The Wind Beneath My Feet

From the laundry room came a piercing scream … “My delicate underwear is completely tangled with your Velcro helmet liner! How many times have I told you…”?

I tried calming the situation by assuring her, “Don’t worry dear, good commercial grade Velcro is hard to damage.”

I was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast as Cheryl entered with a large ball of fabric just taken from the dryer. I could tell by the look on her face that I would be buying new underwear when suddenly she looked out the back window and realized she had left the porch umbrella up all night.

“Oh crumb! Look at the umbrella rocking back and forth in the wind. I’d better go out there and collapse it before it gets torn to shreds.”

Now mind you, I would have gotten up to do it but she was the one who left it up all night and besides, I didn’t want to come back to cold eggs, so I sat and watched as she wandered onto the deck.

Mary Poppins. I guess that was the best way to describe it. Mary made it look so easy floating over London holding her umbrella. Cheryl reached up into the spokes of the umbrella to pull the pin to collapse the cloth but in order to reach the pin she tilted the pole at an angle. The wind rolled under the tilted umbrella lifting it and Cheryl off the deck and across the lawn. The resulting landing looked nothing like Mary’s graceful landings…but I made a mental note not to mention that.

Now, since I’m going to get yelled at for telling of Cheryl’s little adventure in flying, the destruction of our deck umbrella and my little laundry faux pas, I thought I should also mention another misadventure from my boyhood: The Leonardo da Vinci School of Flying.

Living my boyhood on the cliff tops over Bellingham Bay, we encountered some mighty winds from off the water. They would blow across the bay and gain speed funneling up the cliffs, some days tearing roofing off houses and hurling lawn furniture from one yard to the next. It was during these storms that my best friend Chuck and I would go to the cliff’s edge to practice flight. In a simple explanation, we would unzip our jackets, grab the coat from the bottom and lift it up over our heads forming a sail. We would then lean out over the cliff into the blast of the wind and hover at a precarious angle out over nothing. But really, who hasn’t done that before? The coats lacked the basic ability to give us lift off the ground. It was time to design a human kite.

Going back to Chuck’s garage, we found some two-inch lath strip lumber his dad had been saving. Quickly, we cut and nailed the wood into a seven-foot-high diamond shape. Luckily, his dad also had a nice rain poncho which he used for hunting and probably wouldn’t miss.

We stapled that tightly to the frame. It now looked like a very large kite. For sturdiness, a vertical and horizontal brace like a cross was nailed into the center of the kite.

The sun had already set by the time we packed the kite down Marine Drive. We passed my adopted grandfather, Elwood K, who was sitting in the old yellow Dodge pickup at the end of his driveway sipping from a bottle of Canadian Mist. He was quite used to our failed experiments.

“What are you fool boys up to this time? Don’t make me have to come save you again!” He had an exaggerated opinion of his life saving capabilities, but he got out of his truck and followed us to the cliff edge anyway.

Separating the homes on Marine Drive from the cliff was the BNSF railroad tracks which ran from Canada to the southern United States. The trains passed by many times each day. As we battled the wind carrying the kite along the top of the cliff, we could hear the distant whistle of an approaching southbound train.

As I look back now as an adult, I realize we had more adventurism than brains. What were we supposing we were going to accomplish with this seven-foot kite on the edge of a cliff? Well, I guess we just wanted to see if we could hover in the wind. It was now dark as the three of us stood looking out over the bay.

“Ok Chuck, see if it works!” I yelled against the wind. Elwood and I lifted the kite upright onto its tail and held tight to steady it. The train was less than a quarter mile away. Chuck backed up to the kite and slid his arms through the cross frame. Grabbing it tightly in his hands he pulled the kite into his body and the three of us stepped toward the cliff edge. He then leaned it into the full blast of the wind.

I am sure that train engineers see many things from their engines which traumatize them, but this evening when the headlight of the train came around the curve and shone brightly on a large kite being lifted eight feet in the air with one boy on the right, one in the center, and an old man on the left…that sight may have stayed with him for quite a while. The kite flipped upside down and all three of us landed on our backs, ten feet from the rails.

We were all soundly bruised but besides having the wind severally knocked out of him, Chuck’s shoulders were so badly hyper-extended backwards he walked for weeks looking like a bald eagle with great posture.

As for Elwood, packing the broken kite back to his truck, he could be heard muttering in his slurred speech, “I knew it wouldn’t work.”

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