Meeting Julie was a privilege. She had been travelling to Adak to teach for twenty years. It’s a tough life living alone there, but she knows that her investment in those children makes a huge difference to their lives. We had a few dinners together at her ex-military house, and even watched some DVDs, including Pixar’s magnificent Inside Out – a fascinating film to watch with teachers, who spend all day managing the emotions of children.
Adak has the westernmost post office in the United States. In the 2016 presidential election, Julie got to the post office to vote near closing time. She was thus recognised in the press as the last person out of 139 million to vote in the election. I didn’t ask whom she voted for, but I suspected it wasn’t Donald Trump.
Christopher was relatively new to the island. He was emerging from a painful divorce, and Adak’s remoteness seemed to soothe his soul. I had come to appreciate the strange power of isolation while sitting in the Southern Sun for hundreds of hours, and exploring remote places like Adak. We shared life stories over a few dinners.
It rained at some point on most days, but there was also plenty of clear weather for exploring. In the grounds of the airport I came across an interesting buried doorway. It was pitch-black inside, but my iPhone torch illuminated some shower cubicles, each with a door at the front to enter and a door at the back to exit to the next room. The tunnel went deeper and deeper, eventually leading to a dormitory. It was an emergency bunker with eighty-four beds, for use in case of nuclear attack. I found many of these around the airport and town – there were enough, I was told, to accommodate the few thousand troops stationed there. Cripes, imagine being in here with eighty-three other people . . .
Elaine was an Aleut woman who ran the only supplies store, and was a regular at the cafe. She recommended some sites that I should visit, and Ruth showed me others. The most harrowing was the locally nicknamed ‘seven doors of doom’: seven underground bunkers, built side by side, each with a heavy steel door, surrounded by a double row security fence and once by armed sentry posts that suggested something of grave danger and importance. It was the place they had stored the nuclear bombs – at the height of the Cold War, this was the closest naval aviation base from which to lob bombs at the Russian east coast. I slowly opened one of the doors, which creaked and groaned just like in a horror movie. It was very, very creepy.
I walked a few kilometres past the harbour and up a hill to an old military barracks. Most of the buildings’ doors were bolted closed, but I found a dorm that I could get into. Further up the hill was an old timber church, which felt like something from a Grant Wood painting. At some point, someone had decided that the only timber building on the island wasn’t holding up, and they wanted a church that would stand the test of time. In the big, bold late 1970s, or perhaps the early 1980s, a second church was constructed, a monolithic structure that looked to be the last building erected before the base was shut down. It didn’t quite create the warmth and communal feeling that I associated with a church.
It was raining heavily as I walked home, but I was curious when I came across a seismologic research building, with equipment still there, complete with red evacuation lights, rotary dial phones and warning sirens – an ominous sign of what life had been like on the island.
As each day went by, I went in another direction. I walked up hills, along bays, grey sand beaches and many disused buildings. I wasn’t sure how long I would spend on Adak, but the long days of walking brought back strong memories of my teenage years living in Devon. Alone, wandering.
I was told there was a cinema, near a former officers’ quarters. I went searching. Expecting a small standalone building, upon walking through the area I noticed one end of a large two-storey block had something odd about it – no windows. Of course, the one thing cinemas around the world have in common is no natural light. The building was boarded up and a sign declared: ‘NO ENTRY’. However, I pretended that the sign wasn’t in English, but rather a strange dialect instead which translated as: ‘EXPLORE AS YOU MUST’.
I jimmied the door open and climbed over some rubble to find a still-intact cinema of a few hundred seats. Using my iPhone light, I found the screen had been ripped down and ruined – so that was clearly my first hurdle if I was to reopen the cinema before I left. A typically narrow and oddly placed door led to a projection room. I carefully climbed the steep stairs and discovered a sad scene. A projector lay on its side, rusted and battered. A machine that once brought so much happiness – between a few training films, I imagined – had been ungraciously destroyed.
It struck me as amazing, though, the sense of romance and affection some of us feel for what is ultimately just a machine – yet a machine that for over a century has delivered laughter, tears and joy to people across the globe. Much like a boat, a plane or a car, a projector brings the promise of adventures that transcend its designed function, to flicker on and off twenty-four times a second, casting an image upon a wall.
‘I’d love to be on Adak for a week with spare time and a plane,’ Burke Mees wrote to me in an email. ‘There is so much to see!’
One of Mees’ suggestions was Atka Island, which was about an hour’s flight away, back east. I arrived just before midday. Walking to the village, I was overtaken by a convoy of quad bikes, with one or two children on each, going home for lunch from the schoolhouse. A small and industrious community of eighty Aleuts live on the island, the indigenous inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands, who were almost wiped out by Russian fur traders and fishermen in the 1800s.
They are a friendly and proud people. The community owns the town’s busy fish-processing factory and a power generator, which means they avoid the outrageous US$1.60 per kilowatt hour charged on Adak, ten times the price in Australia and nearly twenty times what most Americans pay.
When I asked a woman in the town’s well-stocked store if she had any postcards, she said they were sold in the city office, which was ‘over the hill’.
‘Thanks, but there’s some bad weather coming so I don’t really have time,’ I replied. ‘I need to walk back to the airport.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll drive you up there.’
Lucinda not only drove me to the city office, she also gave me a tour of the township: a simple timber church, the old harbour, houses her father built, the town water tank and a tower of instruments used to measure wind speeds at different heights because the community was considering buying a wind generator to supplement their diesel unit. I met her husband, Chris, who it turned out was the mayor. Their kindness was exceptional, and greatly appreciated.
On the way back, I followed another of Burke’s suggestions. I took the Sun over Bechevin Bay, on the western side of Atka, where a B-24 Liberator bomber crash-landed during World War II. The wreckage was still there, sitting ominously in the tundra between two hills. When I flew in low for a closer look, the Sun was hit by a powerful downdraft created by the strong north-westerly tumbling over the adjacent hill. For two seconds I had the nauseating experience of weightlessness. I would never get comfortable with that.
Before leaving Australia, I had agreed to speak at the Seaplane Pilots Association’s conference in Sydney in late October 2015, assuming I’d be home by then. Now, as I waited on Adak, it was obviously impossible for me to give the speech in person. But the school kindly let me use their computer lab, which had enough reliable bandwidth to run Skype. I take public speaking seriously and spent a day preparing for the presentation, much of it in the Adak cafe, where the always-on TV was showing CNN hype up a hurricane that was about to hit Mexico. ‘The worst hurricane in Mexico’s recorded history is nigh,’ cried the news. When it turned out to be little more than heavy wind, CNN swapped its on-screen wind statistics from miles per hour to kilometres per hour, so its predictions of ‘250 mph gusts’ wouldn’t seem quite so obviously overblown. Was there ever such a perfect example of what is wrong with the 24-hour news cycle?
With a world map as a backdrop, my 45-minute p
resentation and slide show went smoothly, although I didn’t mention my growing angst about the flight to Japan. Those feelings were tightly bottled up inside. I was determined to appear confident, almost breezy, about the dangers ahead. It felt bizarre to be standing in a classroom in a remote part of the world talking to a group of pilots and aviation professionals back in Australia, whom I couldn’t see.
At the end of my talk, a spokesman for the Seaplane Pilots Association announced that I had been awarded the newly created Ross Vining Exceptional Achievement Award. Ross was a beloved Australian Searey pilot who, tragically, had died a few years earlier while on a round-Australia expedition. I was moved by being recognised in this way, and even more so by being associated with Ross.
That afternoon, I posted home everything that would not be essential for my flight to Japan. (A year later, it still hasn’t arrived . . . thanks, US Postal Service!) I needed the Southern Sun light so she could carry as much fuel as possible. If the weather didn’t open up by the end of October, a mere week away, I would either fly her back to the American mainland or leave her on Adak and take another shot the following year.
Crunch time had arrived.
33.
The Right Stuff
‘We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements . . . that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.’
COOPER, INTERSTELLAR (2014)
Two huge low-pressure systems sat over the Bering Strait and the North Pacific, inching towards Alaska. I had watched them for days, studying how the interaction of the isobars affected the winds across thousands of kilometres of ocean. The rotation of the Earth means that, in the absence of other influences, including landmass, winds predominately come from the west. But the boundary between two weather systems could overwhelm the globe’s spin and send air back towards Siberia, a north-easterly that the Southern Sun could surf all the way to Japan.
The winds between Alaska and Japan were forecast to reverse on Wednesday, 28 October. I awoke that day with a sense of anticipation laced with fear. As the morning hours passed, the predominating winds changed direction to the east. The flight of my life was on.
I methodically fuelled the Sun. A plane designed to carry 100 litres of petrol was now carrying 410 litres. With my small backpack stowed, and my life raft and emergency bag carefully placed within reach inside the cramped cabin, I was ready to go. At 2 p.m., just as I was about to set off, every pupil and teacher from the Adak school gathered on the tarmac, holding farewell signs they had made in class. I chatted with the teachers for a few minutes and thanked them for our few weeks together. Each pupil said goodbye, shook my hand and conveyed their best wishes, bringing joy to my heart. Michael, my new friend and host at the Blue Bird Cafe, directed me to take off using hand signals he had learned while flying from US aircraft carriers.
The Southern Sun had twenty-one hours’ worth of fuel on board. She took off and flew west with a tailwind, thanks to the first easterly to have come over the island in two weeks. She had never been heavier, and I was careful not to make any sudden movements to the controls. I didn’t want to put any more stress on her light airframe than necessary.
I had done everything possible to prepare, but still the risks were significant. An engine failure over the Pacific at night would be hard to survive, even in a flying boat. If the Sun did manage to land in the rolling seas, the chances of me being rescued in the vast ocean were slim.
I had written a letter to Anne, Tim and Jack. I told them I loved them, I reflected on the many good experiences we had enjoyed together, and I apologised for making their lives difficult from time to time. I offered some positive and uplifting advice to the boys about their futures, although I knew it would be insufficient if they ever read it. I spent two days thinking about the words, and couldn’t hold back my tears as I committed them to paper. Ruth agreed to post the letter if I didn’t make it home. I stuck a pretty Alaskan stamp on the envelope, and hoped it would never receive the postmark that would deliver it to my family.
I was scared. I worried that I was pushing my luck too far. I knew my determination to lap the Earth could have warped my assessment of the risk. Everything had to go almost perfectly for me to make it, and over such a long flight that was not likely.
Thinking back now, I see that I must have known it was more dangerous than I was comfortable with. As when I left Melbourne for London, I didn’t tell anyone how I planned to get to Japan. I had not sought permission to land on Attu, the uninhabited island where I had stored fuel. It would be safer for someone in authority to decline that permission rather than say yes. And anyway, I didn’t know who to ask. I posted a vague message online about my intentions ‘to soon do something’, but I wasn’t specific – I didn’t want to be told I was crazy. Anyone following my satellite tracking could quickly work it out.
As far as I could tell, no one had attempted to fly from Attu to Japan before. Certainly I hadn’t read or heard of it, and my research was thorough. Without any previous examples to learn from, I planned the flight as logically as possible. It seemed straightforward and reasonable on my flight plan, on my Excel spreadsheet and on Google Earth. But I was about to fly twenty-five hours in a day, crossing the international date line in the process. When commercial flights cross the Pacific in fifteen-hour legs, they have complete changes of crew and beds for the off-duty pilots.
That morning, I had called the US customs and immigration service to advise I was leaving the country by private plane from Adak. I may not have entirely explained my stopover in Attu, which is of course American territory, but I didn’t want any last-minute hiccups, such as being told I couldn’t land there, let alone depart the United States from Attu.
The low cloud around Adak was soon left behind as the Sun ventured out over the ocean. The six-hour flight to Attu was uneventful. The highlight was seeing some gorgeous clouds that looked just like animals, including a blue whale gently floating just above the sea.
The wind gradually shifted from an easterly to a north-north-easterly, which was exactly what was forecast and what the Sun needed to get to Japan. Over Attu, turbulence bounced the heavily laden craft up and down. I landed well short of the abandoned runway’s full length, taxied up to my makeshift fuel depot, and as I opened it up clearly heard the sound of scurrying rats. But all five fuel bags were intact. If they hadn’t been, I would have had to fly back to Adak, and that would have been the end of the trip.
I gingerly emptied the fuel into the Sun, while she rocked in the strong wind and light rain. Sunset was forty-five minutes away. I walked up and down the runway to look for potholes or debris, and then rang Peter Steeger in Japan on my satellite phone, requesting clearance from the Japanese authorities to take off.
The answer was no – not just yet. Fog was predicted at Kushiro, my arrival airport in northern Japan, but it would clear by mid-morning.
‘You’ll need to wait at least three hours before taking off, and preferably six,’ Peter said.
Crap, I thought. That will mean taking off in the dark, on a disused runway, with no lights.
Waiting would be better for my arrival in Japan, but the conditions on Attu were deteriorating. I decided it would be best to leave in four hours, at midnight, which would get the Sun to Japan by late morning. It would mean fourteen hours’ flying in the dark out of an expected eighteen-hour flight, which increased the danger. But I wanted tail-winds for as long as possible, and they would dissipate as the night wore on. When I did hit a weather front near Japan, I wanted it to be in daylight. Flying at night, in the rain, over the ocean and with no autopilot would be marginal at best.
I went back into the hut and tried to rest. It didn’t work. The wind battering the small shed was one thing; the rain on the roof was a
nother. The smell of rat droppings wasn’t very relaxing either. I set an alarm on my iPhone for two hours’ time, and then tried to sleep by closing my eyes and lying on my side on the dirty old couch. Hah – as if. With the lights out and my senses alert, the wind seemed stronger and the rain heavier, and I was just waiting for the rats I could hear to climb over me. I lay there for ninety minutes before realising that the rain really was getting heavier.
Outside, I discovered the conditions were getting a lot worse. The sky was overcast and a strong wind was buffeting the Sun. The rain was not too heavy but I feared it soon would be. The clouds to the north, where the wind was coming from, seemed more ominous than those to the south. By now it was nearly 11 p.m. Midnight was too far off – it was time to go.
I made an espresso and ate a cold crab cake given me by my Adak hosts, Mike and Imelda. The irony of enjoying a hot coffee on a barren island without electricity or running water wasn’t lost on me. It felt very strange leaving the United States from an uninhabited island – a huge contrast to my arrival at the bustling Bangor airport a couple of months earlier.
I decided to take off from the shorter of Attu’s two runways, which crossed the longer one. It would take the Southern Sun straight out over the ocean, which was safer than flying past hills and a disused communication tower. About two-thirds of the runway was in fair condition. The rest was so rough, with grass growing through the tarmac, that it could damage the Sun’s undercarriage. I decided to place some LED torches along the runway as references in the dark.
Still, I was apprehensive. It was hard enough to see where the Sun was going while taxiing down the main runway; I couldn’t image what barrelling along at take-off speed would be like. I taxied the length of the runway to get my bearings, and then turned on the LED lights. I taxied back along the runway, which was uphill. When I got to the point where vegetation was growing through the tarmac, I turned the Sun around and faced the ocean.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 24