Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island
Part 22
August 22nd, 1937
The boobies were fledging. All along the shore, under bushes and trees,
the ragged fluffy babies were peeking out from under their parents, who took
turns tending them and flying out to find fish to regurgitate into their
waiting beaks. She was torn between maternal
sympathy and the desire for tender squab; thus far sympathy had the upper
hand.
Firewood was once again running low, so it was
time to move again. Despite her crab
encounter there, the vicinity of her psychic nest seemed like a good candidate
site. She began to relocate gear there,
a few pieces at a time. Taking time,
during the peak heat of midday, to write, using the bow compass that Fred had
kept clipped into the top of his sextant box.
It was a bit clumsy, but less so than a stick with a lead tied on it –
which she had tried.
I have been on Norwich Island, I calculate, for
almost a month and a half – perhaps more, since there have been periods when I
have lost track of the days. My clothing
is wearing out; when rescue finally comes, I may be reluctant to come out of
the bushes until someone can hand me a pair of trousers and a shirt.
I continue to have enough water, thanks to my
excellent dutch oven still and occasional rain squalls like the one a few
nights ago, but it is a chore to operate the still each day, and I seldom have
a surplus. My two desert water bags are
again dry. I fill my thermos from the still, and that is enough to carry me
through the day. As long as the still
holds out and there is water in the ocean – and as long as I can light a fire –
I should not go entirely thirsty, but I know I need to be careful to avoid
dehydration.
My meals are dominated these days by fish. I am reluctant to exploit the newly-hatched Karla
booby chicks, and their parents are aggressively defensive – a great change
from their previous almost casual surrender to the neck-wringer. My fruit and salad courses are varied but not
particularly tasty – hog apple, whose smell I have learned to ignore, and the
fruits and leaves of other trees and shrubs.
I’ve found no purslane on this portion of the island. Nothing here seems
to be poisonous, though none of it is very tasty.
I am moving my camp a short distance up the
windward shore. It is a long shore,
unrelieved by promontory or inlet – just broad reef flat and rocky sand beach,
backed by shrubs and the great mounded trees with their vast flocks of
birds. It should, at any rate, be a
lovely place to watch the sun rise, and pray for a ship.
My injured foot is still swollen, and I worry
about it being infected, but otherwise I am healthy. As long as I remain so, do not experience a
more serious injury, can keep making water and can keep the crabs at bay, I
expect to be able to hold out indefinitely, and I am confident that rescue will
come. In any event, I have done all I
know to do to speed its coming. All I
can do is wait.
She folded the compass and sat quietly with it in
her hand, listening to the island. Birds
crying, the surf thundering on the reef, the wind in the trees. It had become such a part of her, it was hard
to imagine being anywhere else.
As often happened when she sat like this, day or
night – or when she walked the beach just quiet, clearing her mind – The Lady
came. Not visibly, at least not always,
but there, a felt presence.
Boo-Ka IS the
island. Especially the trees, but really
the whole place, the whole buzzing, throbbing natural place. Even the crabs. There is some lesson in it all, for us humans
of the modern world, the American-European world. In some ways I know I can never comprehend
what it is; in others, I think I know it very well.
She invites me
to – I might as well say it – She invites me to die here, to join her, become
part of her by becoming part of the island – the trees, the birds, and yes, the
crabs. To sink down and be part of the
coral gravel, and rise up through the sap and leaves of the trees, and –
somehow – to go beyond, up and up among the stars, into the Milky Way and
beyond.
And I think….
Say to her in my thoughts – not yet, Lady.
Maybe sometime, but not yet. NOT YET!
August 23rd, 1937
Unlike the squalls that walked across the ocean
on their misty rain-legs through the otherwise clear sky, quick to arrive and
depart, dumping tons of water on the island when they hit and nothing when they
missed, this storm was visible from far off, coming out of the southwest. The noonday sun was still bright overhead,
and the humidity seemed to have soared, but the horizon was dark below great
heaving, roiling clouds, approaching slowly.
She eyed the towering thunderheads. Cumulonimbus, clouds she would fly around if
she had the choice. The otherwise
constant northeast trade wind had died, and strange irregular gusts came out of
the southwest.
“Early for a cyclone.”
She had planned her flight to miss the tropical
cyclone season, and she hadn’t been on the island that long. Maybe it was just a big storm. But the sea seemed strangely unsettled, as
though it were being shaken by something.
Choppy waves running in contrary directions, colliding and throwing
spray into the air. Every now and then,
at irregular intervals, a wave would run far up the beach, almost to the edge
of her camp.
She saluted a booby, nervously shifting on its
nest nearby.
“Better move inland and batten the hatches,
Cap’n; looks like at least a septaroon makin’ up.”
She gathered a first load of gear and struggled
through the band of shoreside brush. A
linear clearing opened up and she followed it north along the face of the coral
rubble ridge that ran, probably, the length of the island between ocean and
lagoon. Doubtless thrown up by great sea
surges that had ripped the reef apart and ground it to gravel in ages past.
The clearing turned abruptly to the left, ran
another thirty feet or so and gave out, but the transition was to high-canopy
forest, made up of the gray-barked tree, the darker trees with their
pomegranate-shaped fruits, and other varieties.
The ground here – on the crest of the rubble ridge – was relatively
clear and free of brush.
“Far enough.”
She put down her burdens and went back for
another load.
Three trips moved her dwindling stock of
possessions. Though it could not be past
two in the afternoon, the sky was growing dark, with racing clouds overhead and
occasional flashes of sheet lightning.
She quickly set out everything she could find that would catch
water. Cans, biscuit tins, coffee cup,
dutch oven, freckle crème jar; bottles with leaf-funnels; even emptying the
rubberized bag and opening it wide. She
spread her hammock – wearing thin – over a depression in the ground, and her
one remaining piece of Can Camp canvas over another. Where had the other pieces gone?
“And now I’ll lie on the ground with my mouth
open.”
She did, but gave it up when no rain came. Got up
and walked back to where she could see the ocean.
“Good that I left when I did.”
The waves – well, some of the waves – were
crashing into the fringe of the forest where her camp had been. Still very irregular, with little apparent
pattern or direction, but extraordinarily powerful. As she watched, a tree was ripped out by its
roots and carried over the reef. The
wind rose rapidly, shrieking through the treetops. She retreated inland.
The storm time – it was only late afternoon, but
felt like darkest night – was an orgy of wind and rain, lightning and
thunder. Branches were ripped off trees,
her cans and jars and food containers were tossed in all directions. Her hammock tried to fly away – she weighted
it down with rocks. Birds – there were a
lot of them in the forest – hunkered down under bushes, crabs were nowhere to
be seen. She raced around her inland
campsite catching things that were blowing away – or trying to, dodging flying
branches, staggering from tree to tree and grabbing on to one and then another
to keep from being blown away herself. The rain came in what seemed like solid
sheets, waterfalls out of the sky, sometimes blowing almost horizontally and
hitting her like surf. At the height of
it all, one of the great gray-barked trees seemed almost to explode, pieces
flying everywhere and the massive trunk toppling down the face of the
ridge. She had been leaning against it,
panting, only moments before.
And then it was over. The wind dropped, the rain stopped. The clouds parted, and a ray of evening sunshine
illuminated the clearing created by the destroyed tree. Everything was soaked, everything
dripped. She hurried from container to
container, filling the water bags and bottles.
Enough water, she thought, to last a week without running the
still. She hung up her hammock to dry,
and began gathering wood for a fire.
“If it dries out before dark.”
It did not.
It was an oddly disorienting night in the dark under the trees, with no
fire or even coals to provide a point of reference. The hammock was wet and cold, an odd
experience. She stripped off her soaked
clothes, hung them up on branches, and lay nude in the hammock, staring up
through the gap in the canopy at the now-clear black sky, studded with stars
and dusted across by the Milky Way. For
the millionth time imagined navigating through its star-fields, exploring the
planets that must be there. How? When?
--------------------
Notes
“…the sea seemed strangely unsettled, as though it
were being shaken by something …” These conditions
and those associated with the storm’s subsequent passage are similar to (though
more extreme than) those we experienced when Tropical Cyclone Hina caught us on
Nikumaroro in 1997; see Amelia Earhart’s
Shoes pp 177-9.
“…looks like at least a septaroon makin’ up.” In Cruise
of the Kawa, GP had his protagonist’s ship run afoul of an “octoroon” – a
terrible storm with winds from eight directions. Rather than imagining AE using
the term, and confusing readers, I’m imagining this storm to be just slightly
less intense than the one that struck the Kawa.
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