I was ten. I was undersized. It didn't matter: kite flying was the Great Equalizer. And I flew the American Dream kite in 1964.
Once your kite was in the
air, playing out your kite line and gaining altitude was an art, and if you
were successful, so was your flight. You would let out a section very
slowly so as to maintain tension, always anxious if it started to dip. You had to keep the tension on at all times
until the stronger winds got hold of you.
The American
Beauty
The dynamics of kiting
changed dramatically once you played out the standard 100 yard roll of
string and then tied on another. For one
thing, the additional force exerted would frequently cause the string to
break. That is what always happened every time we tried tying on roll
number three. For another, the farther
out your kite went, the lesser the gain in height proportionate to
distance downrange; in other words, past the one to one vertical to
horizontal you enjoyed with the first 100 yards of string, you were lucky
to get one foot of vertical for every two feet of horizontal after that.
That and the weight of the string meant you were inevitably low, and the act of
winding it in inevitably would cause it to get squirrely, which meant once
again that you would end up in the trees.
So we all knew that going
past the magic 100 yard mark generally meant that the flight - however long we
could keep it up in the air - was doomed. No biggie. Chuck Yeager suffered a few setbacks, as did
the Apollo Seven. Sacrifice was the
price of progress.
The monster flight was
the ultimate and attainable ambition for those of us in the neighborhood with
an allowance or otherwise gainfully employed, and thus able to afford flying
the kite for an afternoon and then simply letting it go. I was in my
second year as a paper boy and grossing around $30 per week between that
and yard work, so money was no object, and there was purely nothing more
entertaining than releasing your kite after it reached its peak
height and watching it run before the wind. It would pirouette,
spin, fall, come back upright, and then spin and fall some more, frequently
taking minutes to fall to the ground, just as frequently landing
a quarter mile or more away, and ever so occasionally flying a long way
downrange, the sheer drag from the string acting to keep the kite flight
worthy.
The Release was a high
moment on the street. It would be announced well in advance so that
everybody else could get themselves in position to watch. Once the pilot
let the string go, all other activity ceased; we would watch it and comment,
connoisseurs of kiting, unconsciously backpedalling down the street in order to
keep the kite in view for a scant few more seconds, and just as unconsciously
learning something about geometry, perspective and horizons in
the process.
As soon as it dropped out of
sight below the treetops, I and my friends would run like mad in hopes of
retrieving it. How many was the time that my little sister would
come running behind us and my mother would yell "Peter, you hold your
sister's hand if you cross State Fair!" And if Mom was not
there to witness the dash, her words would still ring out, dragged no
doubt from a conscience equal parts concerned about my little sister's
inability to look both ways before crossing, and the certainty of the
consequences of not holding her hand across State Fair, or any other major
intersection for that matter.
If Little Sister was around,
inevitably I would be forced to lag behind chasing my own kite,
yelling encouragement to trusted Outriders who surged ahead.
We ran without particularly
high hopes that the kite would be reusable: they were mostly too fragile
to survive crashing to the ground. No, the objective was simply to relish
in finding out how far it had gone, tracking it like bloodhounds, following the
length of string as it ran ahead of us, now just out of reach, now
reachable. We never did try to grab it though, and the kite string would continue
to be towed, and inevitably draped over trees, houses, or played out along
the ground. Neighborhood kids downwind frequently got to your
kite before you did, but kite flyers had a code: It didn’t stop
being your kite just because it flew out of your neighborhood. Plus, you had an organized pack in pursuit,
whereas the Finder was likely just some random kid. And besides, it wasn’t the kite we were
worried about: it was the precious tail.
If the kite was gettable, we
got the tail, and bragging rights for however far downrange the kite flew
unaided. Another kid in the neighborhood
had the record in that respect, a “two roller” that made it almost to Seven
Mile, a full half mile away from State Fair.
His record stood for a long time.
Everybody aspired to fly
farther and higher than anybody else, but verifying the Monster Flight was nebulous
outside of your own street. There was
always somebody who claimed to have gone ever higher and farther, but most
of it was apocryphal, the unsubstantiated bragging of a kid who knew a kid
down the street or one block over on Yacama, but never witnessed by
credible persons. My feat of two hundred yards of string had been
duplicated in my presence but not surpassed, so on our street, that was the
benchmark. Of course, we didn't use words like "benchmark", but
we all knew what it was.
I remember one very
memorable flight we attempted on what was then Oakland Avenue in Detroit,
now known as I-75, just one block East of my street, Omira. Back then,
Oakland Avenue was two lanes in each direction with a boulevard about 150 feet
wide in between. It ran south almost all the way downtown
with almost no trees for the length of it. You would have thought it was perfect for
kite flying, what with the open space, no cars and such, but strangely, we rarely
flew there. In retrospect, we stayed on
our street because we wanted the audience.
The admiration of adults was a powerful incentive to fly your kite
well.
Still, we were working up to
the three roll flight, and occasionally recreation had to take a back seat to
engineering. In particular, we were
experimenting with playing out around a hundred feet of string before the
launch as a means to get a kite airborne on low wind days. Remember that the sweet sustainable winds
were just above the housetops, regardless of how little wind you had at ground
level. Playing out a hundred feet was tricky
because you had much greater stress on your string than the standard launch,
which started out with around twenty feet, and you running like Hell and simultaneously
letting out more line as you ran. With
the 100 foot launch, you also needed a Spotter who held the kite and ran with
you, letting go once you had tension on the line.
Suffice to say we had some
kinks to work out, and desired not an audience to witness our failures. So Oakland Avenue is where we did our dry
runs, and with all the extra space, it was kind of like our Bonneville Salt
Flats. We quickly mastered the Long
Play. Through trial and error we found
that a hundred feet of line could take the stress of running, and gained
altitude quickly to let us get above the housetops. Perfecting the technique vastly expanded the
possibilities. For one thing, kite
flying was now doable on two days out of three, whereas before it might have
been only one in five.
We were that much closer to
the Monster Flight. It would not be long
before we got our chance.
