We best know Charles Lindbergh's wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for her 1955 book, Gift From the Sea. It changed our view of the ocean by making the sea into a metaphor for life itself. She inclined to do that -- to encode parts of her life that did not yield to mere exposition, and thus make them understandable.
Of course we do that with our technologies, since machines are also metaphors for some deep-seated part of ourselves. Anne Morrow Lindbergh subsumed one particular machine into her rich metaphorical subtext. And it was the glider.
Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh married in 1929, a year after she graduated from Smith College. She already had a great deal of aerial experience by the time she learned to pilot a Brunner-Winkle Bird biplane, in 1931. She'd navigated for Charles; then she'd become the first American woman with a first-class glider pilot's license.
The newlywed Lindberghs had gone to San Diego to study with noted glider-maker, Henry Hawley Bowlus. There, they both gained first class licenses. And they did so just when the press paparazzi were hounding them most unmercifully.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh speaks very directly to that experience in her book, The Unicorn and Other Poems. She writes,
Free as a gull,
Alone upon a single shaft of air
Invisible there,
Where,
No man can touch,
No shout can reach, ...
Anyone riding updrafts in an engineless craft finds that reverence for quiet. Anne's daughter Reeve told me, "I don't know if she ever wrote it down, but mother told me that 'the cure for loneliness is solitude'." Anne had also told Reeve about "columns of air, stretching like massive tree trunks between earth and sky."
Although Anne Lindbergh flew gliders only during that brief period, the experience nevertheless held a central place in the rest of her life. That strongly emerges from another book, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead -- a collection of Anne's correspondence beginning just before her marriage to Charles, and continuing through the kidnapping and death of their first child.
The glider experience is an important part of her three-year hour of gold. Her first solo flight was, she said, "perfectly serene and happy." In the misery of her subsequent hour of lead, the metaphor continues serving her. Now she writes,
In that airy quietness ...
I would think until I found ...
Something lying on the ground,
In the bottom of my mind.
That echoes from childhood. I would dream of gliding above the clamor -- soaring in the whispering quiet, of which she writes,
A word falls in the silence like a star,
Searing the empty heavens with the scar
Of beautiful and solitary flight.
So, where does Charles Lindbergh fit into this equation -- this confluence of words, beauty and silence? To find out, we need to look at some of his extensive writings next.
Sources:
A. M. Lindbergh, Gift From the Sea. (New York: Pantheon Press, 1955.)
A. M. Lindbergh, The Unicorn and Other Poems. New York: Pantheon Books Inc., 1956. (The first and last poems from which I quote are from this source. They are titled, Even and Space.)
A. M. Lindbergh, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1929-1932. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
For a thumbnail biography of AML Lindbergh see: http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/history/amlbio.html
For more on A.M.L. as a pilot, see, http://www.charleslindbergh.com/anne/index.asp
I am very grateful to: Bob Phillips, UH Creative Writing program for his counsel; Reeve Lindbergh Tripp (daughter of Charles Anne Morrow Lindbergh) for the fine insights she provided; and writer and glider pilot Alexis Glynn Latner for a glider pilot‘s perspective.