Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke

Author:Julia Cooke [Cooke, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, women, Military, Aviation, United States, 20th Century, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780358251385
Google: _P7qDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2021-03-02T00:22:56.354522+00:00

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Karen and Alan got married, ending the years of distance that had separated them, the on-and-off rhythm of their relationship. They moved briefly to Mill Valley, where Karen’s parents did not attend their small and simple wedding. They visited a month later, though—an implicit blessing. Friends would later describe the couple as competitive. When they skied, they went fast, speeding away from each other; when they hiked, it was with vigor. Now Karen hoped that their mutual drive would push their lives forward together. They moved to the mountains above Lake Tahoe. Alan got his commercial pilot’s certification and became one of the glut of military pilots applying for the same jobs on the airlines.

The move meant Karen had to drive forty-five minutes to the Reno airport and hitch a ride on a small plane down to Los Angeles. Her employee pass entitled her to a seat in the cockpit if the flight was full. She left a junky Oldsmobile at the airport. It required a jump-start to get going but if she missed a connection on her way, she could get down to Whittier to visit her parents for a night.

She flew regular routes and army charters out of LAX, across the Pacific to Hawaii, and up and over the vast western United States and arctic ice fields on the polar route to London. Returning from London over Greenland and Canada, she traced the scant roads in the verdant forests of the West as the plane trawled southward.

If she lucked into midday over Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho, Karen glimpsed a thin strip of a road, white or gray against the green, and she followed the winding curve out from a town into the thick trees as far as it led. That’s where I want to be, she thought; not too far outside of a town, a ranch in the mountains, at the very end of a road somewhere.

Maybe there she would find time to write. Karen’s aspirations had grown. Really, if she let her mind get carried away, she imagined that Alan would be a photographer—he was wonderful with a camera—and she could write. If she could be anyone else in the world, she would be Frances FitzGerald, she thought sometimes. Fire in the Lake, FitzGerald’s work of reporting in Vietnam, won that year’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. But Karen had no backing from a magazine, no money of her own to live on while she wrote. She dreamed of having the time and energy to compose her notes into something meaningful and then sending it off to a magazine, but she was responsible for the rent on their small A-frame in Squaw Valley while Alan applied for pilot jobs.

When a pilot position for Alan failed to materialize, they moved to Missoula, Montana, so he could go to graduate school for environmental planning. With her regular paycheck, Karen paid the mortgage on a little house in town at the base of range after range of mountains layering into the distance.

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