Amelia Earhart: A Private Life

1937, Lae, New Guinea

The heat fastens on everything. The paper curls at the edges. My cuffs hold damp. The skin beneath my watchband has not dried since yesterday afternoon. Outside the window the mechanics are moving around the Electra with the ordinary professional briskness of men who know their job and would rather not be watched doing it, and I can smell avgas and hot metal and the tarmac giving off the day's last heat even after dark. Lae at this hour has no romance in it. It has a radio shed, a strip of cleared ground, and a humid night that will not let a person sleep well enough to matter.

I am writing because silence invites strangers. If I leave these pages behind without saying anything, then whatever remains of me after the next leg will be claimed by the first man with a microphone and the first editor with a clean paragraph. They will say brave. They will say restless. They will say I loved adventure for its own sake, because that sentence travels well. What they will not say is how much of a life gets built around a woman once the public has decided to watch her, and how hard it becomes, past a certain point, to separate what I want from what other people are now counting on.

I know the route. I know the figures. I know the risk is wider than the charts make it look in a planning room. None of this has been built only on gasoline and mechanics. It has been built on money and expectation and on women I have never met who wrote to me from classrooms and kitchens because they believed if I went on, some small door in their own lives might move a little. It is too late to pretend any of that is incidental. It comes with me now more closely than sleep.