Finding the Sky - Notes on Learning to Soar

25 August 2002

This thing sounds like it’s screaming at me. The instrument sounds a tone telling the pilot how fast he’s climbing or sinking, but now the encouraging beeps which accompany a typical climb have accelerated into an urgent, high-pitched whine. I glance and see it reads 14 — I’m climbing at 1400 feet per minute. The altimeter reads 11,000 feet mean sea level, more than a mile above the valley floor. In another three minutes I’ll be two miles high.

On an ordinary day this might be a good thing. My goal in flying a paraglider is, after all, to “sky-out,” get up high, away from the terrain, then go “on glide” and attempt to fly cross-country. But on this afternoon, this climb is drawing me inexorably up toward a large, dirty-bottomed cloud. It looks, from my perch in the frail paraglider, like an ugly giant, acres across, intent on swallowing me and the fifteen pound nylon wing from which I’m suspended. Not my idea of fun.

I’ve heard about this sort of thing — “cloud suck.” The notion of a giant cloud literally sucking an ultralight soaring craft into it seemed fanciful to me when I first encountered it. Until my instructor reminded us that it’s cold inside storm clouds, very cold. Cold enough that hypothermia strikes in minutes, even to someone not underdressed for the occasion, as I am, in jeans and tee, windbreaker and thin bicycling gloves. I once heard the narrator in a paragliding film describe the consequences of getting caught in a cumulonimbus: the words “pilot falls out of the cloud and hits the ground as chunks of ice” suddenly come back to me. It never ceases to amaze me what memory will dislodge at such moments.

The mid-morning “cu’s” — pilotspeak for cumulus clouds, those fluffy white cotton balls kids use as airborne Rorshachs — were mushrooming into “cu-nims.” From below, it’s impossible to tell for sure if my cloud has grown-up into such a giant. It seems huge, but then again, I’ve never been this close to cloudbase before. What I do know is that the convection feeding it —

air warming on the dry ranch lands which rises into the cooler air above as thermals and creates these clouds — has grown intense. In my 120 hours of airtime I’ve never encountered lift like this. I’d spent every flight wanting to go up, and now, with a sudden aversion to entering the “white room” over my head, all I want is down. There’s an old flying adage that says “it’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than in the air wishing you were on the ground.” Suddenly I know exactly where such pithy sayings come from.

“Ok,” I say outloud, “fly the airplane.” I reach up to the risers and “pull big ears,” intentionally collapsing the paraglider’s wingtips, effectively reducing the airfoil by about a third. Then I get my boot heel lodged on the speedbar, and push it out for all I’m worth. This increases the wing’s airspeed, but also causes it to sink faster, and sinking faster is what I’m after. Together, these inputs should have me on the ground in no time. I glance at the vario: I’m still going up at 600 feet per minute. I try the next thing, cranking the wing over into a steeply banked turn. Shifting my weight to the left in the harness and pulling the left control toggle harder, the 360 turn tightens into a spiral dive — this has to work. But for some reason I just can’t hold the dive. Funny thing, but pulling a spiral dive as a descent maneuver to escape cloud suck is a lot harder than practicing a spiral in a maneuvers clinic. There, you’re over water, and an instructor leads you with directions over the radio the whole time.

The radio. Maybe two heads will be better than one, and mine is threatening to mutiny any minute now. I reach for the push-to-talk button on the side of my helmet, hoping my buddy waiting in the landing zone has his ham radio on. “Dan, this is Paul, do you have a copy?”

Weeks go by. “Yeah, I copy you. Over.”

Summoning my mellowest Chuck Yeager voice I say, “Listen, I’m having alittle trouble getting down here. This is getting a little hectic. Over.” In the Olympics of Understatement, the judges are flashing their scorecards:9.2; 9.8; 9.6. A medal is assured. Dan and several others have been watching my little speck of a red glider from the LZ, and recognize the “big ears” configuration as my way of saying I want this flight to be over, now.

Dan’s voice is pretty laid-back after years of life on Maui, but there’s a bit of urgency seeping through the static as it comes over my headset. “Go for the green,” he says.

I don’t get it. “Go for the green?” Is he talking about pulling the green lines on my risers? Is he using some kind of green traffic light metaphor? Is it some kind of Maui mystical hipster slang for “relax?” My mind is searching, baffled. “Do what? Over.”

“Turn downwind and go for the green fields. Go out over the green fields and see if you can lose the lift there.”

Instantly I know he is right. “Copy that.”

The whole time I’d been flying looking up, focusing on the cloud loomingover my little craft. If I’d looked down at the brown, sage-covered fields below, I might have avoided brain-lock and put the pieces together. That dry, dark-colored earth was one gigantic solar collector, baking in the midday Idaho sun. If you’d held a thermometer a foot off the ground, it probably would have read 120 degrees in a matter of minutes. In front of me, hundreds of brown acres, rapidly heating vast quantities of air near their surface. That heated air rising at great velocity, cooling until the moisture it contains condenses out into the Very Big Cloud I Want Very Much To Avoid. That heated air taking me up like the wisps of dandelion I blew skyward as a child. Behind me, downwind, acres of green cultivated fields, moist and cool from constant irrigation. I shift my weight in the harness and bank the wing up, changing my heading.

I get back on the speedbar, to get there ASAP, and back into big ears to minimize the altitude gain on the way. Using weight shift, I bank the wing up one way then the other in a series of wingovers — I want the damn thing to glide as inefficiently as possible. More weeks go by. Finally, I arrive over the lush green, and my whole body utters a sigh of relief as the vario indicates that the glider has started to descend. In a few minutes my boots touchdown. I collapse the wing behind me, bundle it up, and make my way to the dirt road at the edge of the field. I realize I’m shaking as I pull the helmet off. I stand and shake and silently thank the farmer for his crop of alfalfa and peas, which has just taken on new meaning to me.