Finding the Sky - Notes on Learning to Soar

October 1973

There’s a truck in the driveway of the suburban home his folks have rented in Upstate New York. From it emerges a gift from his uncle, an executive with US Steel: a big bundle of aluminum pipe, twelve foot lengths of different diameters, strapped together with tape. When he’s acquitted his duties as an eighth-grader, he walks home from school to discover the aluminum deposited on the floor of the garage. Bouncing with excitement, it’s his own personal Christmas day amongst the detritus of the cluttered garage. He has big plans for the aluminum tubes. With a set of $5 plans ordered from the back pages of Popular Mechanics, he is going to build a hang glider.

Sometimes he can’t believe how cool his dad is — he’ll do something so uncharacteristic — like the day he bought him a centrifugal clutch, the last part needed to complete the crazy three-wheeled go cart he and a friend were building with an old Briggs and Stratton salvaged from a portable cement mixer. Today is one of those times. After studying the xeroxed plans for the Rogallo wing hang glider, his father said he’d see what he could do about getting the materials for him. He was surprised he hadn’t issued a complete ban on foot-launched aircraft, effective immediately, like the one previously issued on motorcycles, and his eyes widened at his dad’s suggestion that he’d try to requisition the costly aluminum tubing. Now he is staring at a big pile of dull aluminum pipe on the concrete floor, but what he sees is his very own hang glider. His old man is the best.

Construction is simple (read primitive). Cut the pipes jaggedly to length with a hacksaw and attempt to file the cuts smooth, with limited success. Cut 12” wooden dowels sized to just fit the inside diameter of the pipes, and hammer into the pipe, butting the ends for added strength. Drill holes through these butted sections and attach the pipes into a triangular configuration with stove bolts. Brace the structure with cable clamped through eyebolts. Fashion a sling from nylon webbing in which to sit upright. Cover the wing with plastic cut from a poly tarp and held to the framework with double-sided carpet tape. Go to the nearest hill at teach yourself to fly.

Work progresses smoothly enough, if you overlook the poorly drilled holes and the bits of dowel that fit too loosely into the tubing, but hey, he’s barely thirteen. The real issue arises once the framework is complete —on his first attempt to carry his new glider he discovers that he can’t quite lift it. And there’s still probably another twenty pounds of material yet to add. This may prove problematic while he attempts to run off a mountainside with it. He is a scrawny, bookish, hugely disappointed adolescent. He doesn’t even bother to complete the last step and attach the plastic sail to the framework. Instead, the tubing gets relegated with the other miscellania to the rafters of the garage, and slowly, as the pipes are pirated for other purposes, his hang glider disappears little by little.

Months later he is walking down the main drag of his little burg and notices a van with a long, narrow fabric bundle on its top. Although he’s never actually seen a hang glider, he’s convinced that’s what this must be. He leaves a note expressing his interest on the windshield. That evening he is surprised when the stranger calls, interrupting dinner; the stranger is surprised to find he’s talking to a thirteen-year-old. Generously, he offers to demonstrate his glider, if they can find an appropriate small hillside. The football field of the local university has a high berm on one side, and it’s from there that he sees a hang glider launch for the first time. On the flat ground of the field his new friend shows him how to lift the glider and run a few steps. While this “real” hang glider is lighter than the unfinished version languishing in the garage, it’s still unmanageably heavy for him. Finally convinced by the experience of trying to run with an unwieldy contraption that weighs as much as he does, his dreams of soaring go up onto the shelf, to remain there for the next quarter of a century.