Magic Wings

by Alden Moffatt

  The day before we were to arrive at Doherty Slide, Stormy, Butch and I flew at Blackcap Mountain, a stones throw from downtown Lakeview. The wind blew weak that day. My flight ended in three minutes and with a wing that was broken in three places, in need of major repairs. My glider stalled ten feet off the ground at the landing area and plowed a hole in the dirt. My head hit the sail as the glider almost flipped over and my shoulder bashed into the keel, one of the main aluminum supports for the sail. The keel snapped in half and the leading edge of the glider bent. One of my control frame tubes was broken. I laid on the ground for a minute and then got up carefully to see if I had broken any bones.

  That was on the first day of what was supposed to be a five day flying excursion. I walked away from that crash sore and depressed. Stormy and I had rented a motel room in Lakeview, and now, on the very first day, two hundred miles from home, I didn't even have a glider.

  I had heard about a problem with landing at higher elevations, about the tendency of a glider to stall at faster speeds than they would at lower places. Coming in for a landing, I was relaxed and confident. Blackcap was only a thousand feet high and the town and beer were comfortably close-by. It was like flying at the bunny hill. Nothing could go wrong. I forgot to increase my speed as I made my final run at the landing area.

  Hang gliders don't fold very well when their main supports are broken. Butch had some duct tape, so I splinted the tubes with sticks to keep the metal from jabbing holes in the sail. "I guess I'm elected to drive for you guys for a couple of days," I moped. Then I picked up the glider and put it on the truck.

  Stormy followed me to the truck like he was thinking about what to say. "Bullshit, Aldo. You can use my spare glider. It's a lot like yours, made by the same company even. You can't miss flying Doherty Slide."

  I turned to him, surprised. "I appreciate it, but I'm not feeling very confident anymore. What if the same thing happens again."

  "That crap can happen to anyone. Even if you fly here all the time, sometimes you'll still call it wrong. Mick, the only local pilot here crashed his airplane the other day, did twenty grand worth of damage to it. You'll fix your glider in a day. How long's it been since you busted aluminum?"

  "About two years."

  "I don't think you'll break anymore this trip. If you do, you can buy me a new glider." Stormy laughed. "Come on! We're here to have fun."

  "OK. I appreciate it. I hope you're not going to regret this," I said as I tied the broken glider to the truck. My neck was throbbing where it had hit the keel of the glider. I wasn't sure that I really wanted to fly the next day, but at least if I decided to, there was a way to do it. I would go along to Doherty Slide for the drive. I wanted to see the place I had heard about for so long.

  We all hopped in my truck and drove back to the top to retrieve Stormy's truck. Then I went back to the motel to watch TV, out of the blazing sun, with the air conditioner up full blast.

  Stormy came back to the room later with a six pack. It was about 8PM and the sun was still shining on the paved parking lot out the front door. He offered me a beer. "I went by the pool and there was nobody there. I wonder where all the babes hang out in this town?"

  "I have no idea."

  "I think they all must leave town as soon as they can drive. There's not much opportunity around here," said Stormy. "Boy, they sure upgraded this TV when they raised the price of a room. Last time I stayed here it was a thirteen incher."

  We watched TV for a while. Stormy grabbed the remote control and kept changing channels. "They ought to make these programs illegal," he snarled. "What a bunch of crap." He kept rotating through the stations. "Putting crap like this in your head is worse than taking drugs. It's insulting to your intelligence. I bet it causes more crime than drugs too. It makes people feel hollow and helpless, just the way the big corporations want them to feel so they'll be miserable and go shopping and waste their money. Kids could be doing their homework but instead they immerse themselves in this garbage."

  "I do tend to agree, but right now I have a headache and there's nothing else to do."

  "What really amazes me is the propaganda they call news. Night after night the top story is that the President got a blow job. I mean, so what!" Stormy sat on his single bed and sipped his beer.

  "Every guy deserves a little fun sometimes," I said.

  "Maybe if the Prez wasn't playing around, he'd have been all frustrated. Maybe he'd have blown up some innocent, destitute country half way around the world."

  "You're welcome to flick off the power button. I don't see anything worth watching." We both drank a beer and I fell asleep before the sun set. The last time I had gone to Lakeview, I had camped near the landing area in a tent. The bed was a lot more comfortable. I didn't wake up 'til sunrise.

  Coffee was the first order of business. We went to get Butch, who had stayed in the campground to save ten bucks. He was standing beside his tent when we got there, already in the hot sun.

  "You should have slept in the motel. I slept like a baby," I said to Butch.

  "I slept terrible. The tent flapped in the wind all night. It was freezing. The mosquitoes drove me inside and I couldn't even make a fire. I've never seen mosquitoes that big. I didn't know bugs could survive when it's that cold," Butch grumbled.

  Stormy yawned and stretched. "I slept great too. But I need some coffee, quick."

  We went to a cafe with a thousand arrowheads glued on boards, mounted on the walls. "I guess they didn't care much for white folks when we took over their land," said Butch, referring to the Indian wars that had been fought all over central Oregon a hundred and fifty years before. "This is quite an arsenal."

  We sat at a table by the windows. "I'd say most of those were used for killing rabbits," said Stormy.

  A truck with a hang glider on top parked behind ours, just outside the cafe window. A stalky, gritty looking man got out of the truck and walked inside. He came to our table. "I guess those gliders on the white rig belong to you."

  "Yeah. Have a seat," said Butch.

  We all ordered breakfast and hardly said a word. Then, as he ate, the stranger said, "I was at King Mountain in Idaho. I think I saw God there. You get to 14,000 feet and the air thins out and you wonder if you're thinking straight. The mountains are that tall, but the updrafts take you a lot higher. I got to eighteen-five and I didn't have oxygen. There were some giant thermals going up a half a mile a minute, and there were holes just as big. I flew a hundred and sixty-seven miles yesterday. Leno made it over the next mountains and went two hundred and twenty. Fuck! I'm not sure we're still alive. Are we alive?" His eyes were glassed over like he wasn't aware we were even there. "Hey, look at this tattoo. I just did it myself last week." On his biceps there was a drawing of a buxomous babe in swim-ware standing beside a hang glider.

  "That's pretty artistic," I said, not really interested.

  "Yeah. I poked a needle in my arm a thousand times. I guess I'm into pain, or something.

  "Where are you guys flying today?" His eyes never really looked at us.

  "Doherty Slide," Butch said. "I hope the wind's right."

  "It always is at Doherty. Wish I could go. I'm headed for the coast today. Doherty's a great flying spot, but watch out for the launch. It'll rip the control bar out of your hands." He was finished eating, left some money, stood and headed for the door. "Don't get too high." He looked at us for a second, unsmiling, then he turned and walked out.

  "I'm strictly a recreational flier," Stormy commented to Butch and me. "Boy, some people get too damn serious about hang gliding. You think you're up there, taking all the risks, and going to the ultimate places, then some guy like that comes along. That guy is nuts!" said Butch.

  "Eighteen thousand feet without oxygen!" Stormy shook his head. "That's not recreation. That's aviation. I'm strictly recreational. I don't launch unless I know where and when I'm going to land."

  "Imagine what kind of crap you'd have to fly through in the heat of the da
y to go two hundred miles. Launch at 10AM and land at 10PM. That's insane!" I said

  "I'm in this for the fun. Not the glory," said Stormy. "Fuck the glory."

  "Fuck the glory," I said, holding up my coffee cup for a toast.

  "He looked a little sick," said Butch.

  "Hope he doesn't drive into a ditch on the way to the coast," said Stormy.

  We finished up breakfast and it was nine o'clock when we headed east toward Doherty Slide.

  We brought our fly fishing poles because Stormy had bragged about some excellent fishing in the mountains between Lakeview and the really dry part of eastern Oregon. Doherty wouldn't be launchable until late afternoon, so we had time to kill.

  Out of Lakeview a half hour we turned off the highway onto a dirt road. The sage brush quickly changed to a beautiful cottonwood, aspen forest interspersed with pines and lovely, flowering meadows. A few miles along the dirt road there was a meadow with a little creek flowing through it. The creek flowed under the road through a culvert. It was cold and clear but otherwise unremarkable.

  "When I was a little kid," said Stormy, "my dad dragged me and my brother into the most god-awful empty place in the Eastern Oregon desert. We parked along the side of a road and walked for miles across the sage brush flats and finally came to a tiny little creek that you could jump across. The creek was a couple feet deep and black with trout. I wish I could remember where it was. My dad baited up our hooks and we nailed one dumb fish after another. They'd never seen a fisherman before. Damn, I wish I could remember where that was. I was only six or seven."

  "This looks like a pretty good spot," said Butch.

  "Well, you go that way, I'm going this way." Stormy walked off into the field. Butch went downstream.

  I tied a fly on the end of my line that Aaron, my son had made. It looked like a pretty realistic bug. Stormy kept walking into the field, looking for the prime spot. I snuck just upstream of the culvert about ten feet and knelt down in the tall grass. I stretch out ten feet of line on the end of my fly pole and dangled the bug on the surface of the little creek. A fairly nice fish splashed on the surface and knocked the fly into the grass. So I dangled it again and the same thing happened. Stormy and Butch heard what was going on and meandered in my direction for a look. Finally the fish got hooked and dragged the tip of my rod down toward the water. I pulled him out of the creek and grabbed the hook, gently let him go back in the water. It was a beautiful trout. I moved a little ways upstream and tried again. I didn't catch anything else and neither did Butch or Stormy, even though, between us we carried a thousand bucks worth of fishing equipment.

  We drove to another creek where Stormy caught an eight incher and I finally gave up and went for a quick, cold swim. "This place is pretty nice," I said. "You wouldn't think there were forests and creeks here this close to the desert. It's so dry in the valley, it makes my lips crack."

  "I had a nosebleed last night," said Butch.

  We set off for the deep desert at about noon, drove downhill and passed the last lonely ranch on the edge of the vast, intense and barren landscape. The fault block mountain where we would be flying was still much further. It was almost ugly out there. The only thing to focus on was a tiny lump in the far, almost invisible distance, where the highway angled up to the top of a long, boring looking and not particularly high ridge. There was hardly any wind, and there were no clouds. It was stuffy, hot; grey earth and blue sky.

  There was a twenty mile stretch of straight, featureless highway in front of us. Stormy put his foot down on the gas pedal until the speedometer was at 90mph. There were waves in the road surface and each time we drove over the top of one, my stomach went up and Stormy went "Whee!" with a stupid smile on his face.

  "Man," said Butch. "Slow down. You're going to make me throw up. What if a wheel fell off or a tire popped right now? You'd get us all killed!"

  Stormy didn't pay any attention. "Whee!"

  In fifteen minutes we were at the launch. "I love this spot," said Stormy. "We call that the Shit-Hole. That's where you land if you sink out. Then you can walk up the highway in the blazing sun and drive the truck to pick me up. I'm going up and over the back. I'll be ten or twenty miles east."

  "Why would you want to go cross-country here?" asked Butch. "There's nothing to see that way but flat, straight highway."

  "Exactly," said Stormy. "You can land anywhere you want to. You can land in the middle of the highway 'cause there's never cars on it."

  I couldn't quite see the point and I looked at Butch who wasn't quite figuring out Stormy' philosophy either. The wind was blowing in from the west, which was a surprise. There wasn't much room to set up gliders and park cars too, so even though the wind was strong enough to blow a glider over, we started assembling them. We could see a couple of more cars with long objects tied on their roofs approaching way in the distance.

  I set my glider down behind some sage that blocked the howling wind somewhat. The wind was intimidating. Dust scoured us. It was early and hot and we would have to wait a long time to launch, until evening probably. The hot sun would not be good for our dacron sails.

  I had to pay extra attention to the wires and tubes, because I was not familiar with the glider Stormy had loaned me. As I assembled it, the sail flapped and stretched in the powerful wind.

  The two cars that had been driving toward us arrived and dust blew across the small parking area. They stopped abruptly at our wing tips.

  The car doors opened. "What are you waiting for. It's perfect!" said one of the drivers. "What. Are you going to wait until the wind dies! You'd get elevatored to ten thousand feet right now."

  We ignored him as best we could. I wrestled in the wind to tighten the glider tensioner and snap it into place. Then I asked Stormy to look over the glider with me to make sure I had done everything correctly. We couldn't see any problems, so we left the gliders there and walked over to the launch, where the wind was even stronger.

  Butch, Stormy and I stood on the edge of the steep drop-off and looked out over the ocean of rippling, burning desert eight hundred feet below. In front of us, for many miles, was a flat valley dotted with salt pans, rocks and patches of sage brush.

  "Behold, the Guano Valley." Stormy gestured. I turned to look at him to see if he was serious.

  "You're kidding," said Butch.

  "Nope," said Stormy. "That's what it's called on the map, and who could argue with the map. It looks like guano to me!"

  "We sure fly in some bleak places," I said.

  "Believe it or not," Stormy continued, "Indians actually lived around here, or hunted here anyway. Maybe they liked the taste of snake. There are some petroglyphs over the hill way out there. They were pretty cool. You could drive to them. Then some idiots dynamited the rocks and now you have to use your imagination to piece the pieces back together."

  "That sucks," Butch said. "One after another, the things that make this world interesting are disappearing."

  "You've got to see this place from the air to appreciate it," Stormy said. The wind was howling, but it was noticeably decreasing. "What time is it?"

  It was about 4:00. The wind was twenty-five miles an hour, still very strong, but getting manageable. We walked back to the parking area.

  The man who had pestered us to fly earlier had not set up his glider. He said that he had a twisted ankle from the day before and was just there to watch.

  "It looks OK now," I said. "I'm going to test the air. Would you guys help me get launched?"

  "I like it when somebody volunteers to be a wind dummy," Stormy said. "Sure."

  I put on my harness and hooked onto the glider. Stormy and Butch held the wing wires and helped me turn to face the strong wind and the wide open desert valley. We carefully walked the glider two hundred feet forward to the edge to the drop-off, while the wind buffeted and lurched the wing from side to side.

  "This doesn't seem very very high," I said loudly, over the voice of the wind. "I hope I don't end up i
n the salt pans down there before I find lift."

  "What do you mean," yelled the guy with the twisted ankle who was hobbling alongside us. "The wind here is nothing but lift. You're gonna have a blast!"

  We stopped walking at the edge. I held the glider steady with the nose down. I nodded to the crew and they released the wires. "Thanks," I yelled into the powerful wind. Then, without a second thought, I ran a few steps and was airborne.

  The wind threw me sideways and my wing tip nearly scraped the ground, so I threw my weight all the way to the opposite wing and leveled out. Then, flying south only a few feet from the ground, I watched the rocky edge go by and it seemed like I was loosing altitude. I slowed down as much as I could without stalling the glider, to make sure I wasn't cutting through the ridge lift, but that didn't seem to help. At best I was staying level or dropping very slowly. A couple of minutes went by and still I was not rising. The launch and landing areas were quickly becoming distant. The desert floor was only a few hundred feet below and, though there were plenty of open places to land, the walk out to the highway would be long if I was forced out of the sky. If I turned back, I thought, I might loose elevation even faster, so I continued flying south. The highway became very far away very fast. And there was a gully that split the solid ridge not far ahead. The ridge lift that held me up marginally would end at the gully and I would be on the ground in a minute if I tried to cross it. The gully was wide and deep. I was two miles from where I had started and the thought of carrying the glider in the searing heat for that distance was unpleasant.

  There was a cliff along the edge of the scarp and I nearly was dragging my wing tip on it, hoping to find some tiny thermal, something to help me stay up at least long enough to make a turn and run back toward that landing area along the highway Stormy had so elegantly called the Shit-hole. As I reached the end of my possible southward flight, I gently turned, trying to not disturb what little lift there was. I made a wide, flat turn. Maybe the lift gods would not notice that I was turning. All too often they had cut me off and laughed as I sank to the ground. I looked at the ridge to the north as I turned and the landing area seemed depressingly distant.