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Safety belts adjusted; shades pulled tight; and the big "Sky Sleeper" taxis across LaGuardia Field, rises smoothly and effortlessly into the misty afternoon sunlight. Peeping down, I see the East River, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Hudson, and then we are roaring over New Jersey. New York has vanished and I am on my way to Pearl Harbor, and although I didn’t know it, to Midway. The fertile farm lands of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana move away below us, painted by early spring and bathed in the mellow light of late afternoon; and I think how happy Walt Whitman would have been, bewhiskered and peering down like the Good Lord aloft, on his country’s rich earth. Half asleep in my bunk after dipping into Chicago, I am charmed by moonlight on the silver wing and see the stars twinkling up from the farms and mysterious land below, and the stars shining down from the sky above, and am confused as to which way heaven or earth lies. Sleep and peace. Only an hour of oblivion, and then rudely awakened on a rolling plane. Night now black and wild; forced down and earthbound in a hotel in Kansas City. At dawn next day a new ship, new shipmates. Ferry pilots and R.A.F., Army and Navy, give our passenger plane a warlike appearance. Moreover, we are behaving exactly like a destroyer, rolling and plunging and dropping thirty or forty feet on these invisible seas. Finally we run out of the storm onto a calm sea of air, the clouds below and astern shooting up, magnificent in the morning sunlight. Two hours later over Oklahoma, there rises dead ahead of us a thick and perfectly filthy yellow wall a mile high, and I am looking straight at my first dust storm – Oh Grapes of Wrath! Our port wing dips dizzily down and the earth swings slowly around, and turning tail, we run away from its pursuing menace for several hours and are back and grounded in Wichita, for the radio from the field we tried to make had told us that the visibility in that smothering dust was zero, and a 65 knot wind had just capsized the plane that landed ahead of us. I begin to think that my country is as violent as she is beautiful. What of the people, their farms and villages, hidden behind that moving wall of dirt? Coughing in their sealed-up houses, while the soil they need mixes with the swirling filth where once had been sky; blinded and cut off from all their neighbors, amid their disappearing mortgaged crops! This is as far as I have ever been from salt water, and as far as I ever want to be. I am aground in a bone dry state. Although so much of our Navy comes from these central states, there are no bluejackets or marines on the streets, and my Navy uniform seems strange out here. There is yellow dust on the dark blue cloth instead of white salt. A clipper ship must have felt like this, when she was towed and shoved away up the muddy shoal waters of some stinking slip to discharge her cargo; her white sea wings stripped from her bare yards and her naked spars and rigging obscured in the shadows of tall gaunt warehouses; the soot and cinders of coughing little locomotives defiling her spotless quarterdeck; the far gaze of her figurehead, used to vast horizons, brought up short by a dingy brick wall. The dirty feet of the stevedores crunch over the ship’s grimy waist. Not long ago she was alive, close-hauled with her lee scuppers awash and the clean green and white foam roaring away to leeward, as her many inner voices made rough music for her crew. Now she lies inert, inarticulate. For hours the ferry pilots and R.A.F. men sprawl listlessly around the Wichita station soda fountain, until finally the air people lead us to two hot, ancient Pullman cars. They creak and groan hour after hour at an incredibly slow speed. After "shooting the breeze" with the R.A.F. men about their part in the air blitzes over France, we turn in at 11 o’clock only to be awakened at 1 A.M. and dumped off the train at Amarillo amid the curses of all, leveled at the harassed and tactful air official. I lose count by now of the checking and rechecking of all our gear. We are finally picked up at the depot by busses and deposited after a long ride through the cool night, at the little Amarillo airport in the panhandle of Texas. But the hardest blow of all is to see a big sky sleeper glide in from the obscurity of the night onto the white apron, and find that she had left LaGuardia Field a day after we had. She refuels and lifts her sleeping passengers by her silver wings and roars away into the starlight. Even the soda fountain is dry, and during the next two hours in that cold morning our humor runs dangerously low. At last movement and motion again in a plane, and a sleep in a comfortable chair, as I have given my bunk to one of the ferry pilots who needs it more than I. Swooping down in the deep night into Albuquerque, and falling to sleep again in the rising plane. After the weird desert dawn above Arizona, we pass over an extraordinary crater, the scar of a falling meteor, its ragged brown edges tinted orange by the low sun, like a gargantuan shell hole a half a mile across. Roaring high up over strange brown hills, pocked with gray green spots, white yellow river beds now dry, the whole scene in tone and color like the patterns on the Navajo Indian blankets and baskets of these lands. I think how climate hardened or softened the Indian tongue, just as today we have the hard nasal of Chicago as opposed to the soft voices of Tidewater, Virginia. Had the Pilgrims landed there rather than on that hard cold rock, their voices would have mellowed like the speech of the Chesapeake shores. So the Indian words made music as beautiful as Conowingo on the Susquehanna. Contrast this with the sharper ring of Connecticut, Weekapaug, Quonochontaug or Nantucket. I’ll admit the beautiful tone of the falling Niagara. Looking down, I see cattle like tiny brown and white beads scattered on a dull surface; freight trains like thin black snakes with white plumes tied to their heads. In the late morning, above the clouds of California, we peer through a hole and see sienna mountains brushed over with a livid green, and then in a sudden rift, my first glimpse of the Pacific – Lord, there is salt water! |