As exciting as we may find the news that Marian’s flight extended far beyond what was previously known, bringing her only 2,600 nautical miles short of a completed north–south circumnavigation, this revelation also carries with it a sad truth: Marian Graves and Eddie Bloom took off from Antarctica and were lost. Despite the fanciful theories some have put forward, we can be certain they lie together deep under cold and stormy waters, in a tomb without walls, a place that remains lonely beyond imagination despite the thousands upon thousands who have made their final rest there.
The offices of D. Wenceslas & Sons have lately been the site of impassioned debates over whether or not Marian would have wished for this manuscript to be published without having a chance to edit and consider its text. Was the manuscript intended as a posthumous message in a bottle? Or was she turning her back on her own words? Admittedly, both in conversation before her flight and in the pages themselves, Marian expressed ambivalence to me about the idea of a readership, but, as I have argued to my colleagues, if she truly did not wish these pages to be read, why did she then not simply destroy them, as she could have so easily? We reached no consensus, and she left no instructions, only the journal itself, abandoned in a frozen, hostile place. What she left resembles less a book than a scaffolding for a future book, but I felt she would prefer it be published as is rather than having it shaped and prettified. Beyond simple corrections of spelling and grammar, I have left her writing unedited, as the risk of distorting her thoughts and intentions seemed to outweigh my own impulses toward tidiness.
I am glad to have known Marian. I wish she were still with us, but I am grateful for her decision, long ago now in that desolate place, to leave behind a record of her final flight. While the record, like the flight itself, remains incomplete, at least it has brought us closer to the end.
Though, as Marian points out in this text, a circle has no end.
Godspeed.
Matilda Feiffer
Publisher
1959
An Incomplete History of Marian’s Fifteenth and Sixteenth Years
September 1929–August 1931
The same month Marian turns fifteen and goes up with Trout for the first time, a test pilot takes off from an airfield in Garden City, New York. He is already known for speed records and stunting and long-distance flying, and in less than thirteen years he’ll become much more famous after he leads sixteen bombers in a bold daylight raid over Japan.
Jimmy Doolittle makes one circle and lands. It’s a brief flight, only fifteen minutes, mundane except for the opaque hood over his cockpit, cutting him off from everything except the instruments. Flying blind, it’s called. Some of his instruments are experimental, among them the Sperry gyroscopic artificial horizon. In its later form, a fixed airplane （you） is superimposed on a gimbaled sphere. The sphere is black below its middle and blue above （the earth, the sky） and orients you to the planet. This object will make the future possible. Before, you didn’t fly in bad weather, so there could be no scheduled flights. Not really. No reliable airlines, certainly. Mail pilots took their chances; lots of them died. Before, if you lost sight of the ground for long enough, you were probably toast. Fly into cloud, and you’d likely end up in a spiral, though you might not even realize what was happening until too late. Up, down, left, right, north, south—all of it a terrible tangle, dragging you out of the sky. Survivors described a state of terminal confusion.
When Doolittle goes up with Sperry’s invention, plenty of pilots, despite their many brethren who’d corkscrewed down to their deaths, don’t believe such an instrument is necessary, take offense even at the suggestion. The more cautious sorts keep a close eye on their indicators to make sure they aren’t inadvertently turning, but if you get distracted and start a spiral, those indicators won’t be much help. The lucky living （Trout among them） tell one another that dead pilots are dead because they didn’t have the elusive, magical “it.”
You have to fly by the seat of your pants, they say. Meaning: A real pilot feels the plane’s every movement in his ass.
But it’s your inner ear, not your ass, that’s the problem. And your inner ear is a liar.
A man, blindfolded and spun slowly in a rotating chair, will think when the chair slows that it has stopped. When it has stopped, he will think it has begun to spin the other way. The mistake happens deep in his ear, among the tiny hair cells and drifting fluid inside the semicircular canals of the bony labyrinth. These are the minute, impossibly fragile internal instruments that detect the yaw, pitch, and roll of the human head—wondrous little gizmos to be sure but poorly evolved for flight.