Hudson night train passed miles away—it sounded like it was going to
go right through the cabin.
Martha was the first to see it, turning and tilting as it rose over the
pines in a way that seemed uncertain to her then but wouldn’t later
when she knew what the pilot was about. High up it caught the full
sun, and white as it was it almost disappeared now and then against
the sky, then came clear and solidified as it swooped down around the
south end of the lake to approach the lake longwise.
“It’s a seaplane,” someone said, and now you could see that it was;
instead of wheels it seemed to be shod in big soft slippers. Martha
watched in awe as it came down fearlessly onto the lake’s surface,
seeming as light as a falling leaf and yet huge with power, the sound
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enormous now, the propeller nearly invisible in its speed. Then it struck
the water—they gasped or cried out, but not Martha, as it seemed to
bounce off and settle again, this time opening a long white rip in the
gray fabric of the lake surface. Martha’d never seen anything so taking
in all her life. She’d seen airplanes in the movies, where (like acrobats
in the circus) they seemed merely impossible; even though you knew
they were real they didn’t seem it. But this one landing with negligent
skill on the water—throttling its engine now and lifting softly in relax-
ation, turning toward the dock of the boys’ camp on the other shore—
it was real, what it had done was real and the pilot could have made a
mistake and come to grief and hadn’t; she could hear it, the power it
expended, she could even smell it.
The girls stood and watched it even after it had tied up at the boys’
dock and sat high and still and innocent there like any old skiff. Of
course everything that occurred in or around the boys’ camp was of
interest. A long time afterward Martha would think how intense it had
been, the two camps so near but with a great gulf fixed between, like
life as it was lived then—the signals and displays from one side meant
for the other side to see and decode, the thousand plans laid every
summer but never acted on to cross the gap. It amazed her to look back
and think how many camps there were in the great north woods like
hers, boys divided from girls not far away. At Martha’s camp the two
had occupied spits or points that had seemed to strain toward each
other, like Romeo and Juliet, like two bodies in movie seats; getting
closer too over the years (so it seemed to Martha as she came back
summer after summer and her legs grew longer). As though all of their
cool nights and hot days and their talk and the summer’s flickering
endless contests about who had said a cruel thing behind whose back
and who was snooty and who was whiny and who was definitely a
part-time Liz were all caused, like a reflection, by what happened
across the lake where the boys fought and played mumblety-peg and
ganged up to humiliate the weak and snapped one another’s bottoms
with towels. Martha knew they did all these things because her older
brother before his illness had gone to the same camp at the lake of the
woods.
They could see the swarm of boys around the plane then. A tall
counselor made his way amid them to where the pilot was just then
342 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
climbing out—he seemed to be wearing a Panama hat, of all things—
and the two of them met and shook hands, and the boys gathered
around the two and the girls could see nothing more. After a brief time
the pilot got up on the plane again, importuned obviously by the boys
asking questions and admiring the craft, and with a wave like Lind-
bergh, he shut himself in; then after a solemn silent moment the engine
started and the propeller kicked once, seemed to travel backward,
kicked again as the engine nacelle blew white smoke, then sped to a blur
in that way a propeller has, hysterical and self-satisfied at once.
What had happened—they learned at supper—was that a boy in the
camp, a first-year, had got bit by a copperhead, and they had no serum,
and so they’d radio’d out, and the plane had brought it in. Just like a
movie—snake, serum, radio, plane. It was thrilling but not as moving
to Martha as the plane itself, as it turned toward them—not toward
them, of course, toward the length of the lake, to take off again. But at
that, somehow all at once and without thought, the girls started waving
and calling and jumping up and down; and the plane seemed to pause
a moment, and then glided with an air of curious interest toward their
dock while the girls cheered in triumph.
It was a Stinson V-77 Gullwing, though that too she’d only learn
later, when she flew one. This summer afternoon she only stood trans-
fixed, but at the front of the pack, as Pete Bigelow (that would turn out
to be his name) stilled his engines to a mutter, and pushed his door
open, and asked if anybody wanted to go for a ride. None of the others
would—not in their bathing costumes, maybe not ever—but Martha
grabbed a robe and her espadrilles and presented herself before she
even knew she had.
“Two dollars,” said Pete, tilting back the Panama. He was older
and uglier than she thought he’d be. Two dollars was a lot of money:
all that was in Martha’s account at the camp store.
“Pay when we get back?” she said, and—seeing her there with no
money, no pockets to put it in—Pete Bigelow laughed, and reached out
a sun-red arm to pull her up and in, just as Martha glimpsed hurrying
toward the dock from wherever she’d been malingering with a cigarette
and a Photoplay the contemptible, the incompetent swimming instruc-
tor, her face a shocked mask of disbelief. Pete reached across her and
pulled shut the flimsy door. He kicked up the engine, a heart-seizing
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noise, a noise that was not only loud but also large, as though it pro-
duced the whole scale of possible sounds from the lowest to the highest
and erased every other sound there could be. From then on it was the
strongest, most easeful sound Martha Goldensohn knew.
It wasn’t until she was in college that she began taking flying lessons.
That would have been early 1941, and already the Air Corps was being
withdrawn from the routine jobs and organized into a fighting force,
and there was a need for fliers and planes who could take urgent mes-
sages or deliver those serums or search for lost hikers. She’d go down
in her little Austin runabout to the flying field whenever she could, and
pay for lessons at twelve dollars an hour, outrageous, nothing else at
school cost anything like that.
“Amelia Earhart, huh,” the instructor, whose name was Doc of
course, remarked when she signed up.
“Ha ha,” she said. “Anytime a woman says, I’d like to fly, you have
to say ‘Amelia Earhart’ right after, or you have bad luck all day—that
it?”
She did well, she had a gift, though she almost flunked out of col-
lege, which Daddy would not have been happy about, spending all her
time on the field or in the air. She managed mostly Cs that semester;
what mattered to her was that she got her pilot’s license. She took a
little inheritance she got that year to go in with a couple of men around
the field on a six-year-old Cessna Airmaster that had been rebuilt after
a tipover on landing. She convinced her partners to sign up with her for
the brand-new Civil Air Patrol. Ten days later the Japanese bombed