Magic Wings

by Alden Moffatt

  That was when my wing tightened and my elevator ride began. A strong thermal lifted me up the face of the cliff and over over the ridge, and, being in no mood at that point to loose the opportunity, I turned in it again and again. The thermal became wider as I rose up. I found that I could fly back and forth above the cliff for a quarter mile. Then I would turn back and ride it up in the other direction. The ground receded and then it became distant. I was a thousand feet above the ridge, then two thousand. I could see other gliders still on the launch. Nobody else was flying. As I kept rising, the scenery was becoming interesting. There were alluvial washes extending out of the gullies that gouged the edge of the Guano Valley, and there was a lot more color and contrast than I had expected to see. It seemed as though I was in a spacecraft looking down. I was getting very high. I climbed until I could barely see cars or gliders and people looked like tiny pieces of lint flittering in a breeze. I was a mile above the launch when the thermal stopped lifting me.

  At that point, there was no reason to stay in one place, so I went wherever I wanted, drifting very slowly down. Other gliders were now launching. They looked tiny and the waves of heat nearly obliterated my view of them. And as I watched everything over the next half hour in the silken smooth air, other gliders came up toward me. I let go of the control bar and took a moment to clean my sun glasses. Then I put a finger on the controls and steered from side to side while I whistled a tune. I looked up at one wing against the dark blue sky. I looked at the vast Earth. Even from there, I could still not see the curve of it.

  The Indians must have had a notion of what their land looked like from some other perspective in order to live there on the harsh desert flats. It was certainly not snake hunting that brought them there. Evening shadows were beginning to stretch out from every little object across the naked landscape. All of the shadows pointed east and looked like hair growing on an animal. Late, the shadows do for the desert what flowers and green grass do for the prairie. The less there is to look at in a landscape, the more we look for beauty in the fleeting moments of shadows. Across those shadows, the little gliders came closer, up on the invisible winds that blow all of us somewhere. Some finally reached higher than I did. It didn't matter. Everybody saw what I saw, and that's what we all came here for after all; to see; to feel. Even if it took all day or a whole lifetime, it was worth all the trouble of getting there, to explore the outer limits for just one hour. The fresh air washed past my face.

  I was slipping slowly toward the ground. When I was a thousand feet up above the launch area again and it was clear to me that the evening thermals were done for the day, I turned downwind and raced along above the highway, just as Stormy had suggested doing. I made it six miles before I was low to the ground and had to think about landing. The asphalt would be a perfect air strip. There was only one car on it that I could see, but he would be gone before I touched down I thought. I set up an approach and made my final turn and sped up to cut through any turbulence close to the ground. The car, who had been speeding, evidently became interested in watching me land and slowed down to a crawl, right in my path. I could see the drivers face filled with envy and wonder as I sped toward his windshield. Didn't he know what an awkward position he was putting me in, I thought. "Jeez," I said. "This is amazing." I was a hundred feet up and didn't have time for reanalyzing my landing possibilities. I saw a tiny clearing out of the corner of my eye, but I would have to make a low turn to get there and would then have to land downwind which might cause me to land too fast, stumble and barrel Stormy's glider into some rocks. "No." I lined up with the side of the road. I would land in the brush rather than put a wing through his windshield.

  Finally, my spectator realized what was happening, maybe too late. He stepped on the gas and was out of my way in a second. I had slowed down and was flying way too slow. If I sped up safely, I would sink too fast and not be able to slide the glider back into position over the highway. I very gently slid the glider sideways through the air, toward the centerline. With five feet to spare I got ready to land. The wind was stronger close to the ground, so the glider didn't stall until I was three feet up. I stumbled on the pavement and skidded on my belly and on two tiny wheels attached to the control bar. The glider stopped moving.

  When I got up and carried the glider to the roadside, Stormy was landing beside me. When he was unhooking from the glider after landing he said to me, "It's funny, eh, how sometimes you have great expectations and then get let down. And now you couldn't imagine how anything good could come of a day, and you get the flight of your life. Don't you think that's strange."

  The man with the twisted ankle came to pick us up.

  Free At Last

  I felt bored and deprived sometimes. I could tell the low pressure of a storm was moving in. The sky was graying and my mind was moody. Outside a single hawk was overhead above a ridge near the house, occasionally flapping but often soaring in a single position, and slowly rising up. The wind must be blowing up there, I thought, because the hawk was flying in one place. On the ground it was calm.

  My dad used to tell me when I was a kid, vultures or hawks soared over a carcass or something they wanted to eat. Over the years, I had investigated his theory and had never been able to locate the dead or dying thing that the birds circled over. There was nothing but grass and trees beneath them, that I could find. When I had flown for many months, a clear picture of a thermal was embedded in my mind. I had felt them from all directions and from the middle. Birds had been there with me in the thermals at times, and we were flying there only because we could. Gaggles of birds fly in thermals when the weather is right to hold them up because they can. There is nothing more to it. No prey down on the ground. Thermaling is an easy way to stay aloft, and the birds are in the thermals because they are lazy, or to put it more kindly, they are conserving their energy.

  In the waiting process of flying a hang glider, waiting for the right conditions for soaring, we’d often watch a dead tree filled with buzzards on the mountainside. It was a good indication that the time was right for us to fly if we saw that bunch of birds lift off from the tree. I discovered that my favorite time to fly was when several red tail hawks were soaring just above the treetops, moving wherever they wanted to go. From them I surmised that the air was consistently lifty and smooth. The hawks would need smooth air in order to stay in that close proximity to the ground. Without it, they would be fighting turbulence to keep from crashing. And they would be expending a great deal of energy in the process. Using a great deal of energy would not be bird like, for soaring birds anyway.

  If the hawks were high in the air, it probably was a day of strong uplifts, but possibly of turbulence too.

  Sometimes birds would tease me when I was at home. Occasionally a soaring bird would catch a thermal from the heat rising from our roof. ChiChi would see me watching it and say, “Don’t even think about flying!” knowing that I was considering playing hooky from work that needed to be done.

  More and more, as I practiced, flying a glider became a passion that integrated into everything I did. I craved exhilaration.

  The low pressure off the coast was making waves in the sky. I could feel their slow pulse. Bands of clouds came and went and the temptation of the danger and excitement became unbearable. I called my pilot friends and heard nothing but answering machines. I checked the forecast and the computer images from space of the position of the clouds. Everything indicated that today would be an interesting day for gliding, so, I asked ChiChi.

  “I thought you were going to till the garden. The fence needs to be finished. The chicken coup has a hole in it. The floor needs vacuuming.”, she complained.

  “Aw, come on, Honey. It looks like a spectacular day,” I pleaded.

  She shook her head. ” I can’t believe I married a flake! Whatever. Go! You don’t get anything done if you do fly and I can’t stand your whining if you don’t fly at least once a week. You get all mopy and pathetic.”

 
That was true. One pilot put it this way: “Flying should be considered one of the main food groups. A body can’t survive without it for long.”

  I hopped in the car and drove to Woodrat.

  Where was everyone today, I asked myself? They all had their jobs and were probably stuck inside, next to a cash register, or in a repair shop or warehouse. I really didn’t have a plan for what to do when I got to the mountain. There was no point in waiting at the landing area, which seemed abandoned to the cows. No one had said that they would be there to keep me company, so I drove to a launch spot that I didn’t use much because it was low on the mountain, only a thousand feet up on the side. I liked to give myself enough elevation to start with so I’d have plenty of time to catch a thermal before I had to land. Today, though, I was by myself and would have to walk back up to get the truck. It was a three mile walk back to the lower launch and an eight mile walk to the top launch at the gravel quarry. I could get back up to the lower launch in an hour if I walked fast.

  The mountain felt lonely as I set up the hang glider by myself. The power of the air was evident in the trees in back of the launch area. They whistled and their tops were bent and twisting. I carefully unfolded the wing with its trailing edge pointing at the wind. The strong, steady wind bowed the sail down so the battens barely went into their pockets. After struggling with the battens, I tensioned the sail. I wondered how I was going to turn the glider around by myself to face the launch without having it flipped over and broken by the wind. And how was I going to hold it steady as I launched without someone to help me. I began to feel discouraged. What if I crashed and no one saw me? What if days went by before they found me dangling in a tree up some tight, unknowable canyon. I said to myself, “Enough of that nonsense!” and I thought, ‘Today I’ll just have to be a lot more careful than usual. Two hours from now I’ll be heading home again. Driving to the mountain and home again will be the most dangerous thing I do today’, and I visualized a perfect flight.

  Then I visualized myself crashing while holding my parachute handle, parachute unopened. “Oh brother.” I tried to ignore the thought and concentrate on putting together the glider without mistakes.

  I got my flight suit and locked the truck and got ready to hook onto the glider. The wind died suddenly, unexpectedly, for about thirty seconds, just after I hooked in, ready to fly. The lull was just long enough for me to turn around the glider. Then the strong wind continued. I stepped with all my weight on the control bar, as I hunched under the glider waiting for the wind to calm. Then another lull came and I launched. Air borne, I cleared all obstacles by a few feet and then turned to contour around the mountain side, separated from blowing treetops by a wing width. The glider soared upward.

  In one long tact, I followed the lay of the land around a ridge and across a gully. In a few minutes, I rose to the level of the gravel quarry. I said to myself, “That beats the heck out of walking”. I was beginning to feel like this was my lucky day. I had just saved myself five miles of miserable dusty road hiking.

  Not long after I passed the isolated gravel quarry where no one was parked, I contoured around to the bowl, as we call the gully on the west side of Woodrat Mountain. There, I was blasted over the top of the mountain, then I smoothly rose up until I was a few hundred feet over the highest tree tops. From that elevation, I flew in every direction until I found the perimeters of the lift band. I flew for half an hour, there, by myself, in the wild. Then, in a moment of loneliness and curiosity, I decided to see if any one else had come to fly on that spectacular, smooth day. I flew back toward the lower launch, two miles in a straight line, dropping all the way. When I was satisfied that I truly was still all alone, I headed back for the mountain top, and on the way back I climbed steadily to the same perch I had explored before.

  It was a clear day. Every land form had distinct outlines. I followed the distant ridges and valleys with my eyes, trying to map out natures work and make some sense out of it; the Red Buttes, Mount Ashland, the Crater Lake Rim, Mount Isabel, and all the hundreds of ridges in every direction connecting them. I tried to absorb the whole view as I flew in slow circles high in the sky, but I found that I could not absorb all of it. I could only grasp enough of it to know that there was something written by the Earth upon that landscape. I could not read the writing though. But I was satisfied to understand what little I could. I was happy.

  Many times in my life I had swam in the tropical ocean and had found that after a few days of immersion, I was as comfortable suspended that way as a dolphin. And now, suspended in the sky, I carved a turn and then another in play, not because there was a necessity for it. I slid one wing on its side and plummeted toward the ground, then I turned another fast corner and captured the lift again. I dropped again to the treetops, just to see what the cones of the trees looked like from above. Then I tilted my glider level and rose up again to become a speck in the sky.

  I flew to the landing area when I felt that I wanted to, but I didn’t fly there in a straight line this time. I carved a slalom at high speed, then I stalled the glider, then dove, then climbed again.

  I landed that day without drilling myself into the ground. I left the glider, set up, in the landing area and began walking up the dirt road to my truck. I had on a big grin.

  A lone car was driving up the road, so I got a ride.

  The Ending

  I’m more relaxed in the air than I used to be, and I wonder if I’m not letting my guard down too much. While I drive up to the launch now, I wonder where the butterflies in my stomach have gone. I thought the fear was a healthy reaction that would keep me from making a mistake. When I set up the glider, I go through automatic motions anymore but I slap myself now and then, and force a look at every joint, every wire. Then standing on the mountain side with my little airplane overhead, I do look again at the angles, the Dacron. It’s what I’ve been told to do, though it seems as unnecessary now as a vulture inspecting it’s feathers before flight. A jet pilot must eventually trust the engineering and materials of that plane, so mine must be a normal reaction, trusting but wary.

  I wait for the wind to howl up along the mountainside then I step into it’s flow. The elevator ride on a hot summer thermal is familiar now. Hundreds of feet above launch I turn to follow the ridge like I have many times, past the microwave tower and on toward the highest point of the mountain. The glide is silent, or almost so. The wind in my face tells that I’m moving forward fast enough to keep the wing from stalling. That’s the only noise, so I can sing to myself, and the music in my head is clear.

  The glider is an instrument, finely tuned, played delicately. Small adjustments keep my course precise and the wing level, not unnecessarily dumping the precious up-wind.

  Or it is a sail boat, bow cutting smoothly through the chop.

  Hugh trees below me a few hundred feet are tossing in a wind. I turn my glider toward an invisible thermal that is the cause of the disturbance, then slightly south to accommodate the prevailing wind. My wing wires tighten and the wing flexes, so I turn to ride the thermal up, all the time singing to myself. The ground pulls away further like a camera zooming out and as a thousand feet opens between me and the mountain top, I gulp and quit singing. And there I hover. Duke and Butch are flying higher though, in a thermal over the ridge that goes north-south. I can’t find a way up to their elevation, though I circle then explore til I drop into the sharp downdraft at the edge of my thermal then bust back into the wall of up air and zoom back to my platform at a mile above sea level. The edge of the thermal is frightening, but I leave and then re-penetrate it again and again sometimes being tilted sideways or kicking the sail with my feet during the sudden jolts. Duke and Butch are way above my elevation. I finally give up on the knuckle biting mountain top thermal and head for the ridge thermal. The air for a minute is calm and not unpredictable. Then I stick the gliders nose into an invisible elevator. Then “elevator going down”, and I know the big one is coming. The control bar is yanked f
orward, almost out of my hands and I pull it back toward me. I’m inside. This is Wiamea Bay surf and you can’t see it, all you can do is speculate on where the waves are, and the churning, seething mass in front of them. The elevator takes me to the tower. My altimeter now reads 6900 feet. Duke flies around me then he flies behind me then his glider passes beneath mine clearing by only thirty feet. “Hi!” then he was gone. I look at my parachute handle and listen to the wing relax and stretch. Butch is up the canyon on yet another thermal and a bit higher. The canyons are starkly defined from here, pin wheeling from the highest hills out to the river valleys. The Applegate meanders from the Red Buttes to Grants Pass. Shasta and Mount McLaughlin poke into the sky. It is cold up here, even on a hot summer day. The wind is crisp and a little ice is forming on the control bar. I head out toward the Applegate River, gliding away from the thermal area into smooth air.

  There are some people at the hang glider launch directly below. They are almost invisible in the distance. “You’re nothing but a bunch of specks!” I yell. But no one can hear me. A white glider is taking off from the main launch thousands of feet below and it looks like a butterfly gently wafting in the wind, meandering back and forth near the treetops. At the time when I only longed to fly and watched other pilots step into the atmosphere with envy, I never dreamed the journey from then to now would ever happen. The path from there to this mile high magic ride across an unimaginable wilderness was long and filled with anxiety. Now, danger lurks everywhere, in the seething, boiling atmosphere where there are violent downdrafts to tumble into and elevator rides that make the most powerful roller coasters seem like candy store shopping. I don’t worry about it all too much anymore. I cruise silently and alone out over the ribbon of river glistening in the setting sun, comfortable, relaxed and confident, though the flight has been long and I’m getting tired. It can take a long time to descend.