Magic Wings Read online

  A puff of warm air ascended the cliff and I ran forward with the glider’s nose pulled down. Then, as my speed picked up and the glider was flying steady, I eased the control bar out and kicked my feet into the pod of my harness. Quickly I turned north so as not to leave the band of ridge lift. I felt the wind push up beneath me and I was hoisted up over the cliff top.

  If I worked all day on a computer inside, why should I go outside where there is risk? I could have spent my whole life locked away in the pleasant bedroom. What drew me to this stress, this in-your-face juxtaposition of life and death where imagery becomes surreal and nothing seems entirely solid? Was it for my health that I would seek out such a situation, hanging there from a string in empty space, without protection from the elements? The sun was hot and bright and the gap between me and the Earth’s crust was opening wider. I could see some of the elements, but I didn’t see myself or my glider without contorting my head around. I looked at the glider, it’s trailing edge flapping slightly, but otherwise taught. The wing was flexing up and down within limits. I thought about my parachute handle and thought about what little good it would do me if a wing broke this close to the ground, fifty feet away from the jagged rocks. I would have enough time to grab the handle before my teeth got knocked to the back of my head, but I wouldn’t feel that happen. Is it worth the risk? That has to be a question that crosses every pilots mind from time to time.

  I leveled the wing out as it was tilted toward the cliff by a thermal and continued along near the cliff top zig zagging along the edge as it wound back and forth to the north. The cliff face was brightly lit by the afternoon sun. Then I got to the point a mile from launch that Duke had warned me about. I had gained some elevation but not a huge amount, so I made a very slow and careful turn away from the cliff, trying not to spill any of my gained altitude. Then I went in the other direction back along the cliff toward launch.

  If I stayed inside all the time, when company came over we could talk about the how comfortable it was inside, all brightly colored with paint. “You’ve really chosen a nice peach for the walls. It reminds me of a sunset.” they’d say.

  But how would I know?

  The sun now was becoming low over the desert to the west and cast a huge shadow across the landscape east. Hat creek rim meandered away from me toward Mount Lassen, a ten thousand foot volcano that cast it’s own formidable shadow. The rim marked the edge of one layer of Earths crust and the beginning of life on an older layer. It looked like a huge black wave breaking on an ocean that had frozen solid in mid storm. What did it look like when this landscape was still red hot, millions of years ago, a massive movement of lava?

  Every bit of human history, until a hundred years ago when people began to fly, had taken place on that fragile, ever changing crust of Earth. Until flight was made possible for us, only a hand full of people even lifted their heads up to look at the sky, unless there was something spectacular happening up there that day. I used to see the sky as an empty space between mountains, where birds fly at peace and travel where they want to across the void.

  Sky, it turned out, was a seething, bubbling ocean of gas, where densities and temperature variations churn up waves, impenetrable formations and even fizzies like a soda drink. The sky is much bigger than the water seas too, so the violence of its variations can be even more horrific. It is a huge sea extending out to an imperceptible meeting with the supposed ‘void’ of space, which also is not entirely empty, though it seems so to our senses.

  I was lifted by a strong, smooth up welling of warm air right over the launch, right over Duke, who was now setting up his glider frantically. I made a slow circle counterclockwise, and three circles later I was three thousand feet above him. The ground shrank at a dizzying rate. The view knocked the breath out of me: twenty miles of the frozen black wave and mount Lassen, now lit by the low July sun. The sun must have known that it would be more beautiful today than it ever had been before, shining just for me. The writing of nature was in the cracks of Earth, petroglyphs so huge they could describe all of Earth’s history to the beginning of time. Understanding those writings might start there, with looking. You cannot see the lay of the land from the ground.

  I had a perch in the sky, a towering viewpoint. Someday the view would explain itself.

  Duke was spreading his wings below, struggling to construct his glider. But I could barely see his wing, there in the vastness. And Duke, for me, had totally disappeared.

  I climbed until I was on top of that wave of uplifting air, then I headed north again toward the ‘point’, the protrusion dividing two huge indentations in the Rim. As I flew forward, the glider blew east with the prevailing wind. I blew over a plateau. I corrected the drift and turned slightly left to get back above the cliff. I knew by my drift now that the prevailing wind was blowing from the west, and I analyzed where on the cliff that wind would be blowing directly perpendicular. Those areas would be likely lift generators. I felt safe to fly around the bend and further north.

  For a few minutes I followed the cliff top toward the north, looking back occasionally to notice that my nearest landing area was disappearing from view. There was nothing but a battlefield of broken black rock below, the cinder bombs of a volcanic mound which dominated my view. The land showed no sign of houses, no roads or any other working of man. There was no place to land in front of me without broken bones, and there would be no chance of walking anywhere on the sharp rubble even if one did survive a landing there. The air was sinking now, so rather than rely on luck, I decided that I should be even higher to explore north any further. I turned back to fly south along the rim.

  When I got back over the launch, Duke was there and ready to fly. I was only up a hundred feet from him. He slipped into the air and in a few minutes we both found a large thermal and ascended to an awesome vantage point.

  Many years ago Duke must have seen that view and thought the same thoughts I did now about the mysterious writing on the ground. Duke is somewhat of a philosopher and I have been surprised at times at the thoughts he has verbalized. Many years ago he got rid of his TV. He lives in a small house that is falling apart, with his wife, whom he met thirty five years ago in high school. He said once,” The media is a propaganda machine of the government. How else could we have such a schmuck for a president. They take away our earnings to bail out the corporate rich. There's no way anyone would vote for someone who did that without the elections being rigged. This ain’t a free country. You try to be who you really want to be and you’ll be stoned to death. They won’t allow you to have any money. They’ll put you out in the street and make fun of you on TV. They’ll feed you through programs for the poor, to make you think they care, but it’s all just manipulation.

  “But nature is fair. They can’t control us out here. It worries them.”

  He went on, “I hear you only have to tell a person something three times from three different sources, and they’ll think it’s the truth. They’ll think they heard it from God. That’s how useless the truth is when it comes from your TV. If you don’t have any experience with raw, uncontrolled nature, you’ll believe anything they tell you, cause you won’t know who you really are, and you won’t have any reference point to watch things from.”

  In my opinion, nobody could understand the breathtaking truth that Duke had seen in his lifetime. I couldn’t begin to imagine what you could learn in twenty five years of flying. There is a lot of time to think about the world when you’re away from the ground and all the petty problems that exist on Earth. Not everyone thinks about the government when they’re flying, nor does everyone abandon their TVs.

  Some people develop religious philosophies. It is hard to imagine, flying silently with such vast exposure to the elements, that the sky is not filled with something beyond what we understand in our limited world. Like thermals, we cannot see what truly resides there when we have no senses that can decipher the information.

  Years ago I was bed ridden with pneu
monia. I lay in the bed day after day slowly suffocating, never sleeping. My lungs crackled with each breath. And I thought my end was near. I recovered with the help of antibiotics, but during my disease, I thought I saw some thing from a different world though I cant describe it and won’t try. I saw it again there at Hat Creek Rim.

  When I was dying I also though a lot about what people meant by the phrase ‘unnecessary risk’. If you never step out of the house you’ll probably be unhealthy and miserable. But at what point do you decide a risk is too great? Is a walk in the woods alone at night too dangerous, or is a speeding motorcycle ride, or is opening the mail? Or do you accept those risks as a means of finding out something about the world or yourself, your limits, the limits of your world. Dying would certainly have taken away my ability to explore the Earth and all it’s intricacies, and I had almost lost everything without even getting out of bed. Nature had almost turned my body back into dirt and I hadn’t even done the things I admired other people for doing because it was too hot, too cold, or I was too lazy or too afraid.

  At three thousand feet above the ground, the nearest comfort zone is three thousand feet below, away across a wilderness that holds many secrets. From the air, the ground is not what you spend most of your time looking at. It is the secrets!

  *******

  Suspended in the vast openness with nothing around, my mind wandered.

  When Duke and I were camped at Indian Valley, there was a creek that flowed under a bridge on a side road. The creek was only a few feet wide and just deep enough to sit in. The days were hot so we’d sit in camp for a while then go to the creek, waiting for the afternoon up welling of air when it would be possible for a hang glider to get more than just a short ride to the landing area.

  Duke was a mechanic working in a plastics factory, but his mind was focused now on creativity. “I want to play the violin”, he said. “If I can learn to play ‘Amazing Grace’ that’ll be my goal. I don’t want to be a great musician, but I don’t want to have to rely on other people to make the music anymore. I want a violin to hang on the wall when I’m not playing it.

  “ Lily wants a computer. We argued all day before I left cause I didn’t want to spend what little money we have on a computer. People get trapped in cyberspace. They don’t do anything anymore. They just want to sit around and pretend there’s something going on. Even a few pilots act like they have a social life because they write a few e-mails and look at the web for a while from their lonely apartments. “

  The trees swayed a little overhead. We were sitting in the creek. It was the first time the trees had moved on that day. Then they became still.

  “When Lily was younger, we used to kayak, ride bikes and backpack. But lately, since our kid left home, she spends most of her time quilting in the bedroom or nursing in the hospital. Last year she came here and we camped in the Greenville park. This year she doesn’t want to be here or anywhere else. She just wants to stay at home.

  “ I think all people get more comfort oriented as they get older. Everyone I know is staying at home more and more every year. You have to fight that urge.”

  Another puff of air circulated through the trees.

  “I won’t have one of those computers around,” Duke continued. “That’ll be the last time Lily ever comes outside if she can entertain herself that way. You know, since computers got cheap ten years ago, there have been almost no new hang glider pilots. Everyone is pretending they’re having adventures now playing video games and flying airplanes on their computers.”

  “That may be true,” I said. “ Everyone gliding who I know has been doing it for a lot of years. I’m the only new pilot in southern Oregon in at least five years.”

  “There are only about thirty people who fly gliders in Southern Oregon and I only see about ten on a regular basis”, Duke said. “And it’s going to get worse too. Pretty soon everyone’s going to wear around virtual reality goggles an they won’t even be awake anymore. They’ll only hear and see what they want to, or what the government wants them to see. People will never invent a world as interesting as this one, you know. People have to suppress their intelligence in order to be entertained by the ridiculous video games and stupid TV programs the big industrialists feed us every day. What a bunch of crap! And the government is using those media to program people into becoming a herd of mindless shoppers.”

  The wind whipped through the trees, rattled the leaves and the gust lasted long enough to pick up some dust off the road and toss it across the creek.

  “Maybe it’s time to head up to the launch” Duke said.

  “ I was hoping to see some other pilots driving up there and throw our gear on their cars so we wouldn’t have to worry about a driver,” I said.

  “Maybe there are no other glider pilots around here anymore,” Duke paused. “ So what kind of violin should I buy? I was at the music store and they had one with lots of pattern in the wood for eight hundred bucks.”

  “Jeez, you’re thinking of spending a lot of money on a violin. I don’t think you need to start out on a pro instrument. Why don’t you come over and play my son’s violin sometime and see if you can get any notes out of it. I think he’d be glad to teach you a thing or two,” I said. ” He’s getting pretty good for having played a year. He practices eight hours a day sometimes. He says ‘Dad, if you ever tell me I have to practice, I’ll quit playing.’ He’s a great kid. Finished at the top of the fifth grade. I don’t know what I did to get a kid who’s smart, fun and popular. I never was like that when I was young.

  “ Well listen to this. My boy’s becoming a tattoo artist!” Duke grumbled. “I’m jealous when someone’s got a kid they’re proud of. My kid used to pull C’s and D’s in school then he dropped out to run off with some tattooed teenage girl with an ear ring through her nose”.

  “Well, in my mind, the most important thing is: is he nice to people? That’s the only thing that’s really important.” I said.

  “Yeah. There are some pretty mean people with some great educations, and they end up being mean to people who don’t have enough education to defend themselves. They use their educations to find ways to rip hard working people off for what little they can earn,” Duke replied. There was some bitterness in his voice. “Yeah he’s nice to people. And he loves animals too.”

  “Well then, he’s a good kid and there’s nothing wrong. I’ve spent a lot of time with August, guiding him every step of the way,” I said. “One reason I decided to fly was to teach August to set his sights high, no matter how scary it was. And of course I encourage him in what he wants to do, providing it’s not going to hurt anyone else. He came home last year and asked, out of the blue, if he could be in the orchestra. I about rolled over dead. What could be more perfect, I thought. I even got him a private instructor, and I took up the violin too. I’m not any good, but it’s been the competition with me that drives his enthusiasm. He wants to be better than me at everything, so I make him work to get there.

  “Someday he’ll probably want to fly better than me. That shouldn’t be too hard, but I don’t know what I think about encouraging him to take that kind of risk while he’s so young. Risk everything when you’re older, and you have a clear vision that the alternative to dying in a hang glider crash is dying of old age in a stinky bed in a rest home with a diaper on after being twenty years too old to enjoy life.

  “I’ve thought about what it would be like crashing from the sky. You wouldn’t feel a thing while you’re falling, and you wouldn’t have time to feel anything when you hit the ground. But I don’t want my boy to risk that at his age. There are a lot of other adventures for him to have first.”

  Duke said, “You think I should get a cheaper violin?”

  “Well I wouldn’t spend two weeks working for something I didn’t even know if I’d play”, I said. “ Every time you buy something, you have to go to work to pay for it. You want a kid like mine? Stay at home as much as you can and be his friend.

 
I was daydreaming about August while the beautiful sky passed beneath me and Duke circled toward me at Hat Creek Rim. I rarely left my family alone for more than a few hours at a time. The last few days, camping out with lots of time to think punctuated by an occasional flight here and there had made me feel a bit irresponsible. But I put guilt out of my mind and turned the glider toward the basalt desert to see what the air was like in a different area.

  Earlier that day, I started daydreaming again, we had stopped by Lake Almanor on the way to Hat Creek to see if there was a place to swim. We had stopped in a campground next to the lake where hundreds of motor homes were set up for the day, their satellite dishes on the rooftops all pointing the same direction, and many of their generators rumbling. There were very few people walking around on the beach or riding bicycles on the path. The campers had closed blinds and curtains, though it was a beautiful, sunny morning and sunlight cast intricate shadows through the conifer forest. There was a row boat with two old fishermen on the lake and a dog running on the waters edge, Why weren’t the people here as excited as that dog about being out in nature? They had probably spent most of their lives in huge cities of crowds, traffic and pavement and now they locked themselves away in their portable homes with their TVs or computers. How strange, I thought.

  The air over the basalt beds was smooth and I wasn’t sinking toward the landing area. I was a full mile off the ground now with nothing in the way of my view except my hands and the control frame. I couldn’t see cars on the road, but I could see small wifts of dust on the ground. I couldn’t see individual rocks, but I could see the designs they made. Just as people see faces in clouds or any objects they want to, I saw familiar shapes in the Earths art form. Just as people hear any sound in running water, I heard music in the wind gently whistling across my face. It sounded like a violin.