Finding the Sky - Notes on Learning to Soar

11 August 1999

In a few minutes this big, air-filled nylon bag is is going to take me on my first “high” flight. I’m going to launch my dusty school glider and run off the edge of this hill, where the ground suddenly drops away and reappears 300 feet later. I’ve been preparing for this moment for the last five days at The Point of the Mountain, just outside of Salt Lake City, where I’ve come for two weeks to learn to fly and train for a P-2 Novice rating. In another sense, I’ve been preparing for this moment for most of my life.

Earlier in the year I completed a sculpture, a kind of poetic flying machine, which featured one of my father’s Vietnam flight suits, and a pair of bird-like wings fashioned out of one hundred leather work gloves — I thought my dad could probably use some wings. The piece was shown several times, and then found a buyer in New Haven. Staring at the check in my hand, I realized I was looking at pretty much the exact purchase price of paragliding lessons and a basic package of gear. A friend later commented that this was “the metaphor of flight sponsoring the reality.” A little research suggested that Salt Lake was an ideal place to train, with its consistently flyable conditions. At the beginning of August, I packed up my motorcycle with camping gear and left New York City, studying cloud formations and birds soaring as I rode the 1800 miles to The Point.

It’s late afternoon and hot. The big brown grasshoppers who outnumber humans here ten-thousand to one are flicking and buzzing around like miniature, robotic solar cells in a state of overcharge. Invariably, the moment a wing gets laid-out in the dusty launch area, a dozen or more of these guys climb aboard, sometimes right inside the wing through the ports in the leading edge. Maybe they’re just trying to get outta town and see the world, but I’ve been told that if they wind-up inside a folded wing at the end of the day, the acid content of their small, prehistoric-looking bodies will eat holes right through the precious nylon. This afternoon, however, I welcome the little hitch-hikers onto my glider, taking their decision to join me as a vote of confidence.

My wing is laid out in a horseshoe shape on the ground behind me, and I am strapped into the harness. The paraglider’s risers are clipped into the caribiners on the harness chest strap, and from this moment, I officially become part of the aircraft. My instructor, a relaxed, late-Nineties style hippy, aptly named Dexter Clearwater, starts a preflight inspection of my set-up. Suddenly transformed into an Airforce Squadron Crew Chief, he is all business as he checks my harness buckles one by one; checks that the caribiners are snapped fully closed and locked; that the risers are properly oriented and the lines to the control toggles in my hands are correctly routed; that the hundred or so other lines running from risers to wing are clear of tangles and snags on the ground. I try to follow each step of the preflight, but the truth is, I need to perform one of my own, on the pilot.

My heart is beating so hard I think bystanders can probably hear it. Tributaries of sweat running under my helmet join the Big Muddy coursing down my back. I’m so nervous and excited that I can’t make any sense of the risers in my hands now, and just have to trust they’re arranged correctly because Dexter examined them closely and pronounced “right on.” I have a case of cotton mouth to rival anything I can remember from my teenage pot-smoking days. Oh, did I mention I’m afraid of heights?

I can’t even walk out to the edge of launch — my feet literally refuse to go near the drop-off — and now I’m about to go sprinting over it. Why was it I thought this would be a good idea?

Dexter stands fifty feet in front of me and yells “Launching!” Fifty feet further the ground disappears. There is nothing I want more than to go floating away over it, and nothing intimidates me more. I yell “Clear!” and before fear has a chance to get a better foothold, charge into a forward launch, feeling the wing rising off the ground behind me, resisting my run toward the precipice. I watch Dexter for the fingers-across-throat that will signal something’s amiss and I should abort the launch, but his hands remain at his sides and a toothy

grin appears on his face. “Run, run, run!” I hear as I go barreling past him, heading for the end of the earth as I know it. I pick-up speed and then...with a smooth tug on the harness, I am rising up over the ironweed and sage. Yards before the edge, the gentle ridge lift this place is known for greets my wing as my feet, disbelievers, continue to pedal along with nothing between them and the ground but thin air.

Suddenly, I am floating out over the edge and everything, my heartbeat, my breath, time, ceases for a millisecond as I look down. This is the time it takes to know, on an intrinsic, cellular level, that I’m not falling, that I am, at last, flying.

I glide straight out away from the hill, heading for the LZ, the hoots and hollers I feel caught silently in my throat, but my face stretching into a grin that will remain for the rest of the week. As I continue on, giddy and amazed, I know instantly that this experience is one of those that cannot be adequately described or shared, that language will at best only circle around it, never touch its center. I know instantly that this slow motion levitation, this near walking-on-air is the ancient dream of bird-like flight come to life. A minute or so later, as I approach the ground and pull both control toggles to flare the wing and gently step back down out of the sky, I know, too, that I am not quite the same person I was before this flight.

One of the most amazing things about paragliding is the equipment itself: 45-pounds of soaring aircraft that packs down to fit into a backpack. When I first watched a pilot fold his wing to the size of a sleeping bag, nestle it and the harness into a rucksack the size of a large laundry bag, and toss it into the trunk of his car, I knew that the history of aviation had turned a magical, unexpected corner. With the advent of these gliders in the last fifteen years, virtually anyone can have his own diminutive aircraft, hidden in the closet of even a New York City studio apartment between flights. My flying buddy, Mark, stores his glider on top of the refrigerator in his small Manhattan galley kitchen, though this probably has mostly to do with wanting a visual reminder of the place flying occupies in his life every time he makes coffee.

There’s something astonishing, too, about the way the glider comes back out of it’s bag, and when deftly launched by its pilot, transforms itself from a pile of crumpled nylon yardage and a seeming rat’s nest of thin, multi-colored lines into a graceful arc of wing floating overhead in the light breeze, eager to lift off. The transformational magic of this appeals to me on some deep level, no doubt originating in childhood, perhaps connected to the hours spent wishing the umbrella I’d opened over my head could generate enough lift to get me airborne. (As a kid I saw the similarity of the umbrella’s cross-section to that of an airfoil, and to this day I’m convinced that an umbrella held at the right angle of attack generates lift. Yes, I did love the scene with the flying chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.) Perhaps it’s just childlike delight that something so amazingly clever could come out of a bag; that I can walk down the street with an airplane in my backpack, a glider with a 36’ wingspan, a comfortable seat, an instrument panel with altimeter/variometer, GPS, and 2 meter shortwave radio, a supply of drinking water, and an emergency parachute. A glider that’s taken me up to 14,000 feet, and kept me aloft soaring for four hours at a time. The paraglider is the childhood fantasy of a magic carpet grown up into a sophisticated, computer-designed, high-tech, mass-produced reality.

I can’t help but wonder at what Otto Lilienthal or the Wrights would think. They’d be pretty tickled, I’d guess, to see what their turn-of-the-century gliders of wood and fabric, lovely craft in their own right, have evolved into a hundred years later. Would these men, self-sacrificing geniuses whose single-minded dedication to the impossible brought us the gift of flight, be more astonished by the monolithic power and size, comfortable pressurized cabins and sophisticated avionics of a late model airliner, or by the fantastic economy of means of the paraglider? Which aircraft represents the more profound advance, at this stage in the game? The one weighing 250 tons bussing 200 bleary-eyed passengers between continents while they read about tax law in the Journal at 35,000 feet, oblivious to anything outside their pressurized vinyl and plastic cabin-bubble? Or the one carried up a hillside on the back of a 52 year-old woman who has always dreamt of flying with the birds? The craft she skillfully launches into a freshening breeze and guides to a thermal to join a pair of broad-tailed hawks and slowly circle upward en masse? The colorful and silent craft which the hawks, bemused, wheel around for a closer look, mere feet from the wing tip? No doubt Otto and Orville and Wilbur would be blown away by the contemporary jet airliner, but the paraglider would awe them too, with it’s profoundly poetic response to man’s ancient, longing question: “How can I fly?”

The two craft represent opposite ends of the spectrum, not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of speed. From New York to San Francisco the 757 you’re aboard will average an airspeed in the neighborhood of 600 miles per hour. From the north end of the ridge at Torrey Pines Gliderport to the southern end, your paraglider will cruise along with airspeeds of 18 to 35 miles per hour. Add a headwind to this equation and the paraglider’s ground speed may slow to a few miles per hour, or to zero, or even begin to go negative (no fun, unless you have a penchant for flying backwards). Ken Baier, a hang glider pilot from the early days of the sport and a pioneering paraglider pilot in the mid 80’s, told me that when the Hangies first started to fly paragliders they simply couldn’t believe anything could move that slowly and still be flying.

And there is a beauty in this. Have you ever had a flying dream, one in which you gently float upward, and moving at a leisurely rate about like that of a bicycle, take a tour of the trees and rooftops of your neighborhood? Have you flown in your sleep, relaxed and comfortable, to the clouds overhead, passing along slowly enough to study your environs in detail from this bird’s eye view, coming to see and understand this plot of earth in a new light? To some New Ager’s, you’re not really dreaming, you’re astral projecting, sending your consciousness out for a little stroll in the sky while your bod stays at home between the sheets. To me, you’re not really dreaming, you’re flying your paraglider.