The Story of Amelia Earhart - A Woman With The Courage To Follow Her Dreams

Earhart And Rejecting Traditions

Yeah, I mean she was really going against the traditions of what women wanted to do. And she was like that even before she became famous. I mean, she never really wanted to get married. And in fact, she was engaged for to someone for a long time and she kept kind of putting them off, putting them off. She never wanted a traditional life. And she just kind of grew up that way.

Welcome And The Mystery Hook

Welcome to the Midlife Rebel Podcast. It's time to rewrite the midlife story for women who refuse to be put in a box. Because maybe midlife isn't a crisis. Maybe it's an awakening.

This book came out of an expedition that I went on. Ended up being two expeditions to look for what some people hoped would be Amelia Earhart's remains, sort of closer to you than to me. So in the just below the equator in the South Pacific on an island that is not inhabited right now.

That's um quite a task, no doubt. And uh do you know what? I I've did some reading um before this interview, and I didn't know a great deal about Amelia Earhart. You've probably heard a lot of people say that, but um, I heard you mention that it's part of American history. She was part of American history, so it's something that you learn about. But um I grew up in the UK, so she wasn't part, as far as I know, maybe I just wasn't paying attention to the history class. Um and I don't you hear about colonization and all of the things for Australia and Captain Cook. So Amelia here, I don't think makes an appearance in Australia either. Can you give us a just a kind of brief, like many listeners, I'm sure, will know who she is, but just a brief kind of outline of who she is and why she's famous.

Who Amelia Earhart Really Was

Yeah, and um, no worries about not knowing that much. I really didn't know that much either. I mean, we learn about her in elementary school, but usually, you know, it's Women's History Month, they trot on a bunch of women. She's one of them because she was one of the first female aviators and certainly the most famous one in the US. And um, the reason she's important is not necessarily because she was the best female aviator. There were actually quite a few really skilled pilots, but she did break a lot of records. She was the first woman to fly in an airplane across the Atlantic, but she actually didn't fly the plane, she was just a passenger. But then she was the second person to make that trip solo. So the first Charles Lindbergh was the first, and she was the second. Um, so that was a really brave slash reckless thing to do at the time. Um, she was also very known for speaking up for women's rights to basically do what they wanted to do. But we would not know her as well as we do if she hadn't been married to a really good publicist. So that's one of the reasons that she was, you know, so visible in the front front page of so many newspapers and newsreels and all that kind of thing. And I think some of that publicity carries forward. But she was very um important in her own right. She was definitely a very popular figure in the US during the 20s, mostly in the 30s. And she disappeared when she was making, she was attempting to make a flight around the world, not non-stop. She was stopping around the way and doing it at the equator, which obviously is the widest part. And she um nobody had ever done that before. So if she had made it, she would have set a record.

She would have been the first person to do it.

She would have been the first person, yeah.

But alas, that was not the last.

She she was just three stops short of making it when she disappeared. Yeah.

Wow. So she was a real trailblazer, right? I think that's part of the appeal of hearing her story now, although you say that there were other women doing it. Um well, women love other women that inspire them, right? Yeah. And we love a story of a woman who's kicking butt in a an industry that is not really made for women or you know, at the time. And um yes, just like sort of begins to open up the possibilities for what actually what we are actually capable of. The fact is, she was doing that in the 1920s and 30s, like even more so. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, she was really going against the traditions of what women wanted to do. And she was like that even before she became famous. I mean, she never really wanted to get married. And in fact, she was engaged for to someone for a long time, and she kept kind of putting him off, putting him off. She never wanted a traditional life, and she just kind of grew up that way. I mean, she had very encouraging parents, but it certainly wasn't, I mean, it wasn't really part of the mainstream culture, even though women had gotten the vote, the vote in 1919 in the US, and there was a lot of talk of women's rights, but I don't know how much women's daily lives actually changed. So she was really an example or a model of a different way for women to live. And, you know, a lot of women really worshipped her, and she was a celebrity too. I mean, she was there was all this sort of celebrity culture around her, too.

Okay.

Suffrage And The Inner Flame

You wrote, um, you've written about women's suffrage, haven't you? The the um yeah, the the um women's rights and their their ability to vote, um, and how that all sort of played into history. Do you see a connection with that work and the work that um the work in writing the book about Amelia Hart? Like, is that something that kind of inspires you?

That yeah, well, I'm just I'm interested in people who well, I'm interested in people in general, and I'm interested in people who are trying to forge their own paths. I mean, the the path to women's suffrage in the US at least was really long. It took many decades, it turned took multiple generations of women. Um, there were so many setbacks. But you know, there were all these people with this core belief, all these women with this core belief that they deserve the same rights as any man. And I find that when all of society is telling them different, the fact that they they just have this little light inside of themselves saying, no, I know that I deserve to vote. I know that I deserve to, I mean, they wanted a lot of things. They wanted to be able to own property um separately from their husbands, you know, a lot of things that women didn't have until shockingly recently. Um, but they they weren't dissuaded by what other people told them they ought to be. And Amelia Earhart was very much like that. And so I just find that fascinating. Like, how do you nurture that flame inside of you? How do you disagree when so many other people are telling you differently? I just I'm drawn to stories like that. Yeah.

Do you have any

Saying Yes To Nicumaroro

stories like that of your own? Like where you've been in that circumstance?

Well, kind of. I mean, I I'm not my personal life isn't super exciting, but going on expedition sounds pretty exciting. Well, that was that was a really big step for me because even though I was working at National Geographic, I was not what you would imagine a National Geographic rider to be like. I mean, I knew people that were like that. You know, I worked with people who had, you know, photographers who went into war zones and colleagues who um, you know, would go to like the largest uh refugee camp in the world or would go hawking with sheikhs in the Arabian Peninsula, you know, all the things that you imagine um National Geographic people to do. And I had done some small things, but mostly in the US. So when I was asked to go on this expedition, it was mostly because the editor knew there was this expedition that was going that National Geographic was partnering with. And this expedition was going to Nicomororo, which is an island in Cyrus, that uninhabited. Some people think Amelia Earhart ended up there. And National Geographic's part was to help them bring some um human remain-sniffing dogs and an archaeologist and sort of help with that search. But they had an extra birth, and the person that my editor initially asked to go couldn't go. And he was, you know, he was a young single man who had already traveled around the world and everything. So I think he asked me on a whim because he didn't have anybody else. And I said yes on a whim because I hadn't really thought it through, but I was really eager to do something like that, even though I didn't know if I could do it. So yeah, that was that was kind of a big risky endeavor for me. Because I'd never even been on a um on a ship, really, on Evernox sailboats, but I'd never gone sail for four days. Yeah, this was a voyage. I had never done that.

Yeah.

So it was a real did you feel like the invitation was a real spur of the moment response, like when you said yes, or did you have a think about it?

Um, I said yes, and he said, you should probably check with your family. I'm like, oh, yes, okay. I should talk to them. But um they were encouraging. So um, and my my son was 12 at the time, and he was he was like, Oh, you should totally do it. So I said, Okay, well, I have this stamp of approval from him. So, you know, off I went, but I was kind of feeling my way the whole time. I mean, I had reported stories before and and done that, but I had never used a satellite phone to like turn it to file my story um from the deck of a ship in the middle of the Pacific.

So you had to start writing your story while you were on the voyage, like you didn't have to sort of do the voyage, then come home and no, it was as it was happening.

Oh, right. Because the whole idea was like if they find something, we need to be able to report it right away because it would be this big exclusive, and um, and we wanted to tee people up to say, well, why are they going to this island and what's it like on the island? And and then sort of describe as they do their their exploration what's happening. So yeah, I think I wrote three or four stories from that expedition.

Okay. And yeah, there were people on that journey that were kind of tourists, weren't they?

Yeah, it was kind of a weird hybrid expedition. Um way that you know, it's it's really difficult and expensive to get to this island, and that's been a problem for um people doing research there just always because it's so isolated. It's about uh five-hour, um, five hour, five-day sale from Fiji and about four days or so from Samoa. So it's far. And so the way they decided to pay for it this time was that you know, there's these event adventure tourist tourism groups. And so this group um sold a trip to go find Amelia Earhart, and also there's great diving around this um island. So a bunch of people signed up, mostly older retired couples, very intrepid, who like this idea of doing citizen science. And so they were there were all of them, and then there were the people from Tigar, which is the International Group for Historic Aircraft Restoration, and they're the ones who really pushed this theory that she ended up on this island. And then there was the National Geographic people, you know, there was an archaeologist, there were a couple of videographers, there was me. So um, yeah, it was quite a um a varied crew of people for and you know, and then of course the Fijian crew of this um oh what's the word? I just lost the word. Um just like a tourist boat, basically. Yeah, they had never the ship had never gone so far.

Um so yeah, it was it was wild. How did you feel when you um set out? Like we oh shit.

What a dumb we we actually left Fiji late at night, so after we'd all gone to bed. So when I got stepped out of my room and onto the deck and was like, I can't see anything but water, I was a bit freaked out, I will say. And then I spent the first day and a half being really seasick, so that wasn't very much fun here. Um, but you know, it was daunting, but it was also just kind of thrilling the whole time. You know, the air felt good, it was wonderful to see the waves, and then we got to the island, and it's just this beautiful island you wouldn't want to be stranded on, but you know, palm trees and so many birds and a lagoon and oh wow, you know, tropical island. Wow, that's so cool. Yeah.

Um, so you wrote these four articles for National Geographic as part of your expedition. What changed? What made you become more curious about writing a book about Amelia Hart? And also you wrote you wrote about the the people who were sort of investigating, didn't you?

Yeah. Well, when I didn't I didn't really realize how many people had spent so much time looking into what happened to her. I really had no idea until I went on this expedition. And so I was spending that first expedition learning about their theory, which in short shorthand is always called the castaway theory. And that idea, the idea is that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noon and her navigator were flying from Lay New Guinea to Howland Island, and which is a small uninhabited island where a runway had been built for them. They got lost. And in the castaway theory, they got lost and ended up flying southeast

The Three Disappearance Theories

and landed on Nicameraro, where they there's a reef that you could land on during low tide that looks relatively flat. So that's that theory. And that's all I was really learning about on that expedition. But while we were on that expedition, there was another um, there was a show on the History Channel in the US about a guy who said he'd found photographic evidence that Earhart had been captured by the Japanese. And that's another very big theory. And this guy had found a photograph in the National Archives from Jaluet Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and it showed a bunch of people on a dock, including one person with their back turned, but kind of looking off to the left. And then another guy um leaning against a pole, and this researcher claimed that those two people were white, unlike the other people in the picture. And then it was Earhart and Noonan. So that was a big deal. Like, oh my gosh, we're off researching one theory. And but here's this news breaking about this other theory. But then a few days later, that theory was kind of undermined because somebody found that picture in an earlier publication, which meant they couldn't have, it couldn't have been Earhart or Noonan. So that's how I learned about that theory. And then I learned while I was also on that expedition that another group had been searching for signs of her airplane at the bottom of the ocean. And that is sort of the third theory I write about, which is the crashed and sank theory, which is just that she got lost and ran out of gas and then crashed into the ocean. But after, you know, I got home, I was like, okay, well, we didn't find anything. Um that was a great adventure, you know, back to my life. But then about a year and a half later, um Bob Ballard, who is a scientist who found the Titanic and does a lot of work with uh um the now I'm gonna the acronym is it's NOAA, but it's a national something of it's the one oceanic. Now I'm not even gonna remember, but it's the part of the federal government that studies the oceans on there. And they have been mapping um US territory, which includes you know, underwater around various islands and things. So he was going to be in the neighborhood of Nicomororo. And so he reached out to National Geographic and he has a long-standing relationship with the organization um to say, well, why don't I, you know, make a little detour and go search around Nicomororo and see if I can find Amelia Earhart's plane? And everybody got excited about that, and they decided that they were going to do a documentary around it, and then they sent me to do the same thing again, basically write more stories. And this time I had kind of more time to prepare because the first expedition they asked me just a few weeks before we left. So I didn't have time really to do reading about Earhart. I was really just focused on the search for her. But this time I had a chance to, I had time to explore her life more. And I just got more interested in in her and then what about her made people keep searching for her. And so when I, you know, I did the same thing again. I wrote stories from the ship. Um, but this time when I got home, I I was a little bit frustrated because I was just really writing about the search and not about her, and now I knew more about her. And then um, as sometimes happens, but hadn't happened to me before, and a literary agent reached out and said, I've read your stories, and I think this would make a big great book. And at first I thought, well, but we didn't find anything. So how can there be a book? And there's no like great reveal at the end. But I thought about it and I thought, well, the thing that interests me the most is not which theory is right, but the people who have devoted their life to looking for her and why they're looking for her and why she became the person that she became. So that's how I approached it. I mean, I don't I don't pretend to have a solution in the book because I don't know what happened to her. I just know kind of the paths that the people have followed in their search for her. So spoiler alert, I don't know.

I think that's okay. Um, so what were some of the things that really appealed to you about her story? Like her story obviously started before she uh disappeared. But was there anything in particular that you that really kind of got you connected with her story?

I think the first thing that really connected me um was realizing how um fascinated she was by new things, new technology, and how she grew up at a time when you know, when there were cars were new and telephones were new and airplanes were new. I mean, it was just This time of technological optimism, and she was really fascinated by it all. And when I was on Ballard ship, which is a research ship, very different from a cruise ship and very high-tech, and I kept thinking, oh my God, she would have been fascinated by this. You know, they have all the underwater vehicles that can go really, really deep and map the ocean floor, or um, you know, beam back video of the reef cliff. You know, it was just fascinating. And I kept thinking, she would really like this. Um, so that was kind of my first thought. And then just learning more about how her path to who she became was not linear at all.

Okay.

I mean, she had um she started out with a lot of advantages. Her grandparents were very well off. They were leading citizens of this town in the state of Kansas. Um, and you know, she spent most of her early childhood on this beautiful white Victorian house on the bluff over the Nebraska River. And wait, is it the Nebraska River? I don't one of the major US rivers, but you know, beautiful, comfortable, went to the best school in the town, all that kind of thing. But her parents struggled, and her dad ended up losing. He was a lawyer for the railroad companies, and um started out once he had sort of a permanent job with him, did all right for a while, but then he became an alcoholic and kept losing jobs, and they kept having to move. And each time they moved, they were in a worse position than they had been before. And, you know, it was really a difficult time. Her parents eventually ended up getting divorced, which was not common at the time. Um, and like I said earlier, she knew she didn't want to have a traditional woman's life, but she didn't know what she could do instead of that. So she spent a lot of time in her 20s trying all sorts of things. I mean, she found aviation in her early 20s, but it's really expensive, you know, expensive to operate a plane, to go up and pay for the fuel. So, you know, she had to give it up at some point. She drove a truck to pay for it. She learned photography. She worked in a mailroom. She went to took pre-med classes at Columbia University in New York. She worked, she taught English. Um, she finally found something that she really liked. Um, she was living in Boston or just outside of Boston with her mother and her sister, and ended up working for a settlement house, which was one of these. I know the first one was in England, Poynby House. Maybe mispronouncing that. But it's initially these houses where the idea was that you would just put a bunch of middle class people living in a poor neighborhood, and by example, they would show the poor people how to live. Okay. They very quickly realized that that was not really gonna work. So they became sort of community centers where um, you know, people did live, but they offered English classes and um after-school activities for the kids. She worked with a lot of Syrian and Chinese immigrants in Boston, and she really loved that. She loved being a social worker, and she pretty much thought that that's what she was going to do. But I mean, her her path was just so it'd be so familiar for many people in their 20s, where they're like, I majored in history, what do I do now? Yeah, trying to be from personal experience or anything, but you know, lots of different hats and just trying to figure out. And I found that interesting. Yeah, like she didn't spring out just you know, an amazing aviator and a public speaker and ready to be famous and an example to women. She really had to work her way to who she became. And I I found that really interesting.

Yeah. And it's kind of interesting as well. Like it possi probably wasn't on her mind to become famous for it, or was it, do you think? Like for flying.

Yeah, I mean, the one thing about aviation, yeah, she did want to break records, and it was kind of hard not to be famous for flying at the time. Like if you were entering in any sort of air race, if you were moderately attractive woman who was flying, the newspapers would notice you because they were writing about aviation so much. So even like within the first year, she learned how to fly out in Los Angeles. I mean, she really did live all over the country. Um, she was already appearing in the newspapers without too much effort. Um, but you know, a lot of women pilots were appearing like that. It was only after she got connected to her husband, George Putnam, who he was a publisher with a famous um publishing company, and he had um published uh Charles Lindbergh's book, which published you know within a month of him flying across the country. So it's a bit of a slapdash affair, but made a ton of money, and he just knew how to package people and how to make sure that they were in front of the public. And he ensured that when people thought about women aviators, they thought of her first.

Yeah. Okay.

So she didn't really seek being famous, and she was at first just embarrassed by it. Um, when she first flew across the Atlantic as a passenger, when she arrived in England, everybody was well, first she arrived in Wales. And then when she arrived in London, people only wanted to hear from her, not from the pilot who had actually got them there or the navigator. And she was very embarrassed by that. She kept saying, No, you need to talk to these people. But they were not very articulate, they were shy, and she was just able to speak in a disarming way about her experience. But she was very embarrassed that she became famous for basically just being a passenger. So yeah.

Yeah, wow. And yeah, just that uh well, so many people become famous after they've died, don't they? As well. But she obviously had some some recognition beforehand that that that wasn't necessarily her intention. Um, yeah, what uh okay. I'm I'm still really curious. Like you've obviously done a whole bunch, you needed to do a whole bunch of research about Amelia Rearhart, and the the book is about that, but you've the fact that you've kind of broken it into these, did you break it into these three sections of like this is one possibility, this is the other possibility, this is the other possibility? And that the people that were working on those projects, and like you you mentioned their kind that like that almost the human behavior side of things, like why why have they got this desire and fascination to like solve the mystery?

Yeah, I really thought at first that I was going to write it as almost like a

Skill, Radio, Risk And Blame

TikTok, you know, going not a TikTok as in the social media, but as a you know, then they found this and they moved on to that, and then they found, you know, just but it it didn't really work that way. And I really struggled to figure out how to balance these theories and not give I didn't want to either put my thumb on the scale for either one of these theories, but I also didn't want to pretend something was credible when it really wasn't. So that was a challenge to figure out how to write that. Um but one thing that I really that fascinated me about writing about the theories is how they sort of melded with what was going on in the culture when they got popular. So the idea that the Japanese had captured Erhart was really tied into all the um World War II and all the anti-Japanese feeling, and then all the soldiers, the US soldiers, so many soldiers going across the Pacific, um, you know, fighting the Japanese on each island, and then coming home and having all these memories and mistrust and fear of the Japanese. So they were much more inclined to believe that they would do something before we were at war to capture and possibly kill Erhart when there wasn't real really a lot of solid evidence for that. But it was interesting how it came up out of all these people's experience. And then the idea that um, you know, she was a castaway comes out of this, you know, this this struggle with, well, how was she a good pilot or not? Can a woman be a good pilot or not? What are the mistakes that she made or who actually made the mistakes? Was it really the Coast Guard ship that was waiting for her at the island who made mistakes? And some of that is also um true for the um the crashed and burned theory, you know, trying to figure out who made the mistakes, but that theory could never be investigated because up until the last decade or two, we haven't had the just the ability to search so deeply in the ocean. So I there were just so many different threads, you know, there's the personal threads, there's Earhart's story, and then there's the historical context.

So did you so with the um like the the two accident, the castaway and the the um going to the bottom of the ocean theories, when you were talking about that, were they kind was was there like suggestion that it was her fault and that she was inadequate or incompetent in her ability to fly?

There has been debate about how um yeah, how skilled she was at a as a pilot. Um but a lot of the debate has been around um her skill as a navigator and also, and this is her skill of operating a radio because one of the issues was there there was a US Coast Guard ship that was waiting for her at Howland and they were going to guide her in, but they realized after a while that they could hear her radio transmissions, but she couldn't hear them. And so there was concern that there was something wrong with the radio, but it may have been that there was something wrong with the schedules of when they were planning to talk. She also had something, you know, a direction finder, which was a way to hone in on radio signal, but she'd never really learned how to use it. Um, so it wasn't, I mean, there is some, some people say that she wasn't a great pilot. And she may not have been the best pilot. I mean, there were a lot of good pilots, but she did make it really, really far around the world. Yeah. Um, and I think that speaks to her skills. But there were lots of other things, and she didn't know Morse code, which is what a lot of people, especially um radio operators on ships, would have expected her to know Morse code. So there were there were sort of preparation things that she seems to have been a little too casual about. She's like, Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And she's like, I've been through hard flights before and I survived. And yeah. And yeah, so that's really more the the conversation about whether she was as prepared as she could have been. And her she had a navigator with her, and he was supposed to be one of the best navigators. He had worked with Pan Am on developing their um Pacific flights. So he had already crossed the Pacific many times. Um, but his issue was that he was rumored to be known to be an alcoholic. So, you know, the question was, well, was he drinking? Um and you know, there is some evidence that at least what they were delayed in lay for a couple nights, and there's evidence that at least on one of those nights he got pretty drunk. So um, yeah, it wouldn't be fun with me the next day. Oh, I know it would have been horrible. Like it would have smelled like all the fuel and the noise, yeah, the heat. Yeah, doesn't seem like a very pleasant experience.

So as you were writing the book, like did you feel like you were really connecting with Amelia's story? Like, where did you feel you're a journalist, so you're probably really good at like finding out the facts, but you're create you're kind of creating a story from it as well, aren't you? You want yeah. Did you uh what what was your experience with that? And like, did you feel like you were really connecting with her as the the character in that process?

Um, I think it's interesting. Somebody asked me, like, well, is she your best friend now? Like, no, they're not real friends, she's dead. Um yeah, um, I feel like uh it's kind of hard to answer. I feel like I understand her pretty well. Um I don't know if I necessarily feel close to her. I almost feel more sympathy or or even empathy for her family. Um you know, her sister ended up having a more traditional life, but also she was very accomplished within that life. She was um

Family Impact And Humanising Icons

just sort of a pillar of the community of Medford, Massachusetts. She was a teacher for a long time. Um, she was involved in various local, you know, community organizations. And because Amelia Earhart was so her once she became famous, her life was so out of the ordinary. I mean, she was flying all the time. She was staying overnight at the White House with her friends, you know, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. You know, she had a really different kind of life. So I really related to her in her 20s. But once she became famous, it's sort of like she shot off into the sky. And I was like, oh, there you go. Um so and and I did sympathize with her family, who also, even though they weren't the ones who were famous, but what happened to her really affected them. And even before she was lost, you know, they the news, you know, reporters would bother them about her. She she would tell them, oh, you have to watch what you wear and what you say in public because that reflects on me. They would have the she was supporting them financially, but they would have all these tense exchanges about money. So they were just kind of brought along for the ride. And with, you know, it wasn't their choice at all. So in a way, I was kind of sympathetic to them.

Yeah.

But you know, they're all just humans, and I did like to I wanted to make make her and understand her as a human rather than as an icon.

Yeah. That kind of makes makes it sound like she was quite self-interest, had a lot of self-interest and not really necessarily a a concern for the people that she might be taking with her.

Yeah, I mean, I think she did I think she was she was so caught up in her life that I think she might have not thought about how it was affecting them. And she felt like she was doing a good thing. Yeah. And I mean, and she was. She was financially supporting them, but then she would be very impatient with them. And um, she didn't like her sister's husband, and you know, you know, a lot of you know, regular family stuff. But and she doesn't always come off super well, but she just again, she's human. She's not just going to act perfectly in every situation.

Yeah. How much of this um sort of biographical stuff did you in have you included in the book?

Oh, a lot. I mean, the book is about half-biography. I kind of the way I structured it is it goes um one chapter is on her biography, and then the next chapter is on one aspect of the search for her. So it kind of goes back and forth in a way that I hope is not too confusing for her figures.

I'm sure it was.

So yeah, I didn't want to leave her story out of it.

Yeah.

I wanted that to be the context for the search.

Once you'd finished writing the book, or it may have happened before because you went on these two expeditions, so you obviously had a fair bit of knowledge of her and and what was going on with them trying to find her or solve the mystery. Do you have a leaning towards one of the stories of the three?

Well, I mean, I I don't know. There's no, and people will quibble with this, but there's no solid evidence, like that, or definitive evidence, I should say, for either of them. So I tend to think the simplest thing is the most likely if she ran out of gas and went into the ocean. That said, I'm very fond of the castaway theory, just because that was my gateway drug into the whole Bear Heart theory. Um, and

Why Search And What It Changes

the people who have pursued it have done so much amazing research on the islands, in Fiji, in Curibas, in the archives in Australia, in England. I mean, just really phenomenal research. And it's so interesting how the search is also connected to you know, British imperialism. They had just um right after Earhart disappeared, that island was taken over and made into a very small colony by the Brits. Um, and that's all just really interesting. Like, how how did that happen? They were why did it happen? They were trying to solve an overpopulation problem on some other islands, and all that stuff is just fascinating to me. So, but I don't I don't advocate for any theory.

Do you okay? So maybe you've just answered that, but uh this but do you so these searches are continuing, right?

Yeah, there's an expedition going to Nicomaro at the end of next month.

Are you going? No, no, no. Um do you think that they will ever get to the bottom of it?

Um I think if somebody wants to spend the time and the money, I think eventually something will be discovered. Probably at the bottom somewhere of the Pacific. Um but I mean if it's if if she didn't crash into the Pacific, I mean we do definitely have the technology now to just kind of go back and forth across the bottom of the ocean with seminar and video and all sorts of things. Um if, however, she did not crash into the ocean, if she ended up on an island, then I think it's almost um more chance whether we find anything.

Yeah.

I mean, they've looked, there is this expedition, as I said, um back to Nick Morroro. And it's based on a satellite image. Somebody thinks they saw a shape that looks like a plane in the lagoon. And there, I mean, I've gotten, I just recently got an email from somebody who has saw a different shape on the island in a satellite image. So I mean that'll continue. And there's other islands where people think she might have been. It up. But there are a lot of islands in the Pacific. So that seems more like luck in a way if you find the Red Island. But I I don't know. I mean, people I have mixed feelings about saying whether people should keep searching. I mean, I have been asked before. It's like, well, what will be what's the benefit of finding her? Like, what will we learn? And it's like, well, I guess we'll learn where she died. But it's just like solving a mystery, isn't it? Right. Solving a mystery, then you know, but it's not going to change um aviation. No. How aviation is done or anything like that. Um, so why keep searching? And part of me is like, oh, yeah, maybe the money should be spent elsewhere, which is what her family would say. But on the other hand, I know the power of that these searches have and how compelling they are for the people that are participating in them. And it's hard to say people shouldn't do that. Right. Yeah. Because they're following a passion, right? Yes, exactly. And they're learning about themselves as they do it, they're testing themselves, they're pushing their knowledge, they're pushing their bodies, you know, they're and that's all worth doing, I suppose.

Yeah. Yes. When you um I'm going back to you. Um back to you. When you so you've written for magazines, you were writing for National Geographic, and then you wrote a book. Was that a very different experience? Never considered yourself a book writer.

No, I mean, I always thought it would be wonderful to write a book, but I always imagined it'd be fiction, but I'm actually not very good at fiction.

So that never how do you feel about it now that you've done it? Do you feel like you want to write more? Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. I really enjoyed it. I mean, when you write for a newspaper or a magazine, you're you have to match their style in a way.

Writing The Book And Finding Purpose

And you know, they if this is just kind of normal. A publication has subjects that they're interested in and ways that they write about those subjects. So you kind of have to shape whatever you write to that, and that is totally fine. It makes sense. But writing a book, it's just this is I'm crafting the story the way I think it should be told. And maybe nobody wants to read it, or maybe a bunch of people want to read it, but it's kind of all on me, which is both liberating and terrifying. So, but I really I also really enjoyed having such a being able to cover something so thoroughly um and to follow the things that I found interesting rather than what might be news. Because even though I've been a journalist for a long time, I'm not a big news writer, I guess. So this was it just felt very it's deeply satisfying to do something in-depth. So yeah, I definitely want to do it again.

Do you feel like you've changed during the process?

Oh yeah. Um, part of it was just the time it took because you know I got the contract in 2020, and you may recall that some things happened in 2020. Yeah. So so there was um, you know, the pandemic, and then kind of unrelated to the pandemic, I had several deaths in the family over that period. Um my job changed a lot to the point where I ended up leaving so I could finish the book. So I went from being, you know, a staff person to being on my own. So there was just a lot of things to think about, and somehow it all kind of got mixed into the book. So I ended up writing a little bit about grief at the end of the book, and that I think losing family members made me think about well, how did Earhart's family feel when she when she was lost? And we don't really talk about you know, it her loss is a news item and a mystery and not something that happened to a family, and that sort of shifted my perspective a bit. So yeah, I've I've definitely changed.

Do you feel like the process that you've been through um and the just the experience and how things have kind of slotted into place? You know, you got the call, you went on these expeditions, it's led you to write in the book. Do you feel like this is kind of like a guide to um your purpose? Like, do you feel anything like that evolving?

Um yeah, it has helped me find what I think I am sort of the best at, you know, and helped me sort of develop the skills. Like I I learned all about writing on the job, and now it's sort of all come together in this book, and I realized that I I also have gravitated gravitated towards um you know, incorporating sort of a sense of humanity and wonder in what I write about. And I think that's in this book too. And I it's clarified a lot of things that are important for me um in in what I do. I mean, I don't think that this kind of book is going to change the world or anything, but I think it does give people, I don't know, a way of looking at the world, a way of understanding the world, and just almost a feeling about the world. And I feel like that is maybe my tiny role in the world.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's uh yeah, you kind of um I guess it's along the same lines as the people who are doing the um the searches, you know, they're they're they're following a a dream or a path that that they're passionate about. And you know, maybe it won't come to anything, but it's still something they're doing. And what you just said about writing a book and the style of writing, and and you said maybe no one will want to read it or something. I think that they'll probably want to read it because it does sound very compelling, but um, yeah, that that following your your dream and your passion and your interest, you know, is obviously um an important thing to do as well. And I think that that uh is kind of it's a it reflects in the story of Amelia Heart as well. That's what she was doing, that's what you're doing. And I love exactly I love that your experience is kind of reflected in in the story that you've you've told.

Yes, yeah. She would always um people would always ask her, Why are you making these dangerous flights? And she would say kind of flippantly, for the fun of it. It's sort of like I don't have to give a reason, I just have to want to do it, you know, and just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I have to give a reason either. And I I really like that idea. It's like, well, you can just do it for the experience, you know, not to be a cliche, but you know, the journey is the point.

Yeah. So and that's a hard lesson to learn sometimes, isn't it, when there's

Final Takeaway And Support

yes, expectation um to you know be doing all of the things. So yeah, that's uh it's a really good, good closing message, I think, is to follow, follow your heart. Hey there, Rebel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Midlife Rebel Podcast. If you'd like to support the show, you can buy me a coffee by going to Buy MeACoffee forward slash Midlife Rebel Podcast. Thanks for listening.