Aurora ~ Prologue
 | Aurora |
- Aurora ~ Prologue
- Aurora ~ Chapter 1
I don’t believe in ‘happy ever after’. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, in heaven…or hell… or any of the other garbage they spout to keep the huddled masses docile and obedient while they’re searching for their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That particular rainbow is not likely visit their neighborhood anytime soon, and when it does, you can bet it will terminate in a bottomless bog. Not a particularly attractive viewpoint for a woman to have, my mother would say, but there you have it for whatever it’s worth. I believe that the light at the end of the tunnel is sure to be an oncoming train and whatever hell there is, it isn’t some sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, it exists in the here and now, and it’s of our own making. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the front page of your local newspaper. The only thing that awaits at the end of our lives is a long dark sleep and that’s as close to heaven as any of us are likely to get.
There is one thing I do believe in. I believe in destiny, or Fate, if you prefer, although sometimes Dame Fate has a really twisted sense of humor. If you listen closely, you can hear her laughing. You probably think it’s just the sound of the wind, but I know better. That howl is the bitch laughing her ass off. No, our path through life, as well as our final destination, is set at the moment of birth. All we control is the direction of a few detours between point A and point B.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past few hours and now, more than ever, I know it to be true. We can challenge fate as much as we want, but she always gets her way in the end. I should know. As the saying goes, life was something that happened to me while I was making other plans.
My name, in the event you’re interested, is Alexis StJames, and I was born in San Francisco in July of 1907. Wrong place, wrong time. My life has been just generally wrong all the way around. My mother, the former Bernice Wilmington, nice middle class daughter of “the Nob Hill Wilmington’s”, was overjoyed when she had a daughter. That was just what she wanted, a pretty, petite little girl she could raise to be the proper society debutant. Instead she got me. Poor mom.
The first indication of the grief to come was the moment I pushed away the Cupie doll she bought me for my birthday to get at a neighbor boy’s Erector Set. She had a tomboy on her hands. To her credit, she never nagged me about it, at least not publicly. She would have considered that improper for her station. But she knew how to make her disappointment obvious, and never more so than when I fell in love at seventeen. You see I didn’t fall in love with a suitable young man, as so many of my friends did and as mom must have hoped. I fell in love with the handsome silver shape of an Avro Baby, an aeroplane like the one that Bart Hinkler had flown in his attempt to fly from England to Australia only three years previously.. It was a sleek, beautiful collection of nuts, bolts and wiring that would eventually come to break my heart more thouroughly than any man ever could have.
Dad had been a flyer, first in an old Curtiss JN4, then later flying Neiuports as part of the 17th Pursuit Squadron during World War I. He had flown thirty-eight missions before retiring to take a job as a civilian mail pilot with Boeing Air Transport. He used to take me flying in an old Sopwith Pup crop duster and I had fallen in love with the freedom of flight. I grew up watching the sky, watching the stars and wondering what it would be like to fly among them, wondering what kinds of creatures inhabited the planets that circled them. When dad transferred to Boeing’s new commercial passenger service, I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to pick up where daddy left off. Oh, not as a passenger pilot, even I had known that was impossible, commercial air flight is exclusively a male province. But I knew I wanted to fly and I dreamed that some day, I could do it for a living. In the end, that, too, turned out to be impossible, not one was willing to even consider hiring a woman to fly professionally. We were considered to be ‘emotionally unsuitable” for the manly art of aviation. Oh, I could have settled for crop dusting or giving free flights at local carnivals. Many women did and made a fair living at it, but they were still considered ‘curiosities’ or aberrations, certainly not the so-called ‘normal’ female. I had entered the National Women’s Air Derby in 1929, much to my mother’s chagrin, and had flown successfully from Santa Monica to Cleveland. I came in fourteenth, but that wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough. I dreamed of the stars. I knew that someday, man would fly among them and could only imagine what that would be like. That they were forever denied to me was a tremendous disappointment that colored the rest of my life and, indirectly, eventually brought me here to this outpost in Northern Greenland..
Disillusioned by the future, you could say I rebounded into the past. While I was in my second year at Stanford University, I had taken a job clerking for the Paleontology department and found the work fascinating. Fickle though it seems, I put my dreams of flight behind me, switched my major from Literature to Paleontology, and immersed myself in prehistory. No one was more surprised than myself, but I simply found the work interesting and I’ve been kept busy the last few years. Certainly a scholarly vocation was much more acceptable to my mother than aviation and the friction in the household was substantially reduced. While I’m not exactly a “name”, I do have a certain reputation in the ‘trade’ as they say. Which is how I came by this……opportunity… and ended telling my life’s story to this Dictaphone on the seat beside me in the futile hope that it will survive and that someone, eventually, will find it.
In 1928, Louise Boyd, a highly regarded local adventuress, had journeyed to the Arctic in search of the missing explorer Roald Amundsen. Although she hadn’t found him, the effort had ‘made her reputation”, so to speak. So much so that the American Geographical Society agreed to fund her further Arctic research. After attending one of her lectures, I was more than anxious to join her next expedition and, to my great surprise, I was accepted. Six months later, I found myself here in northern Greenland near the De Geer glacier. And that is where, once again, Dame Fate decided to roll the dice.
Three days ago, a team of researchers were dispatched to take depth measurements in a nearby fjord when one of them noticed something protruding from the nearby glacier. The focus of the expedition took an abrupt change of direction and I found myself in the bottom of a trench digging out one of the most complete Mammoth specimens ever found. It wasn’t the stars, but it was almost enough. Almost.
I’ve never considered the concept of time travel a viable one. If Mr Wells’ fictional tale were possible, the time stream would be littered with those trying to undo past mistakes or right some imagined wrongs, myself included. But yesterday, sitting in the bottom of that hole, stroking those few tufts of shaggy reddish brown hair, I could almost believe that it was possible to breach the barrier of time and that I was there, 20000 years in the past, when the land had trembled beneath the tread of this beast’s massive feet. It was an exhilarating feeling, a combination of wonder and triumph. And.. the kind of rush that I hadn’t experienced since I was a kid watching my father turning Immelman’s over the bay. I think I fell a little in love with the beast at that point. Unfortunately, love has the nasty habit of making its’ victims do incredibly stupid things and even an experienced field paleontologist was not immune, or I wouldn’t have wheedled our pilot into letting me take our plane up so I could survey the entire area by air.. Stupid…Alexis, really, really….stupid….
It should have been simple…I was a licensed pilot, right? One quick turn around the basin, under those magnificent Northern Lights, just to see what might have been missed, then back to base. Only blizzards come out of nowhere when you’re this far north. They have a term for it, a ‘white out’. The land, air, sea, everything in fact, bleeds out into a uniform shade of gray and visibility is down to nothing. Only a fool flies in a storm alone. Say hello to a fool. The effects of those gorgeous lights and the storm have combined to make my radio and compass useless. The fact that I am still in the air is a miracle that I don’t expect to continue. The gas in the tank won’t hold out forever and when it goes, this plane is coming down. Whether it comes down on land or in water, I know that the end result will be the same. You don’t last too long on the ice up here, and a rescue party is unlikely. They have no way to know where I am. You last an even shorter time, approximately 3 minutes, in the water. The human body just isn’t meant to survive long at these temperatures.
Do I have regrets? Yes, of course. Doesn’t everyone? Is there anything I would change? Absolutely. But not the usual things you would expect. It wouldn’t be the marriage, husband and children I never had, much to my mother’s disappointment. That was never in my vision of the future. I always felt there was something else out there for me, and even though I couldn’t put a name to it, I knew it was there. I guess I never saw the point of marrying some presentable, well placed young man just for the sake of ‘doing was expected’ of me. Part of the problem was that I never found a man I found interesting enough to want to spend more than a few hours with, much less a lifetime. In college there were a couple of boys I found entertaining, but no one who caused the kind of fireworks that one equates with love.. There has been only one great love in my life. That was the adventure of flight and it broke my heart.
It’s very quiet now. The last of the fuel is gone and I think the storm is breaking up. I can see something…. it is a sliver of night sky and in it I can see the multi-colored shimmer and glow of the Lights. They are incredible, but they are not the thing that holds my attention as the cold and the dark and the silence settles down around me.
It is the stars clearly visable through them. They are so bright and clear and beautiful, a million brilliant multicolored points of light spread across the sky, and their beauty is echoed in the dark water that stretches beneath me. . They seem so close, as though I could reach up and catch them in my hand and hold them close. But I can’t. I never could. I tried. I tried so hard. They’re out there waiting, but for someone else, not for me. It won’t be long now and it should be quick. If you, whoever you are, find this cylinder, will you please contact my parents, Mr and Mrs Alvin StJames. At the time of this writing they live at 1448 Avila Street in San Francisco. Will you tell them I was thinking of them, that I’m really not at all frightened? I’m all right, in fact, I am at peace. At least that bitch, Fate, has finally shut up.
