Volume XIII, Issue VIII: Special Book Section
Apollonius
By Bob Kirchman
Copyright © 2017, The Kirchman Studio, all rights reserved
Chapter 5: Sarah Cohen Ben-Gurion
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray [and] women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.” -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
In fact, Sarah Cohen was no stranger to the business of jumping into new worlds. As a girl she was always looking for new adventure. She crawled at six months and never stopped after that. She played for hours in the woods behind her house and most of her playmates were boys. Summertime allowed day-long adventures with them. At night, she was drawn to read Narnia, Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. She took up horseback riding and scared the wits out of her dear mother, it is said. For Sarah, the collaboration of man and beast opened up new worlds of speed and sensation. Once she’d learned to gallop a horse, she only stopped in kindness to the animal.
Her girlhood in suburban New Jersey probably wouldn’t count as being all that extraordinary. It was those quiet lazy afternoons in the Summer woods that fueled her imagination. Camping out in the Pine Barrens with her family and in the wild mountains of Western North Carolina, she was first drawn to the stars. One exceptionally clear night she lay in the open on a mountain roan as the rest of her family slept soundly and looked up at the Milky Way. “How many stars are out there?” She mused. “What wonders lie out there that I cannot see?”
Then came the day she announced to her surprised family that she was going to Israel. She was going to serve in the IDF! Well, somehow along the way she took a test for pilot skills, aced it, and the rest is history. No doubts her confidence as an aviator was first forged on the back of a strong horse! She flew F-17’s and that is how she came under the command of her husband when she joined his squadron.
The Alaska Space Program opened up the possibility of a childhood fantasy coming true for both her and her husband, as they both admired the American astronauts of the nineteen-sixties and the seventies who had taken man to the moon. Sarah also admired Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who, together with her husband, had pioneered the establishment of air service around the world. Anne and Charles had in fact flown together in a relationship very similar to hers and Abiyah’s. Anne married Charles in 1929 and got her glider pilot’s license a year later. She served as Lindbergh’s navigatior, radio operator and copilot as the famous aviator worked to lay out the routes for modern air travel. Their travels together took them to Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
A true Renaissance person, Anne Lindbergh became a writer as well. Inspired by Anne's stories, Sarah kept a detailed diary of life aboard the Great Northern and in her spare moments took thousands of photographs as she planned to create a permanent record of their own historic adventure. She shuddered at the thought of the terrible kidnapping of Anne’s first child and wondered how she and Abiyah might drop out of the public eye and find some anonymity when they had their own children. Sarah Cohen was a dreamer, a visionary, and she was driven on in her present task by the knowledge that most of all one must give their children dreams and vision.
(to be continued)
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Copyright © 2020, The Kirchman Studio, all rights reserved
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh traveled the world in airplanes such as this as they charted the routes for intercontinental air service. She acted as his copilot, radio operator and navigator.
