Wind Dummy

There's Nothing Like the promise of solo flight to get you watching natural wind socks: treetops, tall grass, steam plumes, flags, birds. Especially the birds if it's a paraglider you'll be strapped to--a piece of cloth without frame or motor that you'll pilot through whatever gust and thermal earth and sun happen to cook up while you hang between them, a wind sock yourself.

I watched the hawks and the turkey vultures on my way up the northeastern edge of the San Francisco Bay toward the hills of Vallejo. It was the middle of April, an overcast morning, and it seemed to me the big soaring meat eaters were working a little harder than usual--tipping, stalling, flapping--to keep from being blown off the ridge lines they were hunting.

Then again, I suppose any wind at all would have had my worried attention that morning. The birdman fever that overtakes some people had just never infected me. In fact, I'd always thought that Icarus was a snotty kid who pretty much got what he deserved.

My instructor, Mark Chirico, assured me that under the right conditions, paragliding was very safe and very easy. He had a 400-foot hillside picked out for us, and he thought that, working one on one, I'd probably be flying from the top by the end of the first day. In a normal class (continued on page 154)Wind Dummy(continued from page 120) of 12 people, he said, everybody would go from the top by the end of the second day, "including the women and children."

Child's play. Sounded good. Except that I've played the idiot beginner too many times to believe the optimistic twaddle the devotees spout as you stand there looking up or looking down at whatever dicey business you're about to try for the first time. These things each have a character all their own, and when adrenaline's involved, nothing's simple.

"Come on up," said Mark. "It's a little breezy, but we can probably find a sheltered area behind some of the big hills."

A couple of hours later, I sat in a Vallejo house with Mark, another instructor named Andy Long and his wife, Jeannie. We were watching a video that had been made a couple of weeks earlier in Washington: Mark--solidly built, dark curly hair--was coaching a pretty blonde woman named Penny LeGate, the star of Seattle's Evening. She looked at the camera and said, "I can't believe that yesterday I'd never seen a paraglider, and now here I am, ready to fly." As for the risk, she said it was "safer than riding a bicycle... and easier to learn."

"Paragliding deserves respect," said Mark when they cut to him. "But it's really simple." Then, after clips of her training exercises, LeGate ran from the top of a gentle hill and flew: a smooth 30-second flight to a nice easy landing.

"I recommend it for everybody," she said at the end of the segment. "Even people who are afraid of heights, like me."

A second video, in French, talked about the popularity of the sport in Europe. Mark translated: Fifty thousand Europeans a year go paragliding, mostly in the Alps. Mark said that he had run a school in Annecy, France, for two years. He'd also organized American hang-gliding and paragliding tours of Europe and has, he says, 1200 air hours in a hang glider.

In fact, many paragliding instructors and entrepreneurs come out of hang gliding. It's a natural transition: from a relatively dangerous and unforgiving sport that requires years to master to one that can be learned in a matter of days by nearly anyone in reasonable shape, which means the commercial possibilities are beyond anything hang gliding could ever have hoped for. After the Evening segment was shown in Seattle, Mark's company, Parapente USA, got 150 inquiries in 24 hours.

•

Red-winged blackbirds rocked back and forth on high wild mustard in the 100-acre meadow below the hillscape Mark had chosen for us. It had been a lush spring in Northern California, and the fields were rich with lupine and poppy scattered amid the real and ancient owners of the land, the grasses. On that morning, we waded through waist-high foxtail and wild oats, each of us with a 15-pound backpack that held our folded paragliders.

The hill itself was a pretty series of uneven terraces, each steeper than the one below it, that rose and narrowed into a sharp ridge that had the contour of a great green wave that seemed about to break over the meadow below. Wind-sculpted trees stood bent witness to the blow on top, as did the ruckle and the wave of the grass up there.

It wasn't that calm even where we were on the lower slopes; gusty, about 15 miles an hour, I thought.

"It's a bit strong," Mark said as we began unpacking the chutes. "It's the top speed of these sails that limits them. If you jump into a wind that's blowing faster than these things can fly--about twenty-five miles an hour--you're likely to get blown over the back of the hill, and that's not fun."

He laid my chute on the grass and stretched the lines and the harness downhill in front of it. Then he pointed to the fluorescent pink, yellow, blue and turquoise parts of the sail. Essentially, it's a high-tech rectangular parachute, about 30 feet from tip to tip, seven feet from front to rear. It's made of tough, light material and is divided into chambers that run front to rear and are open along the leading edge, so that the entire thing inflates when it's pulled up into the wind. The lines from the front and rear edges cascade together just above the harness to form two front and two rear risers. Separate lines, each with a hand loop, run to both the left and the right rear corners of the wing and are the brakes.

Mark buckled himself into the harness, faced downhill and took the front risers and the brakes into his hands.

"I'm going to launch facing into the wind--missionary style," he said. He arched his body, pulled the lines, took two steps forward and the huge kite sprung up over his head, where it began bucking and torquing in the big wind. He staggered, pulled on the right brake, then the left, in an attempt to stabilize the wing over his head, and after about 30 seconds of struggle, he pulled on the rear risers and the chute collapsed like an obedient dog that had been told to sit.

"This sail is a station wagon, a battleship," he said. "It's big and slow and it catches a lot more air than the high-performance models. It's also a lot more stable when you get it flying."

He asked if I had any questions, then buckled me into the harness and said, "This is just ground handling. There's nothing to fear."

I appreciated the reassurance, but I wasn't afraid of anything yet. I didn't know enough to be afraid, and besides, I wasn't going anywhere in this exercise. The object was to get the canopy up over my head and just sort of steer it around in place.

On the count of three, I lunged forward, the sail filled, jumped into the wind 17 feet up and then, in the middle of my first forward step, ripped me backward, spun me around and dragged me ten feet or so across the hillside in a scene that must have looked a lot like those moments in Western movies where some poor bastard is lashed to a buckboard and drug all the way out of town. That's the way it felt, anyway.

Mark told me to try it again, to drive harder with my legs, to let go of the forward risers sooner. I did, and this time the wind spun me off to the right, got me running as if I were late, then yanked me off my feet and bounced me in the deep grass.

Mark decided that maybe a reverse inflation might be a better technique in a wind as big as we had. He turned me in my harness so I was facing uphill toward the grounded chute, which would give me better leverage as it flew. The wind calmed a notch, and this time when I pulled, the wing climbed over my head, hovered there, and for a few seconds, everything seemed possible. When I turned downhill to start my run, however, a gust caught me and turned the whole thing into another dragging.

Mark moved me up the hill to a steeper section, on the thought that gravity might help. It didn't, and for the next couple of hours, I worked like a Clydesdale that was going to be cut from the team. I ran, I pulled, I grunted and swore, I stumbled over little granite uglies hidden in the grass, I veered and skidded and was dragged till the lupine lay in great ruined swaths behind me.

Finally, Mark suggested we take the rest of the afternoon off. The wind had risen out of the beginner's zone, and he thought that maybe if we waited till sunset, conditions would calm--"glass off," he called it--and maybe then we could get a flight or two.

•

Around six that evening, the four of us stood in a natural bowl of hills behind Blue Rock Springs Park, a couple of miles from the hill we'd used that morning. The poppies had rolled themselves into their tight evening sheaths and the overcast had burned away, but the glass-off we'd hoped for hadn't happened. In fact, the wind had come up to something like 20 miles an hour, more in its gustier moments. Andy and Mark watched the natural wind indicators and talked glider-pilot micrometeorology with each other. They guessed the speed of the upper winds by the thrashing of the tops of the 100-foot eucalyptus trees. They used the riffling of the oats downhill from us to time the gust cycles. Where the grass swirled like long hair in the front seat of a convertible, they called it a thermal cycle.

As I listened, it reminded me of my days in the surf, out there trying to read the waves. Water and wind are a lot alike in the way they move. The difference, of course, is that you can look an ocean wave in the face, judge its shape and speed, see the backwash, the sidewash and the rip current. The wind is a ghost that sweeps toward you, leaving only rumors of its mood in the treetops, on the grass. For the real story, you have to get on it and ride.

"We're on the edge here," said Mark as he spread his chute, buckled his harness. A moment later, he tugged on the risers, the sail snapped into the air, then jumped him around in place. He took two prancing steps forward and he was up, straight up, as if he'd pressed an elevator button. He hovered, gained altitude, then moved slowly forward against the heavy wind. Fifteen seconds later, 20 feet down the hill, he pulled hard on the brakes and stepped to a landing.

"That was frightening," he said as he climbed back toward us with one of those "Whoa, Momma" smiles on his face. "The way I went up means the air is in excess of twenty miles an hour, and as I got higher, I had the brakes all the way off for maximum speed and I still wasn't really penetrating. Another five miles an hour, it would have maybe taken me up five hundred feet and then back over the top of the hill."

I looked in the direction he was pointing. "Maybe into that power pole?" I said.

"Who knows?" he said.

A half hour later, Mark was still holding out for things' settling into an evening calm, and on that hope, the two of us put our packed chutes on our backs and hiked a five-mile loop through the hills. The sun set, the wind stayed up, and when it was clear we weren't going to fly, Mark did his best to ease my disappointment.

"This is what it's really all about," he said. "In a beautiful place--look at this light--going out for a little hike and being able to leave the earth. You'll see. Tomorrow could be perfect."

And it was. Or at least it started out that way.

By the time I joined them on the hill the next morning, Mark had already flown from the top and was rhapsodizing about the conditions. "Light winds on the lower sections, fifteen miles an hour on top," he said, pointing to the 400-foot crest. "You'll be flying from up there in a couple of hours."

We slogged to a point about 100 feet high through grass so thick it untied my shoes. I laid out my sail, got into the harness, then listened to an admonition that would have nearly haunting significance before the day was over.

"Remember," he said as he attached a radio receiver to the shoulder strap of my harness. "Once you're up there, you are the one with the ultimate perspective. You must not fly behind the hill. You must not fly into the hill. If we tell you to do something that is not in your best interest, don't do it. You are the pilot. I'm empowering you now. You signed the liability waiver."

And a hell of a waiver it was, too. In all my trips to the edge--ice climbing, rock-climbing, ski jumping, sky diving, wing walking, learning to drive a top-fuel dragster--I'd never seen anything as long or as officious as that release. It was five pages and it required my signature in two places and my initials in nine others beneath clauses that exempted Mark and everybody even vaguely connected to him from any lawsuit I might bring if the worst came true. The grisly document made it plain that no matter what the paragliding aficionados tell you about how safe this game is, their lawyers aren't buying a word of it.

And you can't blame them, really. Paragliding is so new in the United States that it wasn't until this past spring that it was even possible to be certified to teach it. The certification process, organized by the newly formed American Paragliding Association, takes four days, costs about $300 and graduated its first class of ten in April of 1989. Even so, no one is required to have any training at all to teach the sport. "Which means," Mark said, "that anybody with the equipment can get up there and throw you off the mountain."

Near the bottom of the last page of the waiver, I was required to copy this statement: I Realize that Paragliding is an Inherently Dangerous Sport that May Result in my Injury or Even Death.

Before I signed it, I underlined the word Death for dramatic flourish, but on the hill that morning, before my first little flight, I wasn't feeling any particular fear, just the low buzz that comes with hard focus. The wind was smooth, small and steady, and the angle of the hill shallow enough that even if the chute collapsed on me, I figured I wouldn't be bounced much worse than I had been the day before.

Mark stepped down the hill a ways and made a radio check. I ran on the count of three, the chute went up, dipped left slightly, then stabilized as I got a little speed, and two steps later--Kittyhawk--I swung free of the hillside and was airborne. The kite gained altitude in the first few seconds, became solid on the breeze, and after that, it was just a matter of taking the gentle ride 100 yards or so to a smooth stand-up landing. Nothing to it; as easy as they'd said. Once I was in the air, everything about the big sail fell trustworthy and maneuverable, until finally, as I pulled both brake toggles to my knees, it seemed a shame to be landing.

As I trudged back up the hill, Jeannie took off from about the same spot I had. She weighed only 110 pounds, and the wind let her on even more easily than it had me. I watched as she floated almost motionless at times, glided slowly over her shadow, then met up with it weightlessly on touchdown.

I took my second flight off steeper ground from a point twice as high as my first, and this time, I was in the air for about 30 seconds. Mark talked me through a right turn after take-off, then a left back into the wind, then down into another easy landing. It was a great sensation to be wheeling around a couple of hundred feet up like that and, as we climbed the long steep toward the top of the hill, I changed my mind about Icarus. Even after two small flights, I wanted more, longer, higher. I wasn't exactly looking for a flight that would melt the feathers off my wings, but the idea of a jump from 400 feet was full of a lot more exhilaration than fright. I think they called it hubris when Icarus was a boy.

The wind grew stronger as we climbed, and by the time we reached the small sloping meadow that was to be our launch plateau, it seemed to be blowing about twice what it had been on the lower slopes. The view was sensational: Vallejo, the north end of the San Francisco Bay with its bridges and ships. Just behind us, an old barbed-wire fence bisected the flat crest of the hilltop, which was covered by a ground-hugging sweep of daisies.

Andy stood ready in the meadow below to guide me toward a landing, and while he and Mark discussed things over the radio, I decided to take a little wind check of my own: I pissed across it, and when the force of the breeze didn't bend or fray the stream, I decided it wasn't as strong as I was making it out to be.

"If your morning cup of coffee didn't wake you up, this will," said Mark, pointing to the steep drop just in front of us. Then, while he gave me last-minute instructions, I hung my tape recorder from my harness and turned it on. If things went well, the tape would amount to a hot real-time notebook entry, I thought. If things went badly ... well ... I figured it would be the equivalent of those little black boxes they dig out of the wreckage of commercial jets.

"If I say stop, you stop, but I don't expect that to happen," said Mark. Then, while he waited for the right wind cycle, I stood ready, felt my juices rise, told myself there couldn't be any hesitation.

"Advance," yelled Mark, and I did, but as the wing came up, it veered viciously to the right, and the next thing I heard was "Stop ... stop!" I pulled both brake lines and the chute collapsed.

"What the hell happened?" I said. I'd done everything I knew to do, and still the wind had taken things out of my control. It felt terrible.

"You just got off a little crooked; you could have kept going, but let's make things picture perfect."

Again I waited, and this time, when Mark shouted "Go," I grunted, broke forward as hard as I could and was off ... and then hooking right--horribly right--toward a spine of rocks that was sticking out of the hillside. At that point, the voice on my tape is Mark's, insistent and rising, "Brake left, brake left, brake left!" I heard him, but it was all happening much too fast and adrenaline was in the way of everything, including whatever the hell "left" meant, which didn't get through to my overloaded brain until I was a split second from the sharp granite teeth. I pulled hard on the left toggle, missed the rocks by what seemed an inch, swept away from the hill out onto the breeze, safe, free, 400 feet up.

For the next few moments on the tape, there is nothing but my heavy breathing, then Mark's voice over the radio: "Now to Andy," he said. Then he laughed a tight, nervous laugh. I answered with an anguished laugh of my own, then hit a pocket of air that lifted me 20 feet or more, and my worried spirits with it. "That's a thermal; you're OK," said Mark, but by then, I was much better than OK. I was flying. I came out of my left turn smoothly, got myself on a glide path toward Andy, saw the cars on the road below pulling over to watch, and then just sat there wishing I didn't have to come down. I glided above Andy at about 100 feet, and then, 70 seconds from my ugly take-off, I stalled gently to a very pretty landing.

I whooped, and as I turned to look back at the crest, I saw a golden eagle climb into the thermal I had flown through, watched it gyre easily to 1000 feet, then strike off to the west.

As Jeannie waited on top for a cycle light enough to fly, Jim Leech and his ten-year-old son, Timmy, joined Andy and me in the landing zone. Timmy was eager to get into the air. He'd had six previous flights from 500 feet, he said, and what he really wanted was to make a flight without a radio. It was the kind of bravado you expect from ten-year-olds, to whom adrenaline is an almost unknown chemical. Still, it made me feel old. His dad, a highly experienced hang glider, was a little more skeptical about paragliding and was playing a gentle Daedalus to his son's Icarus: He just wasn't sure those frail ships were up to the vagaries of the wind. "My first two flights, I didn't feel nervous about paragliders at all," he said. "It was after I got some experience I started worrying about them."

Then he and Andy talked about a recent fatality in Leavenworth, Washington. An instructor named Jeff Splitgerber had sent three students ahead of him off the top of a mountain and then launched himself below. The students landed safely; he didn't. They found his body on the ground below. Nobody saw what had happened.

After two false starts, Jeannie launched from the top, rose in the thermal, then flew a long, slow course to her husband. Then Mark flew, made a 360-degree turn in the thermal, got some lift, then glided in. "Nice flight," he said as he got to me. "I'm glad you didn't turn out to be a pencil-neck geek."

Mark and Jim talked about where on the hillside would be safe for Timmy to fly. At 85 pounds, the boy was maybe just heavy enough to fly this wind from halfway up the hill if they put a packed chute on his back for ballast.

"This is the time you need a wind dummy," said Mark. "Somebody you can throw out there to test things."

"A what?" I said.

Jim laughed. A little hang-gliding humor, he said. "But it's not the way Mark made it sound. In hang gliding, you want somebody to be a wind dummy if it's almost, but maybe not quite, soarable. If he goes up, that's good. If he just glides down, we wait for a while."

"Yeah, sure," I said.

A few minutes later, Timmy stood in harness and baby-blue helmet about the 200-foot level. He'd wanted to start from a higher point, but Mark and his dad had said no, and when he took his first step, it was clear they'd made the right decision. The boy lifted immediately, hovered almost motionless, then moved very slowly forward into the breeze, gained altitude like a weather balloon, then moved ahead again without seeming to drop at all. His dad video-taped his long, slow glide to a landing so gentle that it looked like he'd been set down by a stork.

Over the next half hour, the wind rose. Andy was the last to go from the top and the updraft was enough to keep him soaring back and forth across the face of the hill for three and a half minutes. It was a gorgeous sight. Two eagles joined him in the thermals and played above him as he laughed and shouted. "I was really skied out," he said when he landed. Then he added, "It's nice but lifty." Mark took a short ride from mid-point on the hill and decided it was too blustery for any more flights from the crest that afternoon. He predicted that it would glass off around sunset and that if we went back then, I could probably soar the way Andy had.

•

The sun was nearly down by the time Mark and I began the long climb from the lower meadow toward the top of the hill. It was just the two of us, and although the wind at the bottom seemed light, the grass and the trees up top looked to be taking a whipping. The higher we climbed, the heavier it blew, and when we finally stood face into the wind on the crest, I didn't like it at all. It reminded me too much of the wind that had played me like a paper puppet the day before. Only worse.

"How hard do you think it's blowing?" I asked.

Mark smiled a gung-ho smile and said, "I'd say this is the most glorious fifteen miles an hour you'll ever know. Just be awed."

"Feels over the edge to me," I said. "But then, this whole thing is over the edge, isn't it?"

I laid out my chute, which immediately took a little skitter across the ground, back toward the barbed-wire fence. I flattened it, then climbed into the harness thinking to myself, What the hell are you doing? Mark checked my buckles, told me again that this was incredible air. I turned on my tape recorder, but when I listened to it later, most of my words had been lost under the roar of the wind.

"Talk about a wind dummy--this is him," I told Mark.

"This is a perfect soaring wind," he said. "Stand there for a minute, feel it, think about it."

I thought about it. Bad thoughts. It felt like 20 or 25 miles an hour to me, and the picture I got as I tried to see myself through the launch was me all hell out of control as soon as I stepped off, and then ... who knows? After two or three minutes, I still couldn't quite bring myself to say that crucial little yes that gets said somewhere inside you just before you actually do one of these damn things. But I couldn't quite say no, either, didn't want to say no; I stood there asking myself if maybe I just weren't crazy enough anymore, if fear weren't maybe having a cheap little victory over me, one that I would regret when I was back at my typewriter. Or was this just purely nuts? A lot smaller wind than the one I was standing in had almost sailed me hip first into a nasty pile of granite just a few hours before.

About the time I moved into a fourth round of yes-no-maybe with myself, Mark stepped over and said, "I forgot the radios. That scrubs it. I wouldn't want you to fly this wind without a receiver."

A huge, gentle wave of relief swept over me.

"At least you were all the way in the harness," he said. "You were ready."

We decided I'd walk halfway down the hill, maybe fly from a lower slope. But, as I gathered my chute, Mark had second thoughts. He stepped in front of me, put his arms out and said, "This is a wonder wind. It's under twenty miles an hour. You can fly it. It's perfect. Your call.

"Oh, shit, I thought as everything in me went stiff again. Another chance to back out. Goddamn it ... look him in the eye ... the coach ... ask yourself if you can trust his judgment ... his 1200 hours in a hang glider.... You have to trust a coach, don't you? ... You were brought up to trust your coaches.... I mean, they needle you, push you, abuse you, and if you can't take it, you're a wimp who's going to spend his whole life stuck doing only those things he's sure he can do. Ah, but finally--especially in risky games--his experience or his certificates don't matter and the word wimp is just a cruel and empty piece of schoolyard bullshit. It's your ass out there and there's no excuse for spending it stupidly.

"If it's my call ... I'm not going," I told Mark. "I'd rather just watch ... see what you can do in a wind like this."

He smiled, said that was fine, and as he laid his chute out, I stepped aside to watch.

It was almost dark. The very last of the sunset colors lay in faint layers above a fog bank that was moving toward us from San Francisco. The lights below us were coming on. A steam plume 15 miles across the bay lay perfectly parallel to the land. Mark stood quietly in his harness for nearly five minutes, Zenning himself up for the flight, I thought. Now and then, he held a hand up into the heavy wind.

He turned himself around for a reverse inflation, hesitated, then lifted his chute into the air and was yanked violently--las if by wild horses--toward the barbed wire. He ran to stay on his feet, then tried to dig his heels in, skidded, fell, was slammed with a horrible thump into the fence, then was raked over it by the still-flying sail, which collapsed into the daisies 20 feet behind.

I ran to the fence and started over it, sure that Mark had been terribly mauled; but he was up almost immediately, saying he was all right, breathing hard, swearing at himself, gathering his sail. When he was back over the fence, we checked his injuries, which were amazingly light for the way he'd gone into the wire. He had a puncture on his ankle and some scratches on the same leg. He told me not to worry, that he'd just had a tetanus shot, that he was fine. Then he said, "About time for me to get back on the horse that threw me," laid his chute on the ground and stood in the ready position.

This is crazy, I thought, but I didn't have a chance to say it, because Mark was into a monolog, scolding himself about what had happened.

"Hang glider, paraglider or anything ... it's a mind thing.... Sets you on edge before you ever get off ... and you have to have your shit together.... Sometimes you have your shit together, sometimes you don't.... That wasn't a physical error, it was a mental thing.... This is the time when all the dark shadows come up--it's blowing, there aren't a bunch of other people flying and you're all by yourself on the mountain. And as much as you tell yourself the air is fine, you are going up into it in an air bag...."

It was nearly pitch-dark, and as foolish as it seemed for Mark to be attempting another flight, it occurred to me that the steep walk down was going to be treacherous without light, and that maybe with his leg the way it was, flying was his best chance. I told him I was going to start down, while I could still see a little. He said fine, that he might even join me.

I lost sight of the upper plateau as soon as I started down the steep upper sections. I expected to see Mark fly into view at some point, and when he didn't, I worried that maybe he'd crashed again or collapsed from shock. In any case, I knew I had to keep moving. Twenty minutes later, I spotted Mark descending the upper slopes, his bunched chute slung over his shoulder like a huge flower.

We met at the car. "It's good to get your ass kicked now and then," he said.

I nodded, said I knew what he meant, and I did. But mostly, I was feeling good that when it had been my turn up there in the shadow of the wind, it had been my fear I'd trusted.

"Mark faced downhill and pulled the lines. The chute began bucking and torquing in the wind."