Oh, Amelia
I have mentioned that National Geographic is one of my last vestigial magazine subscriptions. I don’t stack them side-by-side in yellow-spined glory on some dusty basement shelf, as I remember them from my youth. But I do let them linger on the bedside table, the office glass-top table and the bathroom magazine caddy well beyond their otherwise useful life. I actually do glance through and read parts of the hard glossy copy, but NatGeo, as they now like to call themselves, is clearly preparing me for the day when that kaolin clay-based glossy paper goes the way of all paper. They probably send me seven or eight emails per week to make sure that I recognize the value they are adding to my modern digital life of the mind. Many junk emails (like, for instance, Apple News) strike me as annoying and unwanted, but anything NatGeo sends me is either read or is benignly trashed with a mental note that just reading their headlines has some value to my thought process. Writing this blog every day is VERY important to my mental health, regardless of who reads my story. Some of it is because of my need for self-expression, but an equal measure is because it gives me limitless directions for mental wandering. I track information down through the internet and things I read based on thoughts that present themselves to me from my daily survey of the world. NatGeo is a valuable view of the world in a whole range of environmental, historical, anthropological and scientific realms, all of which hold meaningful interest to me.
For instance, this morning NatGeo sent me an email with the headline, “Where did Amelia Earhart Go?” I don’t know when I first heard of Amelia Earhart, but since she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, her name has never left the American imagination, so it might have been as early as when I was five or six years old. I don’t think about Amelia Earhart often, but I have to admit that she has appeared in my consciousness on many occasions over the last sixty years. I once saw a movie about her where she was played by Hilary Swank. As I look up Amelia, I see it co-stars Richard Gere and Ewan MacGregor, making it a movie that I want to suddenly see again. There have been several documentaries and History Channel programs that featured the disappearance of Amelia Earhart as one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Twentieth Century. Seeing NatGeo fall to the endlessly popular cult of chasing Amelia has made me stop and wonder. Why does she and her mystery plague us all these 85 years later. I recently listened to the audiobook called Extraterrestrial by Avi Loeb. It is about the first signs of intelligent life beyond Earth as per the Oumuamua meteor/comet/spaceship that passed through our solar system in 2017. Now there is a mystery worth pondering that means something to our future. But why does the disappearance of one female aviator in 1937 hold so much intrigue to the half dozen generations that have come and gone since then?
And despite this quandary and the ongoing mysteries and tragedies that abound in the here and now in the world, I find myself drawn to rewatch the 2009 Amelia movie and perhaps one or two of the documentaries in addition to reading the new NatGeo articles. I almost wish there could be some sort of resolution of the Amelia Earhart issue so that we could all move on, once and for all. Let’s face it, this was one unusual and adventurous woman who knowingly took risks with her person and presumably paid the price. She was not a great scientist. She was not a great and heroic leader. She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and therefore held some sway with FDR, enough so that the U.S. Navy built an airfield of the small uninhabited Pacific island that she needed to land on to refuel in order to accomplish her first-ever circumnavigation of the globe. Indeed, it was that adventure and that particular airfield that proved to be her undoing in that she and/or her navigator failed to find that particular needle in the rather primitive haystack of 1937 navigation technology.
But now having read what I can about Amelia, watched the documentaries and even watched Hilary Swank try to imitate the legendary aviatrix, I am still wondering why all th fuss. I now understand that she was a woman ahead of her time and to some a role model for women of the Twentieth Century. The year she went missing was the year my mother broke from the uneducated realm of her Slovak immigrant heritage and did what women of that day only rarely did, she graduated from college on her own steam and did so from the one Ivy League school that admitted women in that day (Harvard didn’t allow women until 1946 and Columbia was the last holdout when it admitted women first in 1983). So, that may explain why I find all this Amelia Earhart hoopla so surprising. I was raised by a female trendsetter who didn’t stop with a Cornell parchment, but just used it as a launching pad for a lifetime of adventure seeking.
Where Amelia left off, Millie began and did so with what I dare say was more meaningful impact on the world at large. Where Amelia spent her time making numerous aviation records, Millie spent her life directly improving the lives of women and children in the most challenging parts of the world, first with the Rockefeller Foundation and eventually with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. She ultimately achieved a Ph.D. in adult education and attained full diplomatic status for the last fifteen years of her career. She was worth two Amelia’s in my humble and highly biased opinion. Where Amelia had forty years to leave her imprint on the world, Millie had 100 years. Where Amelia set herself up as a role model for women, Millie saved and educated generations of young women.
Today was International Women’s Day. The first year it was celebrated (by various European nations) was 1911 (the year we first made it to the South Pole). Russia then picked up on it in 1913. But it was the American Socialist Party that really started it all with the celebration of National Women’s Day in 1909 (the year we made it to the North Pole). Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head for those Republicans that keep calling Democrats Socialists? Maybe the Republicans would like to name-call and conspiracy-trash the discoverers of the Poles?
While NatGeo and others in the world are bothering yet again to delve into the depths of the Pacific for another retelling of the Amelia Earhart story of how a daring (some would say, reckless) female explorer ended her life in pursuit of yet another record, there was another great discovery announced today. It seems Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, the subject of almost as many documentaries and movies as Amelia Earhart, a ship that sank in the icebound waters of the Weddell Sea in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica in 1915 was found and photographed by undersea drones. Now there is a REAL achievement to help mankind. Searching for a ship by a daring (some would say, reckless) explorer who launched an expedition to go somewhere Roald Amundsen had attained (The South Pole) in 1911, having been bested on his original attempt to conquer the North Pole by either or both Frederick Cook and/or Robert Peary in 1909. My God, while we battle for our human soul against the forces of Putin’s evil genius, there are still people didling around with Amelia and Ernest trying to figure out why people who are hailed as great adventurers have waisted our time for the past century or more. They could be spending their time wondering about how guys like Vlad the Destroyer get and keep power, which is by NOT wasting time on silly old mysteries of the deep. Oh, Amelia (and Ernest), please just Rest In Peace.