One hour and fifteen minutes later they sighted Nova Scotia and Fear Island. The plane dropped to 2,000 feet for a closer look. The haze had lessened. White gulls flew over the clustered houses on the green land and headed out over the waves rocking a lone dory on the shore. A rocky ledge ruffled the edge of the island. Pubnico Harbor was directly below. The Friendship, motors humming sweetly, had averaged 114 mph since it left Boston.
Amelia changed her seat to a gas can and looked down through the hatchway. A green dappled shore came into view. The plane raced fast-scudding clouds and churned through the reappearing haze. Bored with nothing more to see, AE now lay on the floor of the fuselage and pulled up the fur collar of her oversized leather flying suit. She felt snug and warm. Beside her along the bulkhead the gas cans squeaked against the heavy tie ropes. “Having a squeaking good time,” Amelia said to herself, and remembered those other squeaking good times she once had in Atchison, Kansas.
2. Girlhood in Kansas
Grandfather Otis stood in front of the fireplace in the long living room of his home. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth, his black, square-toed, handmade shoes squeaking on the hard wood floor. He was a big, thick-chested man, and even in retirement he was still every inch the judge he had been before his two granddaughters were born.
His wife Amelia sat in the rocking chair, darning a black knee stocking. The chair creaked as it rocked, keeping involuntary time with the heel-and-toe swaying of the thick black shoes.
Two little girls, their daughter Amy’s only children, sat on the stiff horsehair sofa and exchanged knowing looks. The older girl, Amelia, who was named after her grandmother, bent over and whispered into her sister Muriel’s ear. “A squeaking good time!” They giggled. They wished they had shoes that squeaked, too.
The girls loved their grandfather because he often entertained them with stories about his early days in Kansas. Judge Otis had been one of the first settlers of Atchison. Shortly after the Civil War, when he graduated from the University of Michigan, he came by overland stage from Kalamazoo to Chicago, took a flatboat to St. Louis, then went up the Missouri River and debarked at Atchison to make his home. He built a large two-story brick-and-frame house on a site overlooking the river, and added a big barn and woodshed. The work completed, he sent for his bride, who had been staying with her Quaker family in Philadelphia.
Amelia Otis found the country nearly savage. The railroad tracks going into Atchison were lined with buffalo bones, and the so-called “friendly” Indians scared her half to death. They were too friendly. Whenever she went shopping in town, the curious Indians fingered her dress and poked into her shopping basket. Grandfather Otis chuckled when he told this story about his wife, for she would always remind him that she had preferred the civilization of Philadelphia and the society of Friends.
The Earhart girls enjoyed their grandfather but he never replaced their father, who, it seemed, was always away on a business trip. One of Amelia’s earliest memories of her childhood was waiting for her father to come home for the weekend, to see what presents he would bring and, best of all, to play with him during the day and to listen to his stories at night. He had bought them a baseball and bat and also a basketball, and had shown them how to play with them, despite the protests of some of the neighborhood mothers.
At bedtime for the girls, instead of sending them upstairs to their room, he would sit in the straight-backed chair by the fireplace, cross the long legs of his slender frame, and tell them stories of his family and boyhood.