Finding the Sky - Notes on Learning to Soar

July 19, 1997

What I love about motorcycling is the way it’s like flying. On a sport bike you lean forward, arms outstretched, feet tucked behind you on rearset footpegs. Almost diving through space, Superman style. And both the airborne superhero and the motorcyclist steer in about the same way: look left, lean left, go left. The bike, steel and aluminum and fiberglass and rubber, inexplicably feels like a natural extension of my body. It is my body’s ability to project itself through space perfected, my body plus eighty horsepower. My body with the ability to go from a standstill to 100 miles per hour and back to a full stop almost instantly, blurring everything seen in the near and middle distance, like the ground blurs under the nose of an airplane flying low and fast. A motorcycle is really just a way to take a powerful engine and transform it’s rotational fury into forward motion with the barest minimum of added stuff. Engine, two wheels, controls, rider. This minimalist design approach results in a rocket-like power-to-weight ratio, a pavement-bound flying machine, an experience as close to flight as one can get without leaving the tarmac.

At least it feels that way to me, and in the last couple of years I’ve been flying down a lot of that pavement on my ‘81 BMW sports-tourer. I explain my little addiction in terms of having been incessantly moved from place to place as the child of an airforce man who for twenty years believed, to no avail, in the possibility of a geographic cure for his problems. I grew up in the back seat of the deep blue Dodge station wagon, rolling up and down the eastern seaboard, pausing here for a year, there for five months. I am a child of the roadtrip. And now, full-grown, living the frenetically-paced life of an artist and self-employed New Yorker, I find it nearly impossible to be still, moving from the moment my eyes open till my head hits the pillow 18 hours later. But I’ve found a curious way to rest. On my bike I am nearly still; only very subtle movements are required, yet at the same time I’m in motion, constantly rolling through the landscape. Stillness and movement at once, and I can’t get enough. Long weekend rides with friends in search of a perfect series of “twisties” winding through the upstate countryside, commuting around the city for my freelance work, and month-long cross country tours have been adding up to about fifteen-thousand two-wheeled miles a year. That will begin to change in the next hour.

My Sunday rides rarely need much more in the way of a destination than a decent diner 200 miles from my front door, but today I actually have a place circled on the map in my tankbag. Julianne, my girlfriend and eager pillion passenger, has cleverly suggested that we take a day trip to see the hang gliders flying at Ellenville, NY, a drab little backwater 90 miles northwest of NYC. I actually haven’t seen a hang glider since I was fourteen, when they were infamous deathships, mostly constructed of bamboo or aluminum poles and plastic tarps, piloted by sun-ripened hippies who were using lots of other means to get high as well.

As my sleek old beemer winds its way westbound on Route 52 through the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, Julianne taps my shoulder and points skyward. I glance up and my heart races at the sight: a dozen gliders are circling over us. Weaving between them, turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks, all sharing the same small patch of sky. The bike is instantly parked in a pull-out and my helmet off, my eyes glued to the scene overhead. Slowly flying alongside the modern, streamlined, delta-wing hang gliders is the most amazing aircraft I’ve ever seen. I almost cannot believe these things are really there, floating over my head. They seem related to a parachute in conception, but far more beautiful; elegant, elongated ellipse-shaped wings, from which the pilots are suspended in a comfy looking chair-like harness by a multitude of thin lines. Unlike a parachute, the wing is volumetric, a true airfoil with a top and bottom surface separated by fabric ribs, and inflated by air flowing into ports along the bottom of the leading edge. And as I watch these colorful wings circling in the late afternoon sky I see they are unlike parachutes in another way: they are going up.