Free Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog Page A

man in spite of his wealth, and he was given to hero-worship. 19 Charles understood Sam, and they enjoyed their shared commitment to the land and animals, as well as a spontaneous “little boy” sense of adventure. Sam was among the few who could match Charles’s physical endurance and thirst for exploration. They had cultivated their relationship through the years, first at Pan Am, then as anti-Roosevelt men before the war, and also as neighbors in Fairfield County, Connecticut. In 1963, Sam and his wife, Tay, had purchased a hundred acres in Kipahulu, eleven miles outside the town of Hana. Their estate was a garden and a sanctuary, filled with flowers, shrubs, and trees, and home to Sam’s menagerie of pet gibbons.
    From the moment Charles’s plane skimmed the surface of the island,he was taken by the line and color of its beauty. Its mountains sloped down to flat horizons, lush green terrain, and deep-dimpled craters of volcanic ash. Orange cliffs descended to black beaches washed by the deep blue sea. At early dawn, Charles would stand on Sam’s beach to watch the sun rise. He would swim beyond the surf to the coral reefs, among the waving fronds and the brilliantly colored fish. But to his disappointment, the primitive ways of the native people had almost disappeared. European culture had eroded Hawaii’s Polynesian past, and it had succumbed to the “modern.”
    Nonetheless, Charles believed it a perfect home base, developed and populated enough for Anne, yet accessible to him in his conservation work both east and west. In 1968, he had a house built on five acres of ocean-front land, transferred to his ownership through the generosity of Sam. The house was designed to buffet the ocean wind and rain, and its geometric lines married simplicity with technological precision. As if Charles wanted to touch the primitive within the refuge of impenetrable walls, he had the house constructed of three-foot-thick stone, its surfaces covered with granite tile. Built without Anne’s consent, according to Charles’s needs, the house, appropriately named Argonauta, never felt like home to Anne. It was cold and unforgiving, without the comfort of heat or electricity. Forced to cook and write by gaslight, eleven miles out of town, and thousands of miles away from family and friends, Anne was almost always alone. She used to stand on the cliffs above the shore and hold her ears against the deafening roar.
    Preferring the sound of cowbells and the softness of mountain mist, Anne often retreated to her chalet in Switzerland. While Charles surveyed the rainforests of the Philippines, Anne sat in Vevey on her verandah, watching the cloud-hung mountains in the distance and working on her diaries and letters. Helen Wolff, in Locarno, read her manuscripts line by line. Since Kurt’s death, Anne and Helen had become intimate friends; Anne trusted her literary instincts and her judgment. Her goal, Helen wrote to Anne, was to retain the honesty of her view while maintaining her professional objectivity. There was to be norecord of marital disputes, children’s problems, or family disharmony. In a sense, Helen, with the consent of Anne and Charles, created the “Anne” of her published diaries. Through Helen’s eyes, Anne would become an asexual idealized woman, constantly struggling with herself for integrity. The flesh and blood Anne, with her rage and sensuality, would hover like a phantom beneath the text.
    While Anne supported Charles in his land and wildlife conservation both in Maui and in Darien, she had no desire to follow him to the Philippines. Her jet lag, since the bout of viral pneumonia several years earlier, was growing more difficult, and “storms” of stomach pain would overwhelm her. Since Charles’s first visit with President Ferdinand Marcos, in 1969, his goal had been to preserve the “core forests” from devastation and development by European loggers. Convinced that the islands would be reduced to a