Why keep hunting for Amelia Earhart?
My friend followed an expedition to find answers about the lost aviator, and found so much more.
On the final day of women’s History Month, I’m going to bring you a whole bunch of Persisters, all in one package.
I struggled all month with whether to write this, because it starts with the story – a complicated one – of a close friend. And ordinarily, this would be a red flag, conflict-of-interest type of thing.
But I decided to invoke the freedom of being independent, because it really is a helluva yarn. It begins in 2017, when Rachel Hartigan told me she’s going on an expedition to find Amelia Earhart.
WTH?
Rachel is smart, funny, witty, understated, practical and kind. She is a Yale graduate who will never tell you that. (Not me, I’ll crassly brag about my Nevada friend who went Eastcoast Ivy!) She is a lot of things, but I never pegged her for an Amelia Earhart hunter, even though she worked for National Geographic at the time. She was an editor.
“I’m going to be thousands of miles away,” she told me, the disbelief clear in her voice, too. I was in shock, proud and insanely jealous.
I already admired Rachel as a Persister. She had been an editor at The Washington Post when we met, brought together because our sons became good friends in school and were asking for playdates.
Thanks to our sons’ mutual nerdiness, we realized we worked at the same place and grew up about an hour apart. I grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in South Lake Tahoe. She is from across the Nevada state line in Reno. Our families became good friends, our husbands were both journalists too and everything clicked.
Rachel was named editor of the Post’s book world in 2009, just when they ended it as a stand alone section (the first time they did this stupid thing). Then they laid her off when they eliminated her position in 2011. Of course, they revived the book section after that, then killed it again two months ago. Stunning.
Unlike the latest, devastating round of Post layoffs, those cost cuts were small, and I know she must’ve felt alone. But Rachel eventually landed a bitchen job at National Geographic, a triumphant middle finger to the Post that I not so secretly envied. Those yellow NatGeo spines were one of the few things on my parents’ bookshelves and my portals to the rest of the world when I was a kid. Her persistence paid off.
But Rachael was editing and writing mostly in D.C., and not swashbuckling around the world. This changed with the Earhart assignment. And when she got back, I lapped up her stories about the cadaver-dogs on board the ship with her, the jagged coral atoll she scoured and the cast of characters who structure their lives around the search for this compelling, near-mythical woman. I joked about the book she has to write. But it wasn’t a joke.
She’s now all over the place, doing book signings and interviews about the final product,“Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life”. (National Geographic).
Rachel didn’t make any conclusions about Earhart’s fate. The dominant theories about her 1937 disappearance, Rachel’s own journey to the deserted atoll of Nikumaroro and a deeply reported biography of Earhart are braided together to make the book a great read.
The story of Earhart’s tumultuous childhood, her first taste of adventure, her marriage to publicity maestro George Putnam and the whole ecosystem of America’s earliest female flyers is a largely unknown tale that Rachel reported masterfully and told eloquently. You’ll learn more about what a remarkable Persister Earhart was; that she was never sated with her most recent flight; about her constant drive to push boundaries and prove herself again and again.
You’ll learn about the breathtaking steps that some of the “Earhart hounds” – the amateur detectives and investigators who spend their lives and savings trying to unravel her story – have taken.
And you’ll learn how Earhart’s surviving family members feel about the mania to find her bones.
But what you don’t learn is what it took for Rachel to finish this.
When you have a friend writing a book, you always want to ask “How’s the book going?” But you don’t want to nag. We went through almost a decade of that question.
The truth is Rachel went through hell while writing this book.m
Some of it is on every page – her obsessive quest to understand and convey the most minute details about radio, the exacting science of flight, the importance of stars and degrees in navigation. She tracked down one of the key figures in one of the most explosive conspiracy theories and interviewed her just before she died.
That’s the easy stuff.
The personal hell is referenced on only one page, the dedication. She thanked her son for telling her to go and her ex-husband for making it possible. Since that trip in 2017, she and her husband divorced. But that wasn’t it.
I mention this because divorce is hard for anyone, but we were especially close to her family and their divorce meant a delicate dance for us all. Who will be coming to which birthday party? Who will drive the kids for playdates? Who will stay in touch? Most of us know the drill.
But it took on a different dimension when her ex-husband killed himself in 2022. Right after the boys’ high school graduation, right before they went off to college. He called my husband and left an unsettling message on his phone that day. My husband called him back as soon as he heard it. It was too late.
The next call came from Rachel, she was at the hospital. She didn’t – couldn’t – walk away.
Not long after this, her parents flew across the country to be there for her son during his first parents’ weekend in college. About 10 minutes after they checked into their hotel, her father suffered a stroke and later died. Then their beloved dog, the one who galloped across the boys’ lives and our house on visits, died too. It was so much.
The tragedies that heaped upon her were massive. Nevertheless, she persisted. The idea that anyone can shoulder this much grief and still continue with a project as large as a book, on a legend like Amelia Earhart no less, is a study in strength and courage.
To see the book published, to devour the delicious reporting and details she spent so many years digging for while her own life was such a challenge, is a stunning example of persistence.
I was lucky to watch her do a book talk recently, where she sparkled.
And she spoke about the parallels of loss and how that haunts us.
“One thing I realized is that when somebody dies very suddenly, you have all these questions and they’re never going to be answered,” she said. “There’s always something left that’s not figured out.”
I’m grateful that Rachel agreed to tell this much of her story. Her husband’s suicide still haunts all of us, please share the 988 suicide hotline with anyone you think may need support.
Also — buy her book! It’s a great read, already a history best seller! Let me know what you think happened to Amelia:
I will get this book, and send love to both families. Your writing is riveting, as always, Petula!
Wow. I stopped breathing while reading your piece. Now I have to go track down the book. Thank you for sharing it.