Back outside, she stopped at the statue of Alma Mater and for no reason climbed into her lap. That it was an irrational thing to do, she readily admitted, but she liked to do silly things once in a while. She decided to walk for a few blocks down Broadway. She turned the corner at 116th Street. Campus couples were walking arm in arm up Broadway and down the side streets to Riverside Drive. She walked in long, even strides, moving with the easy, unconscious grace of the natural athlete.
“The girl in brown who walks alone.” She remembered the inscription under her picture in the high-school yearbook. She had cried over it when she had shown it to her mother; the tag line had been unkind but true.
She blinked her eyes quickly at the memory. She could not be like those other girls who clung to boys as if they were gods or something. It was worth it to be different and go it alone and do what one wanted to do.
7. Land!
“Going it alone,” Amelia repeated the phrase to herself, alone in the passenger compartment of the Friendship, a lone woman, the first woman in history on a transatlantic flight. She looked up and forward to the two men flying the plane. Bill was nosing down again, and Lou was gazing intently out his side window. AE walked carefully up to the cockpit. Twenty-five hundred feet. Eight fifty A.M. Lou Gordon pointed out to the right. Two ships!
One of them was the S. S. America. Lou took over the controls as Bill Stultz went back to try to make radio contact with the ships; but the radio failed to operate. How could he get a position?
The Friendship dropped down and circled the America. Bill scribbled a note. Amelia attached it to an orange, put both in a paper bag, and aimed through the opened hatchway for the deck of the America. The combination of speed, movement of the ship, wind, and lightness of the bag made the bombing a failure. A second attempt failed.
An alternative plan was suggested: should they try to land near the ship, get a position report by voice, then try to take off again? The rough sea would make a landing difficult, a take-off impossible. Bill tried again, but in vain, to receive a message on the radio. What to do?
They decided to trust their earlier course determination, and turn back to retrace the twelve-mile detour they had made to circle the America. They had to trust their own original judgment. They had only one hour of fuel left.
At this low point of desperation Lou Gordon, smiling as if there were nothing to be alarmed about, came back for a sandwich. He tore off the wrapper—another ham sandwich—and crawled back to the cockpit. Amelia liked his easy manner. She looked out: the cloud ceiling was low and the visibility limited. Bill headed the plane down to 500 feet.