“ANNE, ANNE—JUMP!”
The water, muddy and churning, vicious, rushed up at me. We were inside the plane, our trusty steed; one minute we were hovering over the Yangtze River on a rope, ready to be lowered onto the water so we could take off. The next we were listing dangerously to one side, water rushing up to entrap us in the plane, like a tomb. And I thought, more curious than terrified, Death by drowning. Of all the ways I thought I might die, this was not one of them.
Then my husband’s voice, commanding although not panicked, pierced through my drowsy rumination, and I jumped as he told me to. I jumped, just as I had the day the plane overturned. Survival instinct, my compliant nature; maybe a combination of the two. But I leaped, sprawling, out of the plane and hit the flood-swollen waters of the Yangtze, terrified I would be pulled down by the weight of the parachute on my back, my heavy flying clothes. Already praying because I knew that this time I would not survive. I would never see my baby again.
I swallowed filthy water, retching it up as I somehow, miraculously, bobbed up to the surface. Only to feel myself tugged helplessly down again by my parachute. The water closed over my face and I couldn’t breathe. Writhing in panic like an eel, twisting, I managed to shed the parachute and bob back up again, gasping. I thought of all the times I’d been so careful to boil the water before I brushed my teeth or washed my face.
Amid shouts from the men on the boat nearby, I heard Charles call my name.
“Over here!” I waved an arm, and paddled toward him.
Charles was treading water, his hair plastered down, his face splotched with mud. When he saw me, his eyes widened with relief, and he waved back.
“Get away from the plane,” he called over the wind, the shouting, the engine of the boat. I nodded and swam away, threading my way through swirling sticks and logs and other debris carried along on this raging river.
Our ship, our beautiful Lockheed Sirius, was on its side, one great pontoon rising up from the water, the other just below. Water was pouring into the cockpit, and I winced at the thought of my radio and transmitter shorting out, ruined forever. This plane had been our home for the last two months, since July 27, 1931.
That was the day the “Flying Lindberghs” were driven to an airfield on the East River just outside of Queens, New York. On a platform that ramped down to the river, our great black-and-orange Sirius perched precariously on two huge pontoons, waiting for us to board. In the pontoons themselves, each item scrupulously weighed, was everything we could possibly need for several months’ journey to the Arctic, the Orient, and beyond. Our few items of clothing, extra trousers, shirts, and a flying suit for each of us, as well as warm parkas. There were also tins of food; pots for boiling water; a first-aid kit personally packed for us by the chief of staff at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; letters of introduction signed by President Hoover himself; an anchor, oars, an inflatable boat, extra parachutes, firearms, ammunition, fishing equipment, an extra radio, and blankets. Almost as an afterthought, we both carried brand-new passports.
Surrounded by reporters, photographers, and Movietone men with their whirring cameras, we waited as two mechanics made a final check of the Sirius. Charles was asked by male reporters about the technical difficulties of the challenging flight. I was asked by female reporters how I intended to set up housekeeping in a plane, even as my fingers nervously tapped out practice messages in the Morse code I had been studying for weeks—Engine failure. Send help. Location unknown. Not once was I queried about my technical skills, even though I was to be the radio operator on this trip. Waiting for me in my rear compartment was my radio and all its coils and tubes, the receiver perched on a shelf to my right, the transmitter a cold, hard presence at my feet next to the antenna I would slowly crank out of a compartment on the floor whenever I needed to transmit. The huge, noisy dynamotor was behind my seat, where it would occasionally give me a kick, literally, in the pants.
“Mrs. Lindbergh, what clothes are you taking on the trip?” “Are you going to show the new spring fashions to the Japanese?” “Do you think you’ll miss your son very much?”
“Yes,” I replied, in answer to them all—thanking God that it was time to leave. I waved goodbye with that jaunty grin that I could never recognize when I saw it in photographs. Charles had built a little ladder that enabled me to ascend the enormous pontoons; from there I could then hop up onto the wing, and then into the plane itself. We settled into our respective cockpits, Charles in front, me in back, and then Charles started up the plane. Nosing awkwardly down the ramps, we hit the water with a wallop that splashed waves all over the Movietone men, to my great delight.
Our first attempt to take off was cut short by a boat full of newsreel cameras that veered too close. Our second was successful, although I held my breath as Charles maneuvered our way through a flock of airplanes full of more newsreel cameras, some so close I could see the stripes on the bow ties of the photographers. (Newsreel cameramen, I had discovered, always wore bow ties, for reasons I could never fathom.)
Soon enough, we shook them, and we said goodbye with a jaunty little wiggle of the wings that was Charles’s signature. Only then did I see my husband’s shoulders relax; he turned to me with a jubilant grin that made me laugh out loud. We were on our way, just the two of us; on our greatest adventure yet, one for the history books. Charles hadn’t looked so free, so joyous, in months; since long before our son was born.
We would navigate across Canada, up through Alaska, over the Bering Strait, skirt Siberia, and hip-hop down the islands of Japan to China. Along the way, we would eat raw fish with Eskimos in huts, file into a mess tent with prospectors in Anchorage, sit on the bamboo floors of palaces in Japan to partake of ancient tea ceremonies. Everywhere we landed we were mobbed by the population, even if the population was only ten hardy soldiers on a remote island outpost. In the air, we were partners; I took over flying when Charles was tired, or when he needed to map out our routes. But on land, we were always separated; I was shuttled off to be with the women, where I was expected to be interested only in domestic duties. I lost count of the number of times I was asked how I kept the cockpit tidied.
Charles smarted at these questions on my behalf; I would catch his sympathetic head shake. Yet the only time he ever came to my defense was early in the trip, in Ottawa. Waiting for a banquet in our honor to begin, I found my husband seated on the floor of an anteroom, surrounded by fellow pilots.
Charles was a different person around pilots and mechanics; I had learned this early in our marriage, on our first barnstorming trip west. Suddenly the great aviator I had married became “Slim” to all his old colleagues and mechanics; the ones who had remained where they were, content to fly the mail and do tricks for air shows, when he had set his relentless gaze across an ocean, to Paris. They played jokes on one another, told dirty stories, and allowed me to watch, amused and touched. My husband had been a boy, after all; this was my real glimpse into who he was before.
So I smiled when I saw them all huddled on the ground, looking like a gaggle of small boys shooting marbles. They were studying maps, nodding intently as they discussed routes over the Arctic, joshing and teasing one another. But then one pilot suddenly looked up and saw me; he sniffed and grumbled to Charles, “I’d never take my own wife on such a trip.”
Charles didn’t get angry; instead, he merely shrugged and answered, with a proud glance my way, “You must remember that she is crew.”
My skin flushed with pride, with accomplishment. That was my favorite memory of the entire trip; maybe of our entire marriage. For in that moment, everyone knew with certainty that we were truly partners; I was his equal, the equal of every man in that room.
But then Charles and his friends turned back to the maps, and I found myself surrounded by bright, gilded matrons in evening gowns, their hair elegantly coiffed. I was in a limp frock still wrinkled from being packed in the pontoon, and my hair, newly bobbed, was a mass of unkempt curls about my face. My moment of triumph was over as soon as it had begun, and I retreated back in the uncertain shadows of my life here on earth, neither pilot nor matron.
I knew that I would be looking for that proud glance; that feeling of belonging, of knowing who I was, that I mattered, for the rest of my life.
THERE WERE OTHER less jubilant moments on that trip. Moments when the fog was so thick around us as we flew over the Arctic, we couldn’t see where to land. Moments when we almost ran out of fuel, because we had to navigate around capricious storms that caused our plane to buck and heave like a bronco, and I didn’t know if we’d land miles beyond civilization and the nearest refueling station or simply fall out of the sky.
Moments when I angrily cursed myself for believing Charles when he said he was the best pilot he knew, that he would always protect me; for believing him when he said we would see the baby again. Moments when, my eyes shut against the fog, the white blindness, the only image I could see was that of my son’s face, so clearly I wanted to cry out; the shy, sweet smile, the cleft chin, the round blue eyes always trusting—trusting me to come back to him.
Moments when I feared I wouldn’t.
After every storm, every menacing fog, every teeth-jarring landing on a narrow strait, the wings of the plane just barely missing rocks and cliffs, my hands would shake when I undid my harness.
But Charles—Every time! Every single time!—would bound up out of his cockpit, turn around to me with a grin, and exclaim, “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it!” And he would insist that we’d never really been in any danger; he would insist it was all in my head, and that I worried too much, and had I remembered to pack the sandwiches for dinner?
What could I do, in those times? What could I do but nod, and marvel, and chide myself for not being as strong as him, after all? For not acting worthy; worthy of his crew?
And so we traveled on, mapping routes, spreading goodwill across the globe, dispatching letters home when possible. We reached China in late September, where our mission became one of mercy. The Yangtze River had flooded so awesomely that tens of thousands of people were displaced, starving, or drowned. I piloted countless hours over its path, as Charles mapped out areas for possible flood relief, and we delivered much-needed medicine to isolated villages. We were about to leave on one last mission when the Sirius overturned in the Yangtze.
Charles and I were rescued by sailors and brought aboard the British aircraft carrier Hermes, which had tried to launch us in the first place. Somehow they managed to lift the plane out of the water. But as I watched on deck, wrapped in a musty blanket, I saw that there were huge holes in one of the wings and the fuselage.
“Oh, no,” I moaned, sickened by the damage done to our plane; the plane that I had trusted to bring me back to my son, and now I knew that it wouldn’t.
“I can fix it,” Charles promised, that terrifyingly certain set to his jaw. “We’ll have the Hermes take us up to Shanghai, where I can probably get the right parts. I won’t let this be the end of our trip.”
“No, no, of course not,” I replied, too quickly. I couldn’t prevent my entire body from shuddering with cold and, I suddenly realized—heartbreaking disappointment. He would fix it, of course he would. And we would soon be winging our way across the rest of the globe; winging our way to some fresh danger, some impossible situation that no mere mortal could be expected to survive. How many of them could we cheat? How long before even Lucky Lindy’s luck ran out?
I walked away from Charles, my stomach queasy from the water I’d swallowed; I ran my tongue over my teeth and found grit there. I hurried over to the side of the deck and spat frantically over the railing, desperate to get some of the filth out of my mouth; I shivered even though the air was quite warm. Behind me, I heard my husband barking out orders to some of the ship’s crew, as they tried to do something to our plane.
So the ship changed course toward Shanghai, where we’d have to stay; how many days I had no idea, but each one a nail in my heart, hammered in by the knowledge that it would be that much longer before I saw my son, held him in my arms, felt his fingers curl warmly around mine.
It was growing dark, and I was still covered in mud; now I was desperate to get to our little shipboard cabin. If only I could shut the door and take a hot shower, wash the filth and despair off me, look at the photographs of little Charlie that, thank God, were still in my stateroom, safe and dry. My legs weak with exhaustion, I was halfway down the deck when an officer came running toward me.
“Mrs. Lindbergh? Mrs. Lindbergh?” He waved a yellow piece of paper. A telegram, I knew in an instant. I froze, unable to take another step. “Dear Mrs. Lindbergh, I’m sorry—”
“What? The baby? Oh, the baby!”
Charles came running up behind me. “Anne. Let me see what this is.”
He snatched the telegram out of the man’s hands, and read it. As he did, I thought of all the things I would say to him if something had happened to my child. All the blame, all the recrimination; words, sentences—angry, bitter, accusing—flew through my mind and were almost on my lips when I heard my husband say, very gently, “It’s your father.”
“What—Daddy?”
“Yes. He’s—he’s dead, Anne. A stroke. This morning, apparently.”
“Oh.” And I smiled.
Charles looked at me oddly, but then put his arm about my shoulders. He made some kind of apology or statement to the always present newsmen on board the ship, and ushered me quickly down the deck to the telegraph room. He wired my mother to say we would be returning home right away.
Through it all, my husband watched me with grave concern, and I knew he was wondering when, not if, I would collapse or give way to my emotions, those emotions he always despised because he did not understand them. But this time, even Charles understood the sadness of losing a parent. Of course, I must be distraught.
How to explain, then, that all I felt was relief? Relief that little Charlie was fine, that we hadn’t drowned in the Yangtze after all. Relief that it was only my father.
For I would see my baby. Sooner, much sooner, than I had thought. Because my father had died, I was released from my duty as my husband’s crew. At that moment I couldn’t feel grief about the reason.
I only knew the pure happiness of one who has been relieved of a great, crushing burden. I could hardly sleep that night, I was so eager for the morning.
We took a ship back to San Francisco, where we borrowed a plane and flew across the country. We did not encounter any storms or mishaps. And three weeks later, when the car finally pulled up to Next Day Hill, I ran ahead of my husband. I brushed past my grieving mother, my stricken sisters, my silent brother; I ran upstairs on feet that fairly flew.
And I grabbed my child out of the arms of his surprised nurse. Dancing around the sunny, light-filled nursery with Charlie in my arms, I whispered that I would never leave him again.