat awhile looking at the shards and tape in her hand, then let them fall to the ground. 

Could she use a can?  No, she’d decided that they were too big, some time in the past. But maybe she could figure something out. Cut one down. Or maybe it was time for her thermos cup.  Where was it?  She didn’t know. 

“Damn.  Lost.”

It was the cup that was lost. She wasn’t lost.

“I’m not lost….”

Birgie emerged from a pile of brush.

“But you will be if you can’t find water.”

“Make water, with the still. There’s no water to find, unless it rains.”

“Says the world’s expert on island hydrology.”

Hydrology. Hydro – relating to water. Ology – relating to the study of something. Yes.

“What are you telling me?”

“Me, tell you something?”

“That there’s water to be found?”

“Beats me. I’m just a crab.”

“Right.”

“Butcha know, even crabs gotta have water. Rats, too, and birds.”

“O..kay.  Where do you find water?”

“Where do you find water, what?”

“Oh, bushwa.  Where do you find water, Birgie?”

“Hmm…?”

“Where do you find water please, Birgie? With sugar and cream!”

“Can’t deliver the sugar and cream, but water – in the trees, of course.”

“Oh God, more riddles?”

“Would I tell riddles at a time like this?”

“Yes.”

“You know me so well.  Check the trees, Meelie.  No joke.  Ta-ta, I’ll be back.”

 She scuttled away, across the clearing to the north.

Trees.  How would the trees produce water?

Slowly, she recaptured an image – great thick trees with their trunks full of water – where?  And how?

Africa –  she had seen trees full of water in Africa.  Af-ri-ca. 

But those trees had been filled with water by people.  Hadn’t they? 

“Not by crabs….”

Shaking her head, she struggled to her feet and hobbled north, following the crab.  She stopped at every tree, every bush, to lean on it and catch her breath.

“So weak…..”

Just a short distance from where she had made her first and second fires at Freshwater Camp – how ironic that name seemed now, but how good that she could remember the fires, and know that she was moving north from them! – the big dark-barked trees gave way to the lighter-colored ones.  Thick, gnarled trunks, twisting branches.  One huge one had three great branches that spread out at about chest height.  She staggered to it, looked in the space where the branches sprang out….

“Oh my God!.....”

Where the branches separated from the trunk, they formed a kind of basin, and it was full of water!  She cupped her hand and drank some.  Earthy, rather bitter, but it was water, at least a gallon of fresh water. Left – she guessed – by the last rain, protected from evaporating by the tree’s canopy.  She drank another handful, hobbled back to camp for bottles and a can.

Birgie had helped her!  A tickle of suspicion played across her mind.  Why would the crab help her?  Birgie wanted her dead, so she could eat her.  Why prolong her life?

“Don’t know.  Don’t know.”

Later – how long? She wasn’t sure, didn’t know whether it mattered – she sat by her dead fire and tried to make her brain work.

“Have to purify it somehow.”

She trembled; her head swam.  One moment she was burning hot, the next freezing. 

She pinched one of the cans’ open tops to form a sort of pour-spout; carried it and the bottles – the beer bottle, the Benedictine, the St. Joseph’s – to the basin tree, and bailed the basin dry.  Filled two of the bottles that way and a third at another, smaller basin.  Couldn’t find any more water trees before dark fell. 

At the bottom of the second basin, her can encountered something soft and squishy.  Some fur came up on the edge of the can. 

Halfway back to camp, the diarrhea struck again with a vengeance.  She had barely time to get her pants down.  Poor Fred’s almost worn-out coveralls, she thought, and his tattered jockey shorts. She sat in them on a log and stared at the charcoal and ash of her fire place.  Her mouth felt full of cotton, but she couldn’t trust the water.

“Boil it.”

Of course, boiling the water would purify it, even if there had been a dead rat in it.  She looked around for firewood.  Not much ready at hand.  The small first aid kit gave her a beginning; it was made of nice dry wood, and empty now.  She smashed it with a rock, arranged its pieces in a pile.  Dragged herself around to pick up more sticks and twigs until she had a decent heap of wood, and used the inverting eyepiece to set it alight. 

So, she would put the bottles of water in the fire, and when they boiled….

How would she get them out of the fire?  Pick them up with the metal straps she used to turn fish?  No, that wouldn’t work. 

Wire.  Yes, of course.  She found the wire she had brought from – where?  The vague image of something big and hulking – oh yes, the shipwreck.  Wrapped one end of the wire around the beer bottle, the other around the St. Joseph; she would start with them, and when they boiled she could lift them right out with the wire.

The fire was crackling.  Trembling, she carefully lifted the two bottles by their wire handle, lowered them into the flames.

She sat back to wait for the bottles to start bubbling.

Was she forgetting something?

“I’m forgetting everything!”

Her attention drifted to the birds swooping through the trees – then snapped back into focus on the fire – as both bottles shattered, their water putting it out.

“Oh, damnation.”

Of course.  High heat applied to relatively cool glass…..

“Oh, Amelia, you are so damned stupid……” 

The fire was out, the bases of the bottles slowly melting in the still-hot coals.  She watched them numbly, at the same time registering the dutch oven sitting in the coals.  Why hadn’t she used that? Couldn’t find an answer.

“Well, that may have killed the cat.” 

Unnoticed, Birgie had scuttled up next to her.

“My bottles broke.”

“Yup.”

“What cat?”

“The cat’s a metaphor, Honey.”

“A metaphor?”

“Sure, you know.  We met afore.  Maybe we met later.”

“We’ll meet later.”

“Maybe.”

“I was correcting your tense.”

“You are tense.  You need to get over that time thing.”

“What I need to get over is needing clean water.”

“You’ll get there, honey-chops.  Soon enough.” 

Amelia started to answer, but the crab had disappeared.  Scuttled away, or just vanished like a Cheshire Cat?  What was a Cheshire Cat? It was too much trouble to figure out.

There were a few inches of water left in the Benedictine bottle.  She sipped a little of it.  Threw up.

She crawled into her hammock, careful not to rip it.  It was so thin.  She was so thin.  Mister Eric and Koata and their men would have no trouble carrying her.  If they came.

“When they come!”

Wait, hadn’t they come?  No, not yet.  But….  She struggled with what had been, what was yet to come, what was now.

“Get over that time thing……”

Time thing.  There were other times.  Before now.  After now. 

Before now she had been in other places, done other things. 

Visions. Great piles and mountains of cloud; she flew between and around them, sometimes right through them.  Vast fields of green below her, then equally vast seas of sand, sharp-crested dunes stretching away in all directions.  Blue ocean, green ocean, islands in strange exotic forms, lakes in others.  Endless vistas of jungle – trees!  Ocean again, clouds.

“Billows and breeze, islands and seas, mountains of rain and sun….”

Lovely; she wanted to sing, but couldn’t move her lips, open her parched throat. 

Visions of islands, seas, rain and sun and cloud mountains.

Had she been asleep?  It was dark.  She knew that the canopy of leaves was solid above her, but without surprise realized that she could see through it.  There was the Milky Way – so bright, such a thick pathway of stars.  Leading – where? 

In a circle – no, a spiral.  Like water going down a drain.  Was there a drain?  Where did it go?

Her eyes were awash in stars.  Millions and millions of stars.  Was each a sun?  Did each have planets? 

“So much….”

So much to see, experience, explore.

Explore.  Was she done exploring?  Would she soon be just inert matter, going nowhere, doing nothing? 

“All that was me… is gone.” 

Her eyes were too dry for tears.

Boo-ka was there, somewhere in the void between her hammock and the Milky Way, gesturing upward, beckoning. 

But was there a void? 

Of course there was a void – millions and millions and millions of miles of void. 

No.  That was simplistic.

“Continuum.”

Crab gut to earth to tree to bird to Milky Way to wherever the Milky Way went.

Gone up! What an infinite, swelling feeling of comfort and rightness!  Gone on! 

She felt Boo-ka smiling.  The Milky Way filled her vision.

----------------------

Notes

“The freckle crème jar had broken.” See Joe Cerniglia et al: “A Freckle in Time or a Fly in the Ointment?” http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/ResearchPapers/freckleintime/FreckleInTime.html, for discussion of the possible Freckle Crème jar found at the Seven Site.

“…she had seen trees full of water in Africa.”  Writing of Chad during the World Flight:  “Throughout that region the tebeldi tree is used as a water reservoir.”  Last Flight, p. 92.  Tebeldi and tabaldi are local names for trees of genus Adansonia, generally known as the Baobab tree.

“…they formed a kind of basin, and it was full of water!” We have seen such water-holding buka (P. grandis) trees in the forest north of the Seven Site.

“The small first aid kit gave her a beginning…” In our 2007 excavations at the Seven Site we found both sides of a small snap in the WR Feature. The snap matches one that closes a compartment in a red wooden first aid kit acquired by TIGHAR’s Art Carty on Ebay that is consistent with the description of the smaller wooden kit listed in the Luke Field inventory. See http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/2016/05/earharts-first-aid-kits-at-seven-site.html

“Wrapped one end of the wire around the beer bottle, the other around the St. Joseph.” In the WR Feature we also found two broken, partially melted bottles and a twisted piece of wire. One bottle appears to have been a 1930s-style liniment container, possibly St. Joseph's Liniment, while the other appears to be a pre-war beer bottle. The bases of both were melted and the tops shattered, as though they had been placed upright in the fire. See https://www.academia.edu/20111385/Amelia_Earhart_on_Nikumaroro_A_Summary_of_the_Evidence.  

“Blue ocean, green ocean, islands in strange exotic forms, lakes in others.” In Last Flight, p. 90, AE writes of lakes and islands like “strange creatures and outlandish forms.” 

“Billows and breeze, islands and seas, mountains of rain and sun….” Robert Louis Stephenson, variation on the Skye Boat Song. See http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45949, I do not know whether AE liked Stephenson’s take on the old Scotts lay, but I do.