Magic Wings Page 4

  “Beautiful,” I replied. “So how do we get from there to here? I mean, do we head for the cliffs and then come out here over the valley, or what?”

  I looked over the landing area, which looked like a baseball diamond, mostly dirt with a few tufts of grass, situated between a forest of brush and juniper trees. The Junipers smelled like a filthy toilet. Beneath that smell was the biting scent of square miles of sage.

  Every one of my footsteps stirred a puff of white dust. There were ant nests all over and I tried not to step in them.

  “Most people look around the cliffs for thermals,” Duke answered my question after some delay. And there’s usually good ridge lift right off the launch, but I found that it doesn’t matter how high you go on the ridge lift. You still get to the cliffs at the same height. So I just head for the cliffs on a day like this. Maybe we’ll hit ten thousand feet today! It’s pretty scenic, eh.”

  Was this the last day of my life, I asked silently? Better to die in a beautiful place than an ugly one. I thought about the ants and vultures quickly dismantling my splattered carcass.

  Duke was like a teenager trying to get a peer to try smoking a cigarette. And the spectator, Bonzo, also expected to watch me plunge to my death. There was little chance that I could wriggle out of my self inflicted predicament. I, the entertainer, was not going to be allowed to withdraw from the show. There was no other way forward except to bring this performance to it’s fore destined conclusion.

  My anxiety increased and so did my heart rate as we drove again, up. We rounded a bend high up and our view of the huge Shasta Valley opened. As we drove further, contouring along the brushy mountain side, I tried to see the landing area but could not. Everywhere I looked, out over the valley floor in the distance, was covered with the light green of sage or the darker green of the juniper forest. I could see no pastures or meadows within reach of my glider.

  Soon we stopped in the middle of the road. Lily, who had been quilting for the entire drive finally looked up.

  And Duke opened his door and stepped out of the car. “This is it”, he said, standing on the narrow road bed which was sandwiched between a cliffy cut bank on the high side and a cliffy barren drop off on the down hill side.

  “What’s it?” I said.

  “This is the launch,” he replied. I opened the car door and dangled my feet out of it. “Where do we set up?”

  “In the road.” Duke was usually extravagant with words, but not now.

  “What if a car comes along?” I said.

  “Then they have to wait. We usually don’t have that problem, but just in case, we’d better set up in a hurry and get out of the way.” Duke grabbed the front end of my glider from his car rack and waited impatiently for me to grab the other end. We lifted it off the roof and set it in the road. Then we carried his glider a little further from the car, until there was room to spread the wings.

  Wind was coming up furiously from the valley and was swirling around on the road cut lifting up dust now and then and tossing it at us. As I put my glider together, Bonzo meandered back and forth around the delicate glider parts, nearly stepping on them, taking away my concentration. I had a very creepy feeling that something bad was going to happen. I opened up the frame and put in the battens and tensioned the sail. Then I turned.

  The view was tremendous; breathtaking. I looked again for the landing area. “Where’s the LZ,” I asked Duke after I had decided that I couldn’t avoid the question any longer. Duke sauntered over from his glider and pointed. “See that little road,” he pointed his arm at a tiny stripe on the valley floor. “Follow that past that little hill. You’ll see it when you get close enough. If you can’t glide that far, land on the bare hillside, but watch out for snakes. It’s a long walk out.” He grinned.

  Then he walked back to his glider. Before I completed my set-up, I heard Duke putting on his flight suit and clicking the carribeener shut, attaching himself to his wing.

  I decided I’d better turn around and pay attention to his launch, in case there were any tricks to it. He walked up to the edge of the road with his glider over head and after a moment he nonchalantly stepped out into the wind. Bonzo, the spectator cheered and howled. Lily got her camera and took a picture. Then she waited, with the camera still at her eye, for me to launch.

  “Oh brother,” I mumbled. I watched Duke for ten seconds, then I struggled to get into my cumbersome flight suit. Having finished that struggle, panting from the exertion and from fright, I clipped onto my own glider and walked it carefully into position at the edge of the very steep mountain side overlooking the unknown. “Relax,” I said to myself aloud, but nobody else could hear me because of the strong wind. A flight at this place was my destiny and I could not fight destiny. Wind howled up the mountain. I held the glider firmly with the nose pointed out and slightly down, toward the valley floor. Wind rocked the glider back and fourth and then the air smoothed and in a moment, in two steps, I left the mountain side and followed Duke, already in flight and way ahead of me on his way toward the cliffs named Sheep Rocks.

  I flew through whatever lift there was because I was already looking for the landing area as I pushed my feet into the harness pod. Duke circled above the cliffs and went higher. Snow capped Mount Shasta loomed in the background, a giant mountain made of two dormant volcanoes on top of each other. Shasta’s flanks spread out toward the valley like a wedding dress on display, it’s two huge vents towering into the clouds. Duke’s wing looked like a tiny dash of a line off in the distance with a tiny dot dangling beneath it. He was almost disappearing into the magnificent landscape. I caught myself thinking, ’this is worth the risk.’ I actually was glad to be flying there.

  As I got closer and closer to the Sheep Rocks, the cliffs became grander and grander. They were sheer and at least six hundred feet high, reminiscent of an Arizona desert mountain range I had seen once. There were several layers of cliffs. We flew over the windward edge of them. Duke had found a small thermal there. I was too excited about the scenery to think about extending my flight in a thermal. My heart was pounding hard just from being suspended over the breathtaking landscape. The cliffs appeared to shuffle in their positions beneath me as I moved southward, revealing their subtle variations and secret edges. A few trees and plants clung to life on the sheer cliff faces, in cracks. A green spring emerged at the base of one towering rock. I shook with joy as I passed over the cliff and looked directly down onto the lush green seep, a place I could never have seen walking on ground.

  My elevation had sunk to the tops of the cliff faces. I knew I needed to find the landing area.

  Amid the impressive scenery, I fell into a trance, nearly hypnotized.

  There is a huge rock near our house that lies flat against the ground in a gully, an exposed piece of sandstone bedrock. In winter there is a little creek flowing past it. When I’m sitting on the rock, which is quite beautiful and covered with luxuriant moss, I can see Emigrant Lake and the grassy slope we call the training hill. I can also see the high mountains behind the lake. The gully is peaceful, somehow hidden from the modern pace of things. It is a place where I can watch the birds and the sky without distractions. One day while I was sitting on the rock, I noticed that there was a very regular, curved trench running in a semi circle from near the rock’s center. The trench was three inches across and an inch deep and smooth, like part of a statue. It looked like someone had carved it. I followed the curve with my hand and saw that it was the outline of one of two huge monstrous eyeballs. There was a nose carved between them. Everything was thickly covered with moss and obscured by eons of time. The image had been nearly obliterated. Only a small segment of the outline was obviously carved by ancient humans.

  I photographed the rock in segments and pieced the photos together on my computer. I was shocked to discover that I had been sitting many times without noticing, on a statue of a monumental skull, carved into the bedrock, an image thirty feet high. The horrible face stared out at a pea
k in the cascade mountains known today as pilot rock. Pilot Rock is an impressive volcano core that has been exposed by erosion and now sits like a giant castle on top of a timbered ridge.

  So how did the Indians who had lived there so long ago known how to make a sculpture so large without ever being able to climb up in the sky to look at it? There were no tall trees in the gully that I could climb to get a better perspective, though at one time there may have been.

  That monument may have been to the birds who soared regularly over the gully when the east wind blew. Maybe the carving was for communication. Maybe there were bigger carvings nearby, but they were too obscured for me to see. I imagined drums beating and a bonfire blazing, lighting the night sky as ancient people danced on those rocks thousands of years ago, a ceremony to the unknown. Maybe those people had observed something that was being overlooked by so called modern people. Their artwork tested my power of perception.

  I occupied such a tiny, irrelevant spot in history, so all important to myself. The ancient people must have felt the same about their existence.

  From up in the sky, not very far, you would not have seen me there in the gully, and just a few hundred feet up, even the thirty foot skull would be invisible. It would be as hard to notice as the face on a crusty dime lying in a parking lot. From the air, all but the starkest of details on the ground seem flat and uninteresting. What seems so inspiring and relevant on a human scale becomes quite unfamiliar and lack luster when ones eyes are lifted up to a birds perspective. Things that seem ultimately important to ground bound passengers of Earth, become blazee from the heavens. A war would be only a topic of minor interest to the gods. A fire dance in a gully would disappear into oblivion, unnoticed. All of mans endeavors here on Earth disappear if you go high enough. God may be smiling down on us, but is ignorant of our needs, and doesn’t probably even know we exist.

  When I am up in the sky, separated from the dirt that nearly all human history has transpired on, I have entered another world. If a pilot did not force himself to be conscious of the danger of contacting the dirt in the wrong way after a high flight, in the dream world of the soft air, that hard surface could easily be forgotten. There is no discomfort inflicted by the ground on someone a thousand feet in the sky. Even fifty feet up, the ground can be forgotten, as can be the events that take place on it.

  I was daydreaming as I flew away from Sheep Rocks following a country driveway that extended for miles straight out into the Shasta Valley. I was feeling like a grinning eagle, blissfully, silently gliding toward a small, diamond shaped dirt clearing that I could barely see now in the distance. I was drunk on spectacular scenery, and perhaps sensory deprivation, suspended comfortably in the warm Earth’s gasses. A small part of my mind still attached to the reality of the hard surface kept reminding me that I needed to come down safely in order to tell anyone what I had just seen. For some reason, it seemed important to me to relay that experience to anybody who would listen. Without their acknowledgment of it, perhaps I had done nothing. Flying seemed to put me in touch with a dream world. “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.” I sang aloud as I passed a few hundred feet over a rocky mound where there was supposed to be an emergency place to land. I decided that I would rather land in the brush than walk for miles through the snake infested desert away from that bailout area.

  I hit a down draft during the last mile to the landing diamond, and that brought me to three hundred feet above the ground. My happy go lucky attitude disappeared as I looked over the miles and miles of brush and junipers for any tiny clearing that I could land in. Then, as fast as I lost the elevation, I went back up again. And then I went down. The net effect was that I arrived above the diamond shaped dirt patch with almost no room for error or looking around. I quickly glanced at a wind flag we had placed on the edge of the clear ground, then I flew to the down wind edge of the field and beyond. I turned quickly from a hundred feet up, pulled the nose of the glider down and raced toward the near edge of the tiny field. I hit the top of a small tree as I neared the ground, but the top just broke off. I cleared the last bush with my feet by only a few inches. I landed at the center of the diamond with my eagles grin, on my feet, standing a few feet from an ant hill.

  I watched the ants scurry about. Were they making carvings in the boulders of their world hoping I would see it and acknowledge them.

  I carried the glider to the side of the field and unhooked myself. I stretched and looked around. Duke was coming in right behind me.

  Lakeview

  My wife and I and our son went to Lakeview where there were a hundred or more hang glider and paraglider pilots gathered for the annual flying competition on the top of a hill overlooking the town. It was the fourth of July and since my tree landing I had launched and landed without getting hurt several times. There were crowds of wings set up along a road near the hill top, and the pilots sat around in groups or walked back and fourth looking at and comparing equipment. Along with the pilots, it seemed like every citizen of the little town below had come to satisfy their curiosity. It was a hot and muggy day and everyone seemed happy to wait on the sunny, exposed launch area for the afternoon uphill breezes, for a chance to fly.

  When we arrived there at the hill top cumulus clouds had begun to build and the local pilots who I talked to suspected that our window of opportunity for flying might be short that day, between the dead air of the early afternoon and towering cumulus and accompanying gusty winds of evening.

  Being with a happy bunch of people who intended to fly took away some of my apprehension about flying at that site which was new to me in every way. Knowing that I would not have to make decisions about when it would be safe conditions for flying made me feel unusually calm. I would only have to follow in others footsteps. Ordinarily I was in a state of near panic standing on a new launch on a mountain towering over an unknown landscape. Today I would watch and then follow. It would be simple.

  We mingled with the crowd after I had set up the glider, talked to pilots and their families we were just getting to know from other places and from a flying competition I had attended but hadn’t flown in earlier in the year.

  After a few hours a local pilot, a woman in her thirties, launched with a hang glider. She disappeared after climbing steadily through the air heading north and up along the main green ridge that marked the east side of a huge grassy valley. Other flyers followed, so I wandered back toward my glider, which was parked among many on the setup area, slightly nervous as the cumulus clouds were blackening now and some were forming thunderheads in the distance.

  With my wife and son watching, I hooked myself to the glider and turned the glider around to face the wind. There were many of us then preparing for the rush into the clouds.

  Thunderheads are dangerous to flying machines. The lift created in the forming cloud is much greater than a glider requires to stay afloat. Gliders unlucky enough to be sucked up inside the thermal that creates that kind of cloud development have often met their demise, their aluminum tubing snapped by high winds, their pilots frozen and suffocated by being lifted uncontrollably into the upper atmosphere. Cloud suck is a serious hazard not taken lightly by even the most experienced pilots. That day, thunder clouds were building and I could see the weariness on the faces of the old timers of the flying community.

  In the huge valley in front of me as I stood beneath my glider second in line to launch, in the moody light of the impending storm, dust stirred in the distance then it formed into a funnel shaped dust devil rising a thousand feet into the air. And it blackened almost like a tornado lifting dirt from a newly plowed field. I was surprised to see the pilot in front of me run down the side slope and become airborne. The lowering sun shone through the dust tornado and pronounced the walls of the giant thermal column beneath a towering black cloud that rose steadily higher into space. A few people joked about the possibility of harnessing that awesome lift. But for me, if other people hadn’t been flying that day, apparently
without trouble, the dust storm would have been a sure sign that I should put away the glider and drive down the hill.

  The wind at launch had picked up to a steady fifteen miles an hour. I moved up to the edge and took a deep breath. There was nobody in the air in front of me anymore. Those who launched earlier had all flown to the north and had climbed considerably. My concentration was on my own wing now, which was trying to lift up in the increasing wind. I ignored the voice in my head which urged me to take the car back down. And after smiling nervously back at my wife and son, I ran toward the wind and left my contact with the ground.

  For ten minutes I flew contouring alongside the wilderness ridge, surprised at how smooth the air was and how effortless it was to stay afloat. Then in order to go further I had to cross a gully where the ridge lift, the valley wind compressing as it blew straight up the hillside, would not support me. By the time I had crossed to the other side I had lost a few hundred feet of elevation, but then I was pushed upward again, high above the green field where I intended to land. A thermal caught me there and the wires that supported the wing tightened. I turned to stay inside of the lift and soon I towered over the ridge and the mountain range behind it and I continued to climb.

  I tried to look up, to see if a black cloud was building over me but I could see nothing but the glider and clouds a mile or more away. Seeing the glider there flexing and stretching in the up welling air shook my already edgy nerves. I quickly turned to face the distant view and tried to put the fright at seeing myself, suspended from nothing but empty space, out of my mind. I needed to be calm.