Magic Wings

by Alden Moffatt

  Hang Driver

  In the meantime, Zeek called me , looking for a ride back to his car after landing his glider along side the lake near my house. There was a field below the rock dam at Emigrant Lake Park where the wind was usually smooth and steady from the north. The distance from Woodrat Mountain to that field was about twenty miles. That is how far he flew sometimes.

  Or he would call in the morning begging me to drive to the launch.

  I was at the launch at Woodrat often that spring, because I would drive Zeek and Zeek’s side kick, Eddie there so I could watch them fly. Consistently they would launch late in the morning just before valley winds would pick up. Their flights usually began with sprinting launches into almost no wind, running fifteen miles an hour with a 65 pound glider over head.

  Zeek was especially persistent in the pursuit of long flights. His patience was probably an asset he had acquired along with becoming a doctor. Sometimes he would launch and for over an hour, would fly back and fourth across the mountainside, coming back to the launch and turning in exactly the same place; back and fourth and back and fourth without gaining a single inch of elevation. Then suddenly he would find his thermal and soar away until he disappeared into the blue.

  I would get on the two way radio and ask him stupid questions like “How high are you” or “are you going cross country?”

  The radio would crackle back at me. “Yeah, I’m at 7000 feet and still climbing. I’m headed for your place when I hit the top of this thermal.” His voice would be filled with excitement.

  Then I’d drive the car as fast as I could, looking up all the way, trying to see how the flight was progressing. But I could rarely see anyone flying. They were too high or too far away. Despite their 36 foot wing span, the gliders were not visible for much over a mile.

  I could only imagine, at that time, what it would be like to be up there. My imagination was woefully inadequate. I knew it was not like being in a jet or helicopter. In a large aircraft you are protected from the wind. And there’s always a lot of noise. Looking out of a window of a plane seemed to me like looking at a TV. I tried to imagine a flight moving very slow, almost standing still, hanging from a rope at 7000 feet. A chill would come over me. What I really couldn’t imagine was all the work and persistence it would take to get up there, or how I would survive my own fears in the learning process. I watched the hang gliders as carefully as I could, not really knowing what I was looking at. They were breathtaking, especially as they took off from Woodrat Mountain.

  I would almost never see Zeek or Eddie land. They would always be resting next to their gliders when I would pull up the truck next to the field they had chosen to land in. They would have big, wide grins on at that point. They told me stories of their epic flights and dared me to keep up my bunny hill flights cause someday I , too, could fly “The Rat” with them. I didn’t take them seriously. They probably thought I was going to chicken out and quit all together, but they treated me like a comrade, because how else would they get someone to drive them twenty miles back to their cars. And I played along. I couldn’t figure out any other way to learn to fly.

  For the hours and hours I got to ride in the truck with them during that March and April, I asked questions and made a nuisance of myself. I got to hear stories about other people who flew gliders. There weren’t many. There was a surge of new pilots in the early ninetys when safer hang glider designs emerged. Before that, for twenty years, a lot of people were injured or even killed flying Rogallo gliders which were triangular shaped. Most flew without instruction. The Rogallos were the first truly transportable hang gliders. They were unstable under certain conditions. A too strong head wind might make one flip over from end to end in mid-air. Or, in a stall, a spiral spin was a possibility. The Rogallos also did not have a very long glide ratio, which meant that a place to land had to be very close to a place to launch. In the 90s though, some of the design faults were corrected and the glide ratio was increased tremendously. Now, on a calm day, you could glide ten miles or more from a launch just one mile high. And so more people became interested in flying but the interest had tapered off for some reason that nobody could figure out. Eddie speculated that it may be because hang gliding was no longer a spectator sport. Now that gliders could go so far and climb so high, there weren’t many people watching them. Zeek would chime in that flight simulators made it easy for people to pretend they were flying, which was all most people wanted to do anyway.

  Then they would talk about this buddy or that who was in an accident. Some guy named Tweedie got caught in a rotor flying a hundred feet up along a coastal bluff and got hammered into some power lines where his glider was melted and fractured into a hundred pieces, but somehow he was deposited gently on the ground and walked away from the smoldering mess. Then Marilyn launched without hooking her legs through her leg straps and fell down through the harness while she was taking off, and she dangled there as the glider made a slow circle and smashed into the rocks. She was rushed to the hospital and though she recovered in a matter of days, she was never seen flying again after that.

  And Bobby was launching from the beautiful but unforgiving cliff at Dougherty Slide in a thirty mile an hour wind. As soon as he ran over the edge to launch, the glider stalled because the wind ripped the control bar out of his hands. The glider fluttered, smashed into the cliff a hundred feet up, then parachuted quickly to the rocks below. He walked away after duct taping his broken arm to his side.

  Eddie said, “ You ever think about what it would be like if one of your wing wires broke and your wing folded up at ten thousand feet?”

  Zeek replied, “I don’t bother to think about it. That’s why you got a parachute. I guess it would be pretty hard to get the parachute out if you were spinning and flapping around. When your time comes, it comes, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Well it’s obvious, Death doesn’t want either one of us,” said Eddie. “So Aldo, you driving tomorrow?’

  “How ‘bout same time”, said Zeek. “Pick us up at my house?”

  “How about you help me do a few flights at the training hill tomorrow, then I’ll drive you the next day”, I said.

  “Well I guess I’ll have to put in some time nurturing the newby. OK. It’s a deal.”

  ***

  We met at the lake at 10AM. The wind was perfect for practice flights. I wanted to show Zeek how well I was doing, though I knew I wasn’t. I clumsily rigged my glider and then we both walked around it to make sure it was complete.

  Then I wheeled it up the hill on a couple of 12 inch training wheels attached to the control bar. I went about three quarters of the way to the top of the hundred foot high hill to show Zeek that I was brave and seriously trying to fly. As we waited under the wing, with me ready to launch, the wind was a little crossed. It was blowing from the north instead of from the northwest, as I would have preferred.

  Zeek confidently said, “You can launch in this wind. You just have to turn the nose of the glider toward the wind as you run down the hill. It’s called crabbing.”

  I didn’t understand the concept, but wanted to impress the doctor, so with my heart beating wildly I ran ahead and forced the glider to face the wind. In a moment I was ten feet off the ground.

  The glider began to tilt sideways. When I recontacted the ground a few seconds later, the left wing hit first, then the left side of the control bar. Then my knees dragged. The glider flipped around in a circle and came to rest facing back up the hill. It had two broken tubes and would not sit right anymore.

  Zeek looked at the mess and shook his head. “I have some aluminum tubing in the truck if you want to try to fix it and make a few more flights.”

  I was shaking. “I want to fold it up and go home,” I said.

  The Instructor

  I spent a huge amount of time and money repairing the glider, and that, more than anything else, let me know for sure that I needed the help of Badger Martin. But even with instruction, I
was discouraged often by the fear of heights, broken glider parts, winds too strong, or not strong enough, days too hot, too cold. I didn’t have an instinct for three dimensional space either, so I’d land too close, too far, down wind, side wind, not very birdlike.

  Badger Martin didn’t seem to like me very much, and when you sit day after day for hours and hours on an isolated hillside with someone who you’re really not relating to, it eventually takes a toll. I suppose I was too much of a wimp, or I had too much free time on my hands for Badger’s military, workaholic personality. But Badger did make time for me in his mind bogglingly busy schedule. I did appreciate his interest in keeping me from killing myself. Badger had been an airplane mechanic for years and had flown everything he could get his hands on. As with any instructor-student relationship, I had a great deal of admiration for his abilities and credentials. On the other hand, he looked at me as impatient and insignificant, a hopeless coward who would almost certainly amount to nothing.

  I said enthuasticly, “Someday we’ll be flying together.” I also said, “Why don’t you set up a glider today and take a ride too,” as we prepared my glider for the training hill not far into my lessons. That a ten second flight on a bunny hill would be worth the trouble for an instructor of setting up a glider and walking the glider up the hill is absurd. Why would I have thought that such a tiny flight would be interesting to someone who had flown hang gliders all over the country and was considered an excellent pilot by his peers? But at the time, those ten second rides, for me, were such a boiling adrenalin rush and took such awesome courage to plunge into, I couldn’t imagine how , for anybody, such a flight could be boring, monotonous, unthinkably trite. You see, the world is the way the world is, no matter how you think the world is. The way I thought about our training hill days had nothing to do with how those training hill days really were.

  My nievity was irritating to Badger, as were my lunches that ChiChi had so lavishly put together for me. She prepared, each training day, something suitable for any last meal. She naturally suspected that, each day as Badger and I drove away from the house, that that would be the last time we would see each other. She tried not to show her apprehension, but it showed in the lunches. Half way through the day of training, with the sun high and hot in the summer sky, I would set up my lounge chair next to the truck and unpack something gourmet; a crab sandwich on fresh, home made rye; a shrimp salad with roquefort dressing and fresh greens; a warm barbecued fillet and baked yellow potatoes out of a thermos and onto fine china. ChiChi always sent along a lap table and a cotton napkin too. Always, there was sparkling mango or cranberry nectar.

  Meanwhile, Badger, who I offered part of my lunch to, insisted that he’d rather drink soda pop and eat a little bag of potato chips.

  After a few dozen flights unimaginably close to the ground, I finally was allowed to fly from the top of the training hill. Then after a few more flights from there, I was complaining that I was ready for the intermediate mountain at Hornbrook. Badger looked at me the way any parent would look at a five year old kid who wanted to do something dangerous that they could not possibly do safely and said, “No. You want me to be your instructor? We’re going to do this my way. You land on your feet three times in a row and show me you’ve got control over the glider and we’ll talk about the intermediate hill. So far I haven’t seen two good flights in a row,” he scolded.

  “But I haven’t broken any glider parts lately,” I pleaded, grinning sheepishly.

  “Yeah. But you’ve come close and the slope of the training hill keeps you from making the really big mistakes. Three perfect launches and landings in a row is what I want to see. I don’t care if we spend all year here. You’ve got to prove that you’re ready to move to the next step,” Badger demanded.

  So one flight after another went by and each time it seemed more bedrudgery carrying the glider back to the hill top. As I hauled the glider up, I began to feel like an ancient slave, with a stick over my shoulder, pots of water suspended from each end, trudging up to the top of the mountain. I imagined Badger, sitting up atop my launch spot, the ruling king, laughing at my unbearable labor.

  Sometimes I would land standing up, not rolling on the glider’s fat black plastic wheels, two times in a row and would become optimistic that the next flight would fulfill Badger’s requirement. But then on the very next try, I would land with a trip and a splat and have to start all over again.

  In a days hard labor under the intense heat of summer sun, I would usually make ten of these flights and as their numbers added up, I became bored with the scenery, bored with talking to Badger, and I questioned my decision to ever try hang gliding in the first place. As the lesson days marched on and Badger obviously became bored with me as a student, I also felt guilty for dragging him out to that boring hillside time after time. Why couldn’t I launch and land right three lousy times in a row, I asked myself? Was I really so stupid that I couldn’t even preform the task of a pea sized bird brain? And what good were those lessons doing for me if nothing Badger said explained such an obviously simple task?

  “Don’t worry about it,” Badger would grumble after another failing flight. “Every person learns at a different pace. Some people just take a little longer than others.” I could tell that he was trying to console himself for ever having become involved with my training.

  Seven long days and almost seventy tiny flights went by before I finally convinced Badger that it was time to move to the intermediate hill. Actually, on that infamous day, on one of those three so called perfect bunny hill flights, I had tripped and touched the wheels on the ground but then had stood up quickly to hide my mistake. Badger must not have been able to see from his hill top perspective, or he was not looking, or maybe he had noticed and decided that I would be better off dead on the slopes of the Hornbrook hill than continuing with such total frustration and failure.

  Then there were another thirty flights from the petrifying heights of the Hornbrook hill. I remember saying to Badger as we looked at that hill for the first time, “This will be the most amazing thing I’ve ever done”. And Badger looked at me like, boy you ain’t seen nothing yet. And with an ulcerated knot eating a hole in my stomach, I set up the glider on top there against a backdrop of the dizzying heights of that 320 foot hill. There I spent half a year of scattered days.

  Then Badger said I was ready for the ultimate, the mountain launch. You know, when I started this, I set my sights on eventually gliding fearlessly, twenty feet off the ground at the bunny hill as my goal in life. How on earth did anyone ever convince me that I had to become a real live pilot and fly from the treacherous abyss of Woodrat Mountain. But I did own my own glider, and I did pay for lessons, so like, I had to do it. My whole body seemed a bit knotted up that day. The ulcer in my stomach had spread out and become one with every cell. I heard my dead ancestors turn in their graves. Perspiration squirted out of my face. My hands were so tight on the glider’s control frame that I nearly crushed the aluminum tubing. In the background, where I could barely hear him, though he was right along side me at launch, Badger Martin said, “ Relax, light touch. If you start running, run like hell and don’t stop running til your feet are ten feet off the ground.” I ran, and quickly the ground fell away. My teeth ground together but I tried to keep that light touch. By the time I was over the landing area I was exhausted and could barely decide what to do. I made a right turn then a left one then pulled in a little then the pond got awful intimidating, and so did the power lines. And the trees got bigger. I put myself right between the trees and the pond and then I slowed down and so my final turn didn’t work. The tree got too close and there was no way to avoid it. So I decided, well, I might as well hit it square. The glider stuck in the oak branches 15 feet off the ground and didn’t fall back. And there I dangled, kicking around helplessly, uninjured but pathetic, while a small crowd gathered.

  Wild Ride

  Badger and I parted company after one more flight from the mountai
n top at Woodrat which ended in an acceptable landing, then he said I was on my own. It turned out that Badger had quit flying because his new girlfriend was adamantly against it and so I rarely saw him after that day. So after a year of being nurtured, I was cast out of the nest, and I found that making my own decisions about flying was more difficult than I had expected. Here’s an example.

  When a south wind blows at Woodrat, it wraps around the mountain and appears to be coming from the west, directly in front of the lunch. The only way you can tell a south wind is there at all is by observing the high, treetop flag and the angle of approaching thermals. The treetop flag switches from the south to the east, but the ground wind still comes up the front. It comes up the back of the ridge too, but you’re not looking at the back, unless you know you should.

  There are a lot of things you don’t know you should be concerned about when you have only flown a few times from the high launches. You’re scared, but you don’t know what you’re scared of. You know you need more experience, but you can’t get it without making mistakes.

  Up to the day I will describe now, I had never had a long flight on a hang glider. My flying was always uncoordinated, coarsely tuned and always focused on launching and landing.

  Let’s follow the south wind from it’s source; a storm system at sea funneling up tropical air against a high pressure system over sunny California. The wind flows over the Siskiyou Mountains and into Oregon, then down the rugged Applegate River canyon. As it hits the jagged mountain ridge that ends with Woodrat Mountain at its north end, the wind is eddied then eddied again. It is twisted and splattered, torn apart and then forced together. It is churned and chopped. And finally it is delivered sliced and diced to the face of the launch.

  To a novice pilot, it looks deceivingly docile, especially if it is a slow wind and thermals rising up the west of the mountain side hide its presence.