It has been said there are explorers on this earth who are in love with Amelia Earhart. Every now and then I discover another who has handed over his life to her and wonder at his abandonment of current time. How year after year, sometimes with a crew, sometimes with the help of his wife, he searches Earhart’s last pathway across the planet. Yet the woman he pursues is not likely to reveal herself. She is hidden, perhaps forever, in depths unimaginable, or at least in the origins of the human mind.
I know this because I too am held captive by Earhart. When I began flying a small American Grumman trainer in 1973, it wasn’t just to experience piloting through my own expectation. The Earhart conversation, the one we’ve been having ever since, started in Fred Goerner’s The Search for Amelia Earhart only a few years before. In it, the author revealed one of the first conspiratorial theories about her last flight—that Earhart was taken prisoner by the Japanese. The possibility was fresh then, guiding me toward Earhart’s possible end. When I flew, there was a part of her flying with me, finding her in the ebb and flow of mountainous weather, the thrum of an engine meant to succeed in spite of a universe of possible calamities, at times her voice assuring me of the “mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings.” I too was in love with her poetic drift into my imagination. The sound of wings could only be Earhart’s aviation—limitless, distant, fraught with mystery. If I lived in her world long enough, I might come to understand her closest companion—disappearance.
And so I continued to fly, often barefooted, mostly alone. Small secluded runways beguiled me. An instructor, a hard drinking pilot, gave me assurances I was more than adequate for the task of mountain flying but that aviation was changing, drawing up its shirtsleeves and weeding out renegades like him. This was the culminating tie I had with Earhart—a father who drank as hers had done. They both set the flight experience high for risk. Yet neither of us saw that trait as deviant, but more likely a red flag for what we were about to claim for ourselves—the potential for terror on every flight. And the chance world of unexpected, even bedazzling discovery.
Even in 1973 I was a woman seeking a non-womanly experience, but at least it wasn’t defined as a freak show. Earhart’s 1920’s piloting rode on the predominate description of female pilots of that time, a term called stunt fliers. They flew long distance competitions under the twin shadows of mercurial luck in between menstrual cycles, something well known in early aviation as determining their long-term survival. Often described as hysterical or at least capricious, they were not found to be good mechanics, according to Orville Wright. Women weren’t the entire flight package. They weren’t “bundled” or esteemed, but they were determined and many died as a result. Earhart knew this indoctrination. She flew within the male epicenter seeking only a few to teach her and even so would occasionally walk away from a valued instructor to seek her own inner choice.
Fifty years later when I began to fly, these choices were no longer in question. But they were still hard wrought if you were not trained in the military or came from a father, brother or uncle who flew. A woman was an anomaly in the air. And everyone that I heard on the plane’s radio made me try harder.
Much of my young life was spent learning the art of flight. Sometimes just moments in duration there were sequences in the air, some of the most beautiful images in my life. Once I was part of a small group flying in loose formation, those in front of and below me gliding over Sacheen Lake, a ribbon of blue-green summer-lit from the water below. There was the time I landed in little more than a pasture, four coyotes skittering in front of me, then gone as if in a forest mist. For a while I flew in the company of oddities like the Goodyear Blimp and only a few weeks after the deadly eruption of ash from Mount St. Helens just three hundred miles away. Flying was capturing moments I would never experience again, an afterlife of nature, a swan song to the past. I thought of Earhart, but I was flying my own trajectory, one littered in memories still hard to process. Mental illness had frequented my early life, taking its toll on my mother and little sister while I claimed the quieter moments to think about my future. An early marriage and a baby daughter brought me to the conclusion that just the opportunity to fly was extremely rare, perhaps even undeserved. Yet there was something urging me to go on, to pursue its mystery and the hours logged. I kept flying back to the mountains, finding my choices there, not in flight school. “Burning daylight,” my husband used to say.
As I entered my early thirties the truth began its slow drain on my pocketbook, my determination, and closest relationships. Divorced and undecided about the cost of an instrument rating, I remember arising at four in the morning to meet an instructor at a nearby field, then takeoffs into the sunrise while bracing for closing the window to the outside world. Encapsulated and desperately hoping for some kind of instant understanding of blind flight, I continued to press into demands of perhaps one of the most difficult ratings in flying. Vision, or lack of it, seemed to be the crux of my frustration. Scanning instruments literally took away my powerful sense of flight, that which transformed me into a particle of the heavens. I completed the hours. I may have understood the price for situational awareness, but I’d lost my delight in being aloft.
Through it all I never lost interest in Earhart and her twin-engine Lockheed Electra, their 1937 disappearance over the Pacific still seducing me into buying almost every book about her. She was occasionally dubiously sighted among the living, but there was a consistency in routine, mostly in rare appearances of the Electra, tail number (a close N16020) at one time rumored to have crashed into a hillside in northern California, another time witnessed destroyed on Saipan, and in another rendition just a stretch of landing gear reef-bound on Nikumaroro Island with the presumption the rest of the plane separated and drifted downward into the surrounding depths. Public fascination with sketchy details compelled writers and researchers to produce books and biographers to make attempts at defining better her personal life. Yet I failed to see much in the way of her transition from young skillful stunt pilot to operator of what was known as the Electra’s “flying laboratory.” Deep inside I felt even more drawn to her, her spirit still soaring above all theories, all interpretations—an avatar defying clarification. She too had impressions, obstinate ones about flight. It was at that point, at my own detachment from accumulating more hours, more ratings, more loss that I decided to look for the Earhart I suspected once existed. And so I began to track her down, first across the United States (from Washington State to Kansas to Wyoming), then revisiting her collected biographies, her naysayers, her fierce advocates, sometimes one at a time. And what I found was an Earhart unnoticed, perhaps intentionally. It seems she had done a great cover-up at least in her flying expertise. But it may have been greater still.
In 2016, while visiting the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum in Atchison, Kansas, I met with Lou Foudray, then acting caretaker of the museum. She held that position for almost thirty years, a woman esteemed for her communications with those who followed Earhart into whatever realms she led them. Foudray had the ability to listen and pack away weighty conversations that probably, at times, went well into the night, and by the time she met with me she was used to questions that came of a curious fan. But she also recognized something about my nomenclature, the pilot’s first give-away. “Was she a scud runner?” I asked.
“Oh heavens, yes,” she said. “She flew with the sparrows and the eagles. That’s what made her so glamorous. So accomplished. She kept all that low flying to herself. Especially in that first solo across the Atlantic. Low flying. Sometimes just a few feet above the waves. Dangerous. She came close to death.”
“Do you think that particular flight set the bar? Did she fight her way through so much alone that she never abandoned her experience, not for any amount of updating?”
“I think she refused advice, perhaps good advice, to be Earhart. She had her reasons.”
Foudray concentrated on a painting above, one in which the aviatrix gazed down at us. “As famous as she was, she was capable of escaping notice. Idle chatter about chicken sandwiches, tomato juice and little else about the cockpit. Never explained why and no one cared. She learned how easy it was to evade the public eye. Her observance still exists today. Believe me, I know.”
As I re-crossed the U.S., this time entering parts of a desolate Wyoming, there was ample time to think about Foudray’s close association with Earhart’s world. She knew I was headed toward a secretive chapter of the flier’s life, places left untouched for over eighty years. These included the beginnings of a mountain cabin being built for her return from the round-the-world flight, a small town’s debatable contention that Earhart once landed there for about twenty minutes to re-fuel her autogiro, and a persistent rumor I’d come upon that she’d given birth to a baby girl before her career began in flying. That child, still hidden in unresolved backstory and the Wyoming of the early twentieth century, kept luring me on—to Casper, to Meeteetse, to a long-forgotten ranch between the two, and finally to the archives of The University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center, where I began a search for historical verification through Earhart’s friend, Gene Vidal’s boxed history. Very little surfaced, except the unexpected.
One box led to another and over the course of three days a tantalizing detail emerged. Strictly Earhart—having nothing to do with a child, an autogiro or a mountain cabin. From a small lead, no more than a scrap of an old note, I was guided to another archival source, a man by the name of Robert Bedinger. A World War I pilot, Lieutenant Bedinger’s logbook revealed he received pilot training in France in 1917 and became an instructor during World War I. Thereafter he logged time with Howard Hughes and flew TWA mail planes. Both experienced and confidant, he was exactly the kind of check pilot Earhart might have sought those last few days before her long flight around the world, perhaps the only check pilot from which she would accept sanction. On March 12, 1937, only five days before she began her first try at flying the globe, Bedinger accompanied Earhart in her Lockheed Electra at Oakland noting in his logbook, “With Amelia Earhart—Blind Flying Test to qualify her for Round-the-World Flight.” Finding Bedinger’s testimony quietly tucked away in archives far from Earhart’s beginnings, I realized I’d finally found the woman described as one of the world’s most sought-after heroines. A survivor himself, not only of war but of many years of aviation thereafter, Bedinger recognized her specific moment in the air, one that required approval for the job ahead. He had given himself over to her effort knowing full well the demands that would be placed upon her. Apparently, after just one hour of flying with the aviatrix, Bedinger told her she could fly the world. Those words written in his logbook and no doubt in hers may well have carried the strength of Earhart’s conviction right to the end—that and the steadfast belief her piloting would always be her responsibility alone, the sound of wings the only thing that mattered.
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After completing a hybrid memoir (Scud Runner, Flying the Lessons of Ghosts) about my becoming a pilot as a young woman very much influenced by Amelia Earhart, Sherrida Woodley has returned all these years later to researching what is lesser known about her, particularly her piloting, while discovering my own reasons for flying were linked with escaping lingering mental illness in my immediate family.
© 2023, Sherrida Woodley
Halfway Down the Stairs 