By Tom McGowan
I dream of there being a kite college, a place of kite making and flying. I envision them at a pep rally yelling, “K! I! T! E! What is it you want from me? A kite! A kite! A kite!”
They would have multiple classes on designing kites, building kites, coloration of kites, big kites and small kites, simple kites and complex kites, kite tails, kite string to use, the length of string… And, of course, entire days spent on wind — windy days, puffy days, steady days, and foggy days where you have to run with a kite because when it’s foggy, there is no wind.
There is an elegance to kites, a free spirit in its use: There are no batteries or long instruction manuals, just a bit of assembly, tie the knot, hold it up and run into the wind.
It’s simple, like the world before cell phones.
My life with kites started with my mother. Her side of the family were masons and builders, good with their hands and good at creating things. One of her many skills was sewing. When I was perhaps 10 years old, the two of us spent more than a few hours taking a sheet of silk and two pieces of wood, stitching things together on a Singer treadle sewing machine, getting some string from the kitchen, and going over to the park across the street. The park had “The Flats” as we called them – vast playing fields which were about half a mile long and almost as wide. A good place to run to get up some speed and keep away from kite-eating trees. My mom held the kite and I ran with it and she held the kite and I ran with it and she held the kite and I ran with it and I ran and ran and ran with it and it never did take off. This was before YouTube. We were missing the point on something and did not have a clue as to what was wrong.
Perhaps the wood was too heavy – it might have been a pair of yardsticks, or perhaps the front of the kite was not configured to bow out (it has to do with sailboats and sails and velocity over the surface and physics and things which I don’t fully understand). Whatever it was, I know it was important to getting a kite up in the air (or not).
You have to find your place, a place that has wind, to enjoy a kite. Friends introduced us to St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia some 40 years ago. Being an engineer and thus understanding how many things work, I know that if you have cold water and warm air you have wind. I’ve seen it on a massive scale along the Columbia River in Oregon where huge wind machines are set up on both sides of the river. In the morning when there are no thermals they are at rest, and as the day starts to warm up the sunlit air they start spinning and cranking out power until around sunset, starting up the next day with that cold river running through the bluffs and sunlight-warmed air doing its daily job. It’s simple science, yet amazing to watch.
At St. Simons Island, if it isn’t right at dawn there’s almost always wind — wind of many levels, winds blowing in different directions, usually on-shore winds, sometimes cross-shore winds, and rarely winds going out to sea. Then there are the foggy days, however, when the wind is near zero. One foggy morning, when the wind was not there to do its job, I walked quickly down the beach to keep a kite up just 25 feet or so. Near time for me to turn back, I chanced upon a 10-year-old girl who wanted to give it a try. I managed to capture a photo of her running into the fog. It was a ghostly image: arm raised, with her kite fading into the grayness.
Instead of building kites, I have to admit I ask Amazon to send me packs of three – you’ll understand why it’s a 3-pack later. They come in all sorts of colors and designs. I flew one with a dog on it, a colorful dog, a cartoon dog. I stopped to chat with a young woman who seemed interested in the kite. It turned out she was a teacher of young children and she told me that that’s the “PAW Patrol” cartoon dogs, and my kite’s dog is named Chase. Well, I had no idea, but have since learned watching TV that it’s a “pack” of cartoon dogs that save the day every day when there’s an evil person, an environmental catastrophe, or someone who needs rescuing. It is quite a program! And she told me the children just love the PAW Patrol. That made me smile.
As I walk the beach on a windy day with my arm held high by the kite, I do look for folks that I think might be interested. This spans a range. Children, certainly, but older adults and occasionally people in their 20s, too. I walk over and they’re smiling because they’re looking up already, squinting, necks craned backwards, and I ask them when was the last time they flew a kite. Some of them have never, never, never flown a kite and I say, “Would you like to hold on to it?” and they say, “Yes” and I hand over the string grip. Sometimes older people tell me that they haven’t flown a kite since they were 10 years old. I’m not saying that they have tears in their eyes, but I can see that it’s affecting them, holding on to a bit of their youth. One young man in his 20s was so enthusiastic he wanted me to take a picture of him and the kite. That’s a challenge to do if it’s up at 300 feet. I get on the ground looking up and hoping for the best shot of the person and kite. If their phone has a very good lens, by expanding that photo and expanding that photo and doing it some more, they may find that colorful kite at the end of the string. The sunlight makes them glow (as I write this, my current one is black trimmed on the leading edges, with bold sunset red fading to a California yellow at the tail).
I recently came across a family of five children and three adults. As I handed the string grip to the youngest child — perhaps 3 years old – one of her older sisters carefully and secretly threaded two fingers around the string lest her little sister let go, or with a gust perhaps become airborne too.
At the end of the day on the last day that I’m on the beach — and sometimes before that too, just depending — when I’m about to leave I find someone to give my kite to. They go through a stage of disbelief (few of us are conditioned to receive random presents). But yes, yes, you can keep this kite. “Yes, it’s yours now,” I say, and yes, you are happy that you now have a kite. And when I leave the beach, I look backwards and my kite is still up there in the sky. That makes me smile and that makes me happy, too.
