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04 21st, 2009| 
Margaret Bourke-White wrote in 1943:
I SUPPOSE it was those Irish ancestors of mine, deep-sea sailors all of them, whose sons in each succeeding generation ran away to sea when anyone tried to dry-dock them at home, who were responsible for my passionate love of seeing the world. If they were in a position to make observations, they would surely feel that it was a mistake to pass on their wanderlust to a female descendant, for in their day, as far as I have heard, the distaff side never ran off to sea. They might even think that I have an unfair advantage if they could know how quickly our flying boats take us from one part of the world to another.
In view of this ancestral roaming tendency, it was a lucky thing, I think, to marry a man who knows how to read maps. Before making this happy arrangement, I had managed to find my way with a camera through a little more than two dozen countries located on five continents, sometimes for Fortune magazine, sometimes for Life, and sometimes to satisfy my own curiosity. The only time I ever got seriously lost was in northern Canada, flying over the Arctic near the North Magnetic Pole, where compasses don’t work anyway; but direction finding in the Far North was something my Canadian pilot excelled in, and he managed to find his way at last to a tiny Eskimo settlement.
However, when I come back from trips to Siberia or the Sahara Desert, my friends often marvel at how easily I can lose my way between Grand Central and Fifty-first Street while walking to the dentist. Just recently, driving home from New York to Connecticut, I managed to lose my sense of direction so completely within an eighth of a mile of our house that I had to ask the neighbors the way home. This astonished my neighbors, but it didn’t puzzle me at all, for I am no good on the short hops.
But now that I am married, all is changed. My husband reads maps the way I read detective stories. The only difference is that he follows the clues of latitude, longitude, air and ocean currents, and topography, and emerges with the correct deduction, while I, even though attempting to follow that simplest of all clues—the person least suspected—rarely guess the murderer, for I am seldom able to deduce successfully who is the least suspicious.
Erskine Caldwell’s map reading is much more than a simple matter of finding his way from one place to another. It is a whole study in agriculture, economics, and sociology. It is as though, through the surface of the map, he had felt the rainfall, the winds, the altitude, and the fertility of the earth. When he folds up his map, he reminds me of one of his own fictional characters, Jeeter Lester, who in the end of Tobacco Road lets a handful of soil sift through his fingers. Erskine has been feeling the land and he knows in advance what it can be expected to produce in the way of crops and men.
When two persons who have deep professional interests marry, there are two ways of pursuing those interests: together or separately. In our family we do both. Sometimes Erskine is interested in writing about America at the same time that I feel I simply must do some photography in central Asia. The solution is simple. He does his job on one continent and I do mine on another. Sometimes both of us feel that the time has come to work together, in the same country, he with typewriter and I with lens, and then we do something that we both greatly enjoy. We make a trip together and work together.
Russia was one of the countries which we selected to do together, and we had a joint and urgent conviction that we should get there soon, to record in words and pictures what we expected to be the coming tide of the war. We kept our plans somewhat secret, for we do not like to talk about things until we are sure we are going to accomplish them. The State Department granted us validations, although they accompanied our passports with a dutiful and somewhat ominous letter warning us that due to distressed world conditions, we could have no assurance of being able to get back to our native land again. The Soviet Ambassador in Washington promised us visas, which would be waiting for us in Chungking, but he warned me that photographs by visitors in the U.S.S.R.
had been forbidden for some years, and I could have no certainty in advance that the camera ban would be lifted for me.
I was willing to take a chance on this, however. When I first went to Russia, in 1930, few photographs had come out of the country, and those few had been taken by Soviet photographers; foreigners had not been allowed to take pictures at all. This had sharpened my ambition to bring the first photographs, taken by a non-Russian, out of the Soviet Union. I had been successful in accomplishing this not because of any special pull, for I had none at all, but because when I arrived in Moscow and showed the Soviets the many industrial photographs which I had been taking in America, they decided that it might be a good thing after all to let an American industrial photographer record their Five-Year Plan. I was ready to take the gamble again.
Among the extremely few people who knew of our plan was the picture editor of Life magazine. He shared our conviction that Russia was the coming key country in the march of the war, to such an extent that he bade me good-by with the words, “Don’t stop on the way to play marbles!” I had to stop and play marbles in the Gobi Desert, but that comes later.
Erskine does all his writing in a defiantly free-lance way; consequently, he made no commitments beforehand. He did, however, have an understanding with Life and the Columbia Broadcasting System to supply material if he got around to it.I spent the entire month before departure planning my equipment and taking lessons in elementary mechanics so as to be able to repair cameras when I was beyond hope of assistance. Some of my most bulky photographic materials went ahead by ship to Hong Kong, where we would connect up with them at the end of our Pacific clipper flight. My quota of supplies included three thousand flash bulbs, peanut variety, a large quantity of film packs, five cameras,* twenty-two lenses, four portable developing tanks, bottles of Dk21 fine-grain developer, several papers of dressmaker pins,’ duplicates of every screw found in all the
minute parts of my lens mounts and synchronizing magnets, a synchroscope, and a jeweler’s screw driver and pliers. In addition, I carried twenty-eight paper-bound detective stories.
My husband packed one small suitcase with his old corduroy jacket and a few shoes and shirts and got an extra ribbon for his portable typewriter. His professional equipment weighed seventeen pounds. My equipment weighed six hundred pounds.
At last all the preparations were completed, and in late March we took off from the West Coast. There is something about each new trip that fills me with a proud, secret excitement. Even if it is just getting on a train to go from New York to Indianapolis, I feel as if I were traveling toward an adventure. This was to be my first trip completely around the world, and I was walking on wings.
Our clipper’s first stop, at Honolulu, should have been a matter of overnight only. It seemed like imprisonment in paradise when unusually severe weather in the Pacific forced us to spend a week in Hawaii. Honolulu had been a perfect place for a honeymoon when Erskine and I had visited it for that purpose, exactly two years before, but with our eyes directed toward a world at war, Waikiki Beach had less appeal for us.
War was closer even to this dreamy spot than anyone could know. Many of the old-time residents were uneasy. A friend of ours whose lovely home we visited at Hilo, the main harbor of the “Big Island” of Hawaii, said to us, “I want to fly to Maui to visit my sister-in-law. The flight takes only an hour, but you have to stay for five days until the return plane picks you up again. I’d hate to stay away so long and find my house had been bombed. We’re so exposed here on the top of this Cliff.”
Bombing of Hawaii sounded fantastic to us in March of 1941, but it sounded equally fantastic when it became a reality in December. At last, on the eighth day, the waves abated, and our clipper took off. In a few minutes Pearl Harbor was left behind us; the scalloped hill; of Oahu, patterned like a textile with curving rows of pineapple plantations
vanished into the distance. We were flying into a translucent nothingness where air and water were indistinguishable, headed toward the Orient.
Our fellow passengers constituted the major portion of the Dutch government in exile; the group was headed by Foreign Minister van Kleffens, looking like a high-school boy in prim spectacles. The Netherlanders had flown from England with communications from Queen Wilhelmina to President Roosevelt and, after conferences in Washington, were now on their way to the Dutch East Indies.
Our pilot, big, burly Captain Steve Bancroft, invited me up to sit beside him at the controls, where I could watch, as though from a glass cage, the barely perceptible cloud shapes coagulate and take form over a buttermilk sea. After seven and a half hours of flying we coasted into the lagoon of Midway. Sand Island and the smaller Eastern Island make up Midway—projections of an extinct volcano two million years old, whose base rests forever unseen two miles down on the ocean floor.
Long before our giant flying ships had found this a convenient refueling point on the way to the Orient, long before the Japanese had coveted it as a valuable steppingstone toward our Pacific shore, the discovery of Midway as a halfway rest post had been made. Millions of birds, winging their way over the paths of ancestral memory on their mysterious migrations, stop here with the regularity of certain Manhattanites who return to their favorite Florida hotel during the season.
On Midway the season for visitors in wings and feathers is from November to July. The entire sanded, beshrubbed surface of the island was one huge bird nursery. Spaced at a distance of three feet, each standing singly in a primitive sandy hole which passed for a nest, stood half a million gooney youngsters demanding their suppers. Each baby gooney bird was as big as a goose, and their combined voices blanketed the island with chronic protest. Their parents were ignoring their children’s wishes completely, as though their offspring should not be allowed to interfere with their enjoyment of this tropic resort. In twos and threes they circled around each other in a strange little dance, nodding their heads and snapping their beaks, like socialites exchanging polite conversation.
The goonies fascinated the clipper passengers, and I found them especially interesting, since natural history has always been a hobby of mine. We were permitted to walk only a few yards outside the pleasant little Pan American Hotel, far enough to watch the goonies, but not far enough to observe the work of the marines who were engaged in defense construction on the other side of the islands.
At dawn, as we made our way down the slippery pier, the half-million goonies bowed with equal politeness to us and to each other. I hope that when their hour of trial comes they will not show such courtesy to the Japanese.
After seven hours of flying over a sea like shimmering cellophane, we saw below us, suspended in translucent light, a slender little horseshoe, Wake Island. We stepped out on a sand bar, wild with wind and waves. On the fringe of the atoll, which surrounded the island like the rim of a cup, the breakers rose into fountains of spray.
“I always go swimming when I get to Wake,” said Captain Bancroft. “They have the most gol-darned fish here you ever saw.”
We jumped into bathing suits, and the Captain strapped heavy glass masks over our faces. I took a deep breath, plunged down, and found a miraculous pink coral world which opened up just below the surface of the water. I had to keep my fingers and toes out of the way of giant clams which, embedded forever by their own growth in rocky pockets, still were able to reach for me with their thick scalloped lips of purple velvet. Suddenly I realized that I was being watched by hundreds of eyes. A school of transparent fish, almost invisible except for their coal-black eyes, was staring into my face. Soon I felt like a fish myself as exquisite creatures, some sapphire, some indigo, and some smart black ones with red circles on their tails, began swimming along with me. A flounder, looking like an old tire, flapped its way along the ocean floor. Then ahead of me the disembodied leg of a giant with five human toes swam into my vision. I came up, gasping for breath, and identified it as the magnified foot of my husband, who was lost in the exploration of a little cave just ahead of me.
In the morning, while the clipper’s motors warmed up, the Dutch Foreign Minister and I took a last walk along the beach and watched the love terns maneuvering themselves on and off their eggs. The tern, who
lays her single egg on a slender branch, where it remains balanced despite constant winds, executes her take-offs with miraculous precision so as not to knock off her egg.
The perfection of Captain Bancroft’s take-off from a choppy sea also had something ternlike about it, and after seven hours he deposited us gently at Guam. On this hot, lush island we sipped cool drinks with navy officers, who complained, with more prophecy than any of us could know, about Senators who refused to vote appropriations for adequate armaments, for fear of offending Japan.
During our dawn departure we were witnesses to a small dispute between the A and D nations. The Dutch Minister protested heatedly that he had diplomatic immunity when asked to conform to the blanket rule that all passengers open their baggage for examination before boarding the clipper.
“What do you think I have in my dispatch case,” he stormed, “a time bomb?”
“We’re not taking any chances,” replied the Captain. “Someone else might put one there.”
As his ruffled excellency stepped down the dock, the Captain said, “The Japs make the most trouble on this rule. We had one of those special Japanese diplomats a while ago who continued making a scene during the whole time the ship was warming up. ‘He says he doesn’t have to open his brief case for inspection,’ said the dispatcher. ‘No, he doesn’t have to,’ I answered as sweet as sugar, ‘and I don’t have to take him along or take his brief case either.’ At which I took off, leaving the Jap on the pier to reconsider until the next clipper arrived.”
At Manila our clipper was met by a flock of Filipino correspondents, eager, well-informed young people, hungry for news of the mainland. What were people reading? What was being done about this or that social problem? These natives showed a surprising amount of knowledge about the United States. Several of the Filipino correspondents were endeavoring to get assignments in Free China, whose struggle they greatly admired, for they all had a deep-seated distrust of the Japanese.
One more day of flight above the truly china blue of the China Sea, and we descended over rocky coves patterned with groups of sampanslike floating wheat grains, circled over a city rolled out across hills and valleys and beaches, and finally swung into Kowloon Harbor. We were A in Hong Kong, and we had flown halfway around the world.
Lubov Orlova and Grigory Alexandrov, Moscow 1941
