Soon we'll be flying

(Originally posted July 7, 2009)

If you read Eclipse Court, you'll have caught the reference to hang-gliding in yesterday's post. After dreaming about it for, well, decades--a couple of them--Shirley and I are finally going to try it. Of course it isn't just for fun in our case; it's research.

I haven't got to the part in PA where the "single-wing" shows up, and in ak and EC it's just sort of there and taken for granted as a mode of transport, so you might have gathered that Chevenga, Niku and crew fly around on something, and Chevenga is even loopy enough to have twisted Niku's arm into coming up with a way of transferring a person from one of these contraptions to another.

The "single-wing" or, in Niah, moyawa, was Shirley's idea. Niku and the Niah people are hers by origin and they have secretly retained--and improved upon, over centuries--pre-Fire hang-glider technology. Shirley actually sprung this on me in a role-play many years ago, and you'll see the results in PA in, oh, maybe a month or three. Later on in the story, the single-wing will become of crucial import strategically, and we've had much fun recently conceiving the invention of a horse-drawn land-towing device to launch wings, the first-ever capture of a wing and flyer, both intact, by enemies, and so forth. We have yet to have someone re-invent the parachute.

Meanwhile in ak, at some point there's going to be a poem by Chevenga, who is not typically a poet, about perhaps the only thing that could induce him to wax poetic: doing a loop-de-loop on a double wing with Niku. The A-niah love to make love aloft, so you can bet that C & N joined the Fifth Mill version of the Mile-High Club long ago (though not yet in what's posted). Incidentally, in case you doubt that everything has a website these days, here is the official website of the Mile-High Club. Alas, googling "hang gliding sex" doesn't turn up much but fantasies.

But everything we've conceived and written about hang-gliding Fifth-Millennium-style, we've done without actually experiencing it, 20th or 21st-century-style. The closest I've got to it was trying running with a glider on my shoulders for a bit, about 11 years ago. This was with a dear friend and his instructor on each side, both of whom could outrun me handily, so that eventually I had to roll out... probably I should have told them I'd had a C-section five weeks before. Shirley did the same thing, minus the C-section. But that didn't get us into the air.

Now, however, we're going to slip the surly bounds of earth with the help of High Perspectives, based near Pickering, Ontario. We were originally going to do a "low and slow"--Hang Gliding 101-- lesson yesterday (July 6) but the weather didn't co-operate, so now we're scheduled for tomorrow. Because that doesn't get you that far off the ground--you're a rank beginner flying solo and learning the basics--we're also doing a "Tandem Discovery" flight, which is where you go up along with an experienced pilot, the glider being towed by a motorboat, next week, weather permitting.

We're also taking our kids--Tris, age 14, is going to do both low-and-slow and tandem, and Raphi, 11, is going to do tandem. We WILL have the video camera.

How did we get the money to do this? Well, it was Shirley who did, and in quite the spectacular way, but we can't tell you exactly how until August 22, for reasons that we also can't tell you until August 22. But the story's worth the wait, trust me.

Anyway... I'd be lying if I denied that I am a little nervous. The other side, the thrill that I'll be going up in an actual hang-glider, hasn't quite kicked in. I don't think I'm going to really know it's real until I'm at the hang gliding school and looking at and touching and feeling and smelling and harnessing into an actual real-life moyawa.

I can't speak for Shirley, but you can take it to the bank that I'm going to write about the experience. I might wax poetic... for sure you can expect prose. I am hoping there will not have to be too much in the way of whining to the effect of "OMG everything we've written about it is WRONG WRONG WRONG and we have to CHANGE IT ALL!"

Will Shirley, or I, or both, end up tyromos--Niah for "in love with the sky"--and move heaven and earth to pursue hang-gliding expertise? You never know.

Whatever happens, from those moments on, whatever we write in our books about our characters flying will be informed by our own experience, which should make it all richer and more real and more beautiful. Aside from the actual flying, that's the part I'm looking forward to the most.

Wish us safe flights and happy landings!