Jonathan Hiskes | Nov. 11, 2007
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| Courtesy photo, Chris Howell of the Herald-Times |
| Christy Mehrlich, B.A.J. ’05, finished her cross-country reporting trip and now plans to write a book about her adventures. |
The 24-year-old pilot recently finished a five-month, 38-state airborne reporting trip in her 1976 Piper Arrow airplane. At each stop, she wrote a story and took pictures for the (Bloomington) Herald-Times and several other Indiana newspapers. Her work also appears on her Web site, Skyfemme.com.
Back in Bloomington recently for Halloween, Mehrlich detailed her plans to write a book about the trip.
“Unfortunately, with newspapers, there’s got to be a certain amount of quotes and all these rules and such,” she said. “Now I’d like to write it in a different style.”
During her adventures, she talked to Mormon missionaries in Nauvoo, Ill., where Joseph Smith settled in 1839. She asked about 16th-century European settlers on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island. She went fly fishing in Vermont. She said she hoped the stories were inspiration for readers to do their own exploring.
“I don’t think enough people see the country,” she said. “I don’t think enough people think it’s interesting for tourism, just because it’s not Europe, you know? We don’t have really old cities, but we have these people in Florida starting this private zoo.”
She traveled alone, staying with Quakers in Washington, D.C., with a Mennonite family in Georgia and in hostels elsewhere. In September, she returned to her family’s home in the Bay Area, where she plans to work on the book.
Although her father is a pilot, Mehrlich learned to fly while at IU. She spent the months before the trip doing marketing work in Bloomington and planning for the trip. She chose many of the destinations because of their historical significance.
At Kent State University, she talked to witnesses of the 1970 National Guard shooting. In New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, she did volunteer construction work with Habitat for Humanity.
“You hear what it’s like, but it still doesn’t sink in,” she said of the city’s hurricane damage. “In the lower Ninth Ward, there are just no houses.”
Images from the few remaining houses there have stuck with her: a pair of red high heels beside a couch, a moldy teddy bear. Such details appear throughout her first-person stories, which use character and scene sketches to explore larger issues.
The Herald-Times published all of the stories and the (Louisville) Courier-Journal and (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette each published some of them.
Mike Green, her friend and the designer of Skyfemme.com, tried to explain why Mehrlich was suited for the project.
“She’s always trying to do something different and unique,” he said. “Other people wouldn’t even try this. They’d just say ‘I’m gonna go backpack in Europe’ or something.”
“Which is cool, too,” Mehrlich said.
“Which is cool, too,” Green agreed. “But it’s like her to not do the typical or normal thing.”
Mehrlich learned to navigate the fog and the mountains in the northeast and rough weather in other places. Tornado warnings kept her from visiting an archaeological dig in North Dakota. But there were no truly dangerous moments, she said. She had hoped take a self-defense class before leaving Bloomington but ran out of time. Safety on the ground also worked out fine, she said.
She said she doesn’t have plans beyond writing the book. But pilots need to keep flying to retain their skills, she said.
“Alaska’s got the most airports of any state,” she said. “It would be cool to just bop around Alaska for a few months and write about it, if people are interested in that.
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