Global Hero

Charles Lindbergh, an unknown aviator,
was popularly labeled “Lucky Lindy”
and “The Lone Eagle” in 1927 when at
age twenty-five he became the first
pilot to fly solo in a single-engine
aircraft nonstop over the Atlantic,
from New York to Paris in 33 hours

and 30 minutes, landing well after
dark, to be greeted by an estimated
throng of more than 50,000 Frenchmen
mobbing the airport and lifting the
American on their shoulders, carrying
him to his new life as a world-famous
personage, but that tumultuous public
scene was not anything like the quiet
setting of his death at seventy-two,
on the opposite side of the planet,
far out in the vast Pacific, at the
peaceful eastern end of Maui Island
where the terminally ill patient was
staying in a modest cottage with his
wife, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
because the attending doctor didn’t
have time for driving back and forth
along the narrow, zigzag, coast road
between his hospice in Hdna village

and the Lindbergh place at Kipahulu,
a rock-walled house they built on a
bluff overlooking the sea — beyond
some abandoned fields of banana trees
which had become a wild, meandering
jungle that people out there called
The Banana River — this picturesque
property bartered from a friend who
traded five acres of tropical terrain
for a priceless collection of ethnic
costumed dolls the intrepid flier had

acquired during his many international
trips — their residence located near
the vacated little Palapala Ho’omau
Hawaiian Church which they had helped
restore, including the addition of a
tall stained glass window across the
space of an unused side door, a touch
of colorful contemporary art for the
otherwise austere rural chapel where
Lindbergh said he wanted to be buried
in the small adjoining cemetery, and
so immediately after he died, he was
lifted by a sturdy Polynesian into a
plain wooden coffin handmade in liana
from a sketch drawn by Lindbergh -­- and
which local legend says may have

contained his leather helmet and the
goggles worn throughout that historic
transatlantic flight — and then he
was laid to rest, without a eulogy,
as less than ten people witnessed

the casket lowered into the grave,
and according to his last request,
heavy lava boulders were piled into
the pit, and finally the surface was

covered with smooth gray beach stones,
in the Hawaiian Christian tradition,
and afterward a rectangular slab with
its memorial inscription was placed
horizontally upon the site, as the
inconspicuous marker for this always
unassuming and reclusive celebrity.