I Was Amelia Earhart, part two

more excerpts from Jane Mendelsohn's I Was Amelia Earhart....  Read more about the book with a review here: http://www.janemendelsohn.com/novels/i-was-amelia-earheart/

Amelia in the Electra cockpit, c. 1936

"When she thinks of her father now, she sees him at the end of the day.  That's his time of day, twilight, or just before.  The late afternoon, when the sun is setting, when it feels sad and beautiful, like the last day.  When the sadness is too unbearable to think about, and this makes you strangely cheerful. (93)


The heat will take over the island.  It will keep up all day and all night for several weeks.  The sun bears down, the air is still, the deafening hum goes on.  The things that will happen could only have happened during a heat wave.  Everything becomes quite unreal and it seems as though there is no future.  It is impossible to think about the future during the heat wave.  All during the heat wave we have the feeling, even in the darkness, that we need to escape from the sun.  (97)


Fot long stretches of time we're completely silent.  Long after sunset we're still sitting there, on the sand.  I recognize the terror of the quiet, the silence of flying.  Everything is moving, but everything is still. (99)


But before all this, there was the dry storm.  The storm between the heat wave and the rain.
The heat wave lasted for several weeks, at the end of which we were strangers.  We had changed so much, the heat had taken so much, we were strangers to ourselves.  We spent our time together, but we barely spoke anymore.  What was there to say?  We were desiccated, blistered.  Noonan had done everything he could: he'd built us shelter, he'd perfected his device for extracting water, he'd made us a little boat.  But still the sun was too much for us.  One day, he went out in his boat, and by the time he came back he was bleeding from the heat.  He'd covered himself, but the sun had burned through his protection, and he was so cooked that his skin peeled and then bled. (104-5)


I think it was then, during the storm, while we were waiting, that he finally understood what had happened to us. (107)


She spends the morning watching the birds pick at the debris, she watches them fight over fish and pass over urchins, and she does not realize for quite some time that Noonan is among them, squawking and clucking and bickering.  She sees him when he is already deeply engaged in conversation with a bird of paradise, gesticulating madly, with his radio in one hand and a piece of fish in his mouth.  She calls out to him, but he doesn't respond, and she sees him walk away from her, lost in argument with a bird, and then soon afterward she sees him round the bend of the beach and disappear from her sight.

Then she feels completely alone.

Three days later, on an exquisitely clear night, she found herself in the traditional state of a stranded islander, with a melancholy composed of memories and regrets, and too much time on her hands.  Noonan had survived the storm with a poetic stoicism, taking their exile to its purest extreme.  He appeared that night wearing flowers in his hair, he danced alone on the sand in the transparent moonlight, and before daybreak she decided that he was lost to her and to the rest of the world forever. Heartbroken with grief, she had gone to sit in the cockpit, where his singing couldn't reach her, and she put on her goggles and her skullcap in an effort to overcome the desire to join him in his madness.  It was a time of torment, which ended at dawn when she sighted the shore of her island through the broken windshield of her plane, and she decided once and for all that she had taken this journey in order to escape the madness of the world, that she didn't give a damn if she was alone, she wouldn't go crazy, and that she would live the rest of her long and brilliant life on this wild and desolate island. (107-9).