West with the Night

Serendipity flourished again. En route to a hike in the Baleine headlands with Lynn and Louise, the twins pointed out a bronze tablet hearkening back to a day in September 1936 when a young woman named Beryl Markham accomplished what no woman had ever done before—fly an aircraft alone across the Atlantic from east to west.

I had heard of Beryl Markham but had never known—or had entirely forgotten—that her historic flight in a made-for-her Percival Gull monoplane ended in a crash landing near Cape Breton’s easternmost point. I studied the tablet, contemplated the terrain in which Markham had landed her plane, and had to know more.

I was struck at how inconceivably brave it was of this 33-year-old woman to climb into the cockpit of a single-engine plane and fly it alone across the vast Atlantic. The Cape Breton regional Library proved yet again it is my friend: the library extricated a copy of Markham’s book, West with the Night.

A literary hero of mine, Ernest Hemingway, raved about West with the Night: “I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [Markham] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves to be writers.” Wow.

In West with the Night I read Markham’s cool yet hair-raising account of her 21-and-a-half hour flight across the ocean and felt fresh awe for what she’d accomplished. One paragraph particularly grabbed me:

Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind—such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.

In a world that seems increasingly short of singular initiative, courage and fortitude, I count myself lucky to have chanced upon the commemorative tablet and thus come into far-removed contact with a remarkable adventurer.