Kite Flying In America, Part III

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.