Amelia knelt beside the chart table, drinking in the color from the sun splashing on the mist, fog, and clouds. Cloud peaks tinted pink from the setting sun towered in the distance; their hollows were gray and black. The mist on the arc of the props combined with the sun into three bright rainbows. The pink exhausts from the three motors matched the pink of the cloud peaks. The plane sank in the fog to 4,000 feet. They were 1,096 miles out from Trepassey.
It was night. Cloud, mist, and fog combined. Ten o’clock. Amelia tried to write in the dark by using the thumb of her left hand as the starting point of a line. The words were uneven on the logbook but distinct:
How marvelous is a machine and the mind that made it. I am thoroughly occidental in this worship. Bill sits up alone. Every muscle and nerve alert. Many hours to go. Marvelous also. I’ve driven all day and night and know what staying alert means.
Bill climbed to get over the fog and roughness. Five thousand feet. There was another mountain of fog to climb. Six thousand feet. The north star was reflected in the wing tip. Three fifteen A.M. More mountains of fog had to be scaled. Bill gave the plane all she had. Nine thousand feet. Ten thousand feet. Since Trepassey the Friendship had been in the air thirteen hours and fifteen minutes, despite the four-hour advance in clock time. Periodically, Slim Gordon focused a flashlight on the compass so Bill could take a reading.
Stultz had to fly his plane now completely by instruments. He decided to go down through the fog. He began slowly, then more quickly, down to 5,000 feet. Amelia’s ears hurt from the rapid descent. Water streamed on the windows. The left motor started to cough, then the other two. Bill opened the throttles wide, trying to clear the cylinders.
Three thousand feet. The left motor still sputtered. Slim took over the controls, while Bill came back to try the radio. It was dead. Everlasting clouds were everywhere. It began to get lighter as the day dawned. The plane came down through an opening in the clouds. Everything in the cabin slid forward, Amelia with it. She thumped against the forward bulkhead. That sensation again. She grinned, then smiled broadly. The story of her life could be given in forward slides. The roller coaster, the belly whopper, the Columbia dome. It seemed that she had always been coming down from altitude, after seeking the highest point of woodshed, street, or building and exulting to the thrill of quick descent.
6. Premed at Columbia
Amelia studied hard and long at Columbia. She had enrolled in the fall of 1919, when she was twenty-one, as a premedical student. After having been a nurses aide in Toronto during the war, she decided to try medicine as a possible profession. She took all the courses ending in “ology,” and chemistry and physics; and she treated herself to a luxury course in French literature.
Marian Stabler, a close friend at the time, was amazed at the number of credit hours that AE was carrying. “This course she was taking,” Miss Stabler writes, “was really a three-man job, with the full quota at Barnard, and listening courses elsewhere. Apparently Columbia and Barnard didn’t compare notes, as she wouldn’t have been permitted to carry a load like that if anyone had known. She could only manage it because there was little homework or preparation in the science courses.”
But Amelia found time to give free rein to her exploratory nature. As she had adventured into the caves along the shores of the Missouri River below the Otis house, so now she had to investigate every nook of the underground passageways at Columbia. She would go down the steps to the basement of Hamilton Hall, enter through a heavy door, follow the maze of steam pipes wherever they led, and, happily surprised, come out at Schermerhorn Hall on the other side of the campus.