One Summer: America, 1927

putter along contentedly for hours without attention. The J-5 was first used on Richard Byrd’s North Pole flight in 1926, and did its job admirably. The irony, as we shall see, is that Byrd probably never got anywhere near the North Pole.
    Lindbergh made his first test flight on 28 April, two months to the day after placing the order. The plane performed better than he had dared to hope. It was agile and fast – he got it up to 128 miles an hour on its first flight – and it positively leapt into the air fromthe ground, at least when lightly loaded. Over the next ten days, Lindbergh took the plane up another twenty-two times, mostly in short test flights of between five and ten minutes. In a series of trials on 4 May, he gradually increased the fuel load from 38 gallons to 300, but that was still 150 gallons short of what he would carry at takeoff in New York. He dared not push the plane further because of the danger of landing with full tanks. The only test of the plane’s true capabilities would come with the flight to Paris itself.
    Lindbergh was now desperately eager to go. From New York came word that Byrd’s America and Levine’s Columbia were both ready to depart. Only bad weather was holding them back. Then came the news that Nungesser and Coli had left Paris and were en route to America. Lindbergh, quietly despairing, considered changing his plans completely and trying to become the first pilot across the Pacific, flying to Australia via Hawaii – a very much greater challenge and one that would in all likelihood have killed him. He abandoned that thought immediately, however, when the news broke that Nungesser and Coli were missing and presumed dead. If he could get to New York before the storms across much of the continent cleared, he still stood a chance.
    On the afternoon of 10 May, shortly before 4 p.m. California time, Charles Lindbergh climbed into the cockpit of his sleek new plane and took off. Once comfortably airborne, he pointed the nose east and, with the supreme confidence of youth, headed towards St Louis and some of the worst weather America had seen in years.

C HAPTER 3
     

     
    MOST PEOPLE COULDN’T recall a time like it. For months on end, across much of the country, it rained steadily, sometimes in volumes not before seen. Southern Illinois received over two feet of rain in three months; parts of Arkansas had well over three. Rivers almost beyond counting – the San Jacinto in California, the Klamath, Willamette and Umpqua in Oregon, the Snake, Payette and Boise in Idaho, the Colorado in Colorado, the Neosho and Verdigris in Kansas, the Ouachita and St Francis in Arkansas, the Tennessee and Cumberland in the South, the Connecticut in New England – overran their banks. Between the late summer of 1926 and the following spring, enough precipitation fell on the forty-eight United States, by one calculation, to make a cube of water 250 miles across on each side. That is a lot of water, and it was only just the beginning.
    On Good Friday, 15 April, a mighty storm system pounded the middle third of America with rain of a duration and intensity that those who experienced it would not forget in a hurry. From western Montana to West Virginia and from Canada to the Gulf, rain fell in what can only be described as a Noachian deluge. Most places received six to eight inches and some recorded more than a foot. Now nearly all that water raced into swollen creeks and riversand headed, with unwonted intensity, for the great central artery of the continent, the Mississippi River. The Mississippi and its tributaries drain 40 per cent of America, almost a million square miles spread across thirty-one states (and two Canadian provinces), and never in recorded history had the entirety of it been this strained.
    A river approaching flood stage is an ominously fearsome thing, and the Mississippi now took on an aspect of brutal, swift-flowing anger that unnerved even hardened observers. All along the upper Mississippi people stood on the banks and mutely watched as the river paraded objects – trees, dead cows, barn roofs – that hinted at the carnage further north. At St Louis the volume of passing water reached two million cubic feet per second – a phenomenal rate, double the volume recorded during the great flood of 1993. You didn’t have to be an expert to see that this was an unsustainable burden. All along the river armies of men with shovels and sandbags shored up flood defences, but the