Poems by Sherrida Woodley

Bird Notes, July 2, 1937: Earhart’s Last Decision

With thanks to Hob Osterlund, Long-time Protector of Laysan Albatross

by Sherrida Woodley

From Canary Fall 2024

Sherrida once lived between scablands and the deep blue of Lake Coeur d’Alene. The mountains there are magical. Now, she has taken a liking to her new home between the Hualapai Mountains and deep blue of the Colorado River. She has viewed the spine of North America, The Rocky Mountains, from a single engine plane and knows that land, wherever we happen to be placed on it, gives us an enduring connection with all things surrounding us. The “Age of Loneliness,” as E.O. Wilson once declared, is really stewardship. And that has become a reverence and a reckoning.

There comes a time when flying isn’t enough.
Ebb and flow of human decision has become
so much wasted effort on Earhart.
And the only thing left that still bears value as
Amelia Earhart flies her last twenty-five hundred miles
is emulating Ocean’s most solitary companion.
While the Lockheed Electra courses gently toward her own
Pacific destination, the Laysan Albatross
follows no pattern but her own. Earhart’s final notes lead on.

Explore: Earhart writes, has beginnings
without assurance and certainly without
permission. A map in the head of a bird is the most
dependable piloting device there is.
Carried in the fossilhood
of twenty-five million years, to be an albatross means
to live out of one’s country. To be secretive and
dedicated and unexplained except by her native
onlookers who know her spirit lies in oceanic pursuits.

Piloting: Earhart continues, admits finding her own way.
There is no real plan. Just the forgiveness of success
that depends on moving through air everlasting.
There can be no stopping once airborne. Only the wind
knows the way, allowing the great bird access to gravity’s
overriding dynamic, carrying Earth’s whimsy and its load.
Flying fifteen hundred miles just to feed her single chick and as much as
three million miles in a lifetime of flight’s primary bereavement—
Wandering.

Mystery: The pilot infers, does not occur to the albatross.
Earhart’s notes prescribe something she hasn’t been able to correct
in human flight—the desire to conquer, to squelch all disruption.
Radio frequencies have become more important than the adventure.
Practical application is less expensive than personal revelation. No one
wants to know the truth.
And so the albatross carries a message through what can be
almost a century of her existence. She carries at least fifty of those years
without ever touching land. She provides Earhart a long leash.

Distance: Earhart admits, is the culprit. It has tangled her in its
dependency on fuel, on navigation and the collective view that
she is in over her head. There is no place to unload her frustration.
And so she doesn’t speak, even when asked life-affirming questions.
Earhart is fixated on the albatross, who can only plunge into the first
few feet of ocean, hunting for squid sometimes vomited up by whales.
Taking what is afforded her to continue her journey back toward
her chick. Nothing will stop her trajectory, Earhart surmises. She
will know her way through some means still unknown to man.

Instinct: She recalls, has something to do with her own insistence to fly.
She jots a quick side note. . . “Was I once a seagoing bird?” This is unusual, her
traipsing into her imagination, which is normally dismissed for
fretting over people who disappoint her.
“Albatross is a gliding machine,” Earhart further writes. “No flapping wings,
no engine requiring upkeep, she makes her way through lift, locking her
wings, even her elbows into rigidity. She doesn’t trouble herself with the
quirks of man whose instincts have thinned to technical confinement.
She lives for the hunt.”

Achievement: Earhart’s only beguilement, her only disadvantage.
By now she has flown the equator thousands of miles beyond human
expectation. She has allowed herself to disappear from humanity for
at least hundreds of those miles. But she doesn’t show amazement or
even relief at her success. Trained through practice, she
lacks new growth. She bears the weight of stigma. “I’m no longer good
enough,” she writes. “But Laysan Albatross originates in ancient myth.
Accepted despite her limitations, her chick the only reason to succeed.
Everlasting, she returns to the sea, flights for days without a wingbeat.”

Space: She finally writes, “My only solace. No one knows exactly
where I’ve been. No one notices the long absences anymore. These
are more bird-like than any description I may finally achieve, either
dead or alive, flying my own heading. In the middle of a long
Pacific night, I give myself permission to lose track of humanity.
To linger with albatross, who knows no heading. Only heart and silence
and the meander of a coursing wind.”