Strange Things Under the Midnight Sun

(2018, Excerpt)

Restless, Roberta E. Knick pressed her forehead against the little airplane window. Between periodic red flashes on the wing she could spy the twinkling, fluorescent stars. It would have made a great night for stargazing, she thought, and it was absolutely killing her to be inside the cloistered up tin can of a plane.

But no matter. In less than thirty-six hours she would be free from small windows and light pollution for quite some time. Oh yes. She was Arctic-bound, and wild horses nor naysayers of greater wisdom could stop her. The little prop passenger plane, one of the last of its kind, was en route to Churchill, Manitoba, and it was there that her more than nine month journey would begin. Once she’d left people behind and entered the land of harsh storms and polar bears, she’d have the night sky all to herself.

It was all too exciting and she couldn’t calm down. Normally noted for her stoicism, Robbie transformed on the eve of adventure. Though it was one o’clock in the morning she was beyond restless. She was rattling and boiling over, intensely giddy almost to the point of sickness.

Times like this brought out a side in her few people ever saw, for few were mad enough to follow her. It was well known that Robbie took daredevilry to treacherous extremes, and was oft to return less than unscathed from her mad escapades. There was the broken leg on Denali, the third degree burns when the wildfires broke out in the West, and then of course the infamous trans-Pacific incident.

Robbie had set off from Papua New Guinea in May, in a kayak, and six months later, even her family began to wonder where she was when they received neither call nor visit at Thanksgiving. Once they’d tracked down some of her friends and extracted the few details they could about her planned route, they had search parties out and helicopters patrolling the skies. But it was no use. The ocean was too vast, and Robbie could be anywhere. Four months later, after she was declared dead, Robbie showed up nine hundred miles South of target in Peru. She had been “sidetracked.”

Yet always, she returned. Never carried out, never rescued, but on her own two feet. And no matter how closely she had brushed death, she went out and did it again. The woman was indestructible.