Apparently untroubled and indefatigable, Bill Stultz would get up before the others in the morning and go eeling, trouting, or exploring; at night he would pick out tunes on the guitar to entertain the others. Job-like, they all tried to ignore the smothering fog, the howling winds, and the hurtling sea, but the strain was telling in wrinkles of concern on all their faces. To dull the sharpened edge of his anxiety, Bill took to drinking heavily. His melancholy had returned. AE was worried about it; Slim, evidently, was unconcerned, knowing that Bill would stop drinking once he was back in the air, as he had in Boston.
On June 12 they tried desperately for four hours to take off, but the heaviness of the receding tide sprayed and silenced the outboard motors. The plane seemed heavy and unwieldy. Every item of unnecessary equipment was unloaded—camera, coats, bags, cushions—but still the salt spray continued to kill the motors. They were too discouraged to speak.
The next day they arose at six o’clock. They unloaded 300 pounds of fuel and tried for take-off, but the left motor cut out. More days of waiting plagued them until the motor was repaired, but one reassuring message had reached them. The Southern Cross, a trimotored Fokker, like the Friendship except for pontoons, had crossed the Pacific from San Francisco.
Back at the Devereux home, they decided to do something about their clothes. Amelia, who had only the clothes she was wearing, bought a green-checked Mother Hubbard for ninety cents and a pair of tan hose, then borrowed a pair of shoes, a skirt, and a slip, so that she could wash everything from the skin out. Bill and Slim felt the same crawling need for cleanliness. They borrowed clothes, and had their suits cleaned and pressed and their shirts laundered. Bill splurged and bought a new tie and new Trepassey socks.
Finally, a slight break in the weather came on Sunday morning, June 17. At eleven o’clock, after three tries in a heavy sea, the take-off was successful. Bill Stultz, unfortunately, had to be all but carried on the plane by Amelia and Gordon, but again he called upon hidden reserves of airmanship, as in Boston, and piloted the Friendship as if nothing had ever happened.
Amelia worried lest there would be a recurrence of drinking during the long over-water flight. Her fears were intensified when she found a bottle hidden in the rear of the plane. She debated the discovery for a few moments, but soon acted: she dropped the bottle into the ocean. As it happened, her concern was unfounded. Stultz never came back to look for his stimulant; flying, it appeared, was for him stimulant enough.
The Friendship wobbled through the fog, one engine still spluttering from the sea spray on take-off, climbed to 3,000 feet, and leveled off to cruise for a while. More wisps of fog flitted by. Bill nosed the plane higher, out of the fog, but into a sudden snowstorm. Lighter by 2,000 pounds, because of the excess baggage and fuel that had been removed at Trepassey, three tons of aircraft now flew through the air, shaking violently in the buffeting of the storm.
Bill pointed the nose down; the motors roared wide open. At 3,000 feet they bucked a head wind and a lashing rain; the plane bumped and lurched in the downdrafts and updrafts. The air speed was steady at 106 mph. Suddenly a clear sky, sun shining, and blue sea broke as far as Amelia could see; then, ominously, mountainous peaks of clouds towered dead ahead. The plane upended and hurtled headlong in a steep dive. Amelia braced herself against the forward bulkhead and waited for the plane to right itself.
4. Atchison Tomboy
How often before had she known the same sensation, long before she had ever seen or learned how to fly an airplane. Like the day she decided to build a roller coaster out behind her grandfather’s woodshed. With her sister Muriel and her cousins Katherine and Lucy Challiss to help her, Amelia had nailed some cross boards to two long planks for the runway, then tacked some old roller-skate wheels to a wide board for the coaster. The girls lifted the crude runway and leaned it against the top of the shed, while Amelia climbed up a ladder to the roof. The coaster was handed up to her, and as she knelt with the board between her hands, she felt a shiver along the middle of her back. She wondered for a moment if she could make it down the steep incline. The first time she tried, she flipped over when the coaster reached the ground, and her sister and cousins screamed. Amelia cautioned them against making too much noise, then insisted that she would try it again after the boards were made longer. On the second attempt she shot from the end of the incline onto the ground, right side up and unharmed.