Sun - January 4, 2004

"Great!" she said with sudden enthusiasm. "I've always wanted to go hang gliding, but I could never go all by myself. Who's coming with me?"

I pause here to remind my readers that a fundamental tenet of contract law and friendship is never to commit to anything before knowing what it is. Another fundamental rule of friendship is that family commitments trump duties to friends like Rock beats Scissors. Faced with the prospect of dying like Icarus at Karen's side, the memory of the multitude was remarkably refreshed as to a number of coming family commitments that couldn't possibly be rescheduled.

"But surely you'll come with me," Karen cried, pointing to her sole remaining friend in the room. Her makeup smeared with earlier tears, her birthday hat tilting rakishly to the right, her lower lip trembling slightly at anticipated rejection, she looked at me as if to say, "Help me Obi wan-Kenobi. You're my only hope." What could I do? What would you do? I said I'd go too.

The momentousness of this decision can only be fully appreciated when you also understand that I like flying on commercial jets only slightly more than the prospect of removing my own appendix, without anesthetic, using a blunt spoon. Why must the airlines announce a plane's height after takeoff? If they have to tell us, why use measurements like feet? Why not use yards, instead, so that the number provided is smaller? But I digress.

A few weeks after my pledge, on a sunny but windy day, Karen and I drove to the top of Mt. Tamalpais state park, from which the hang gliding school launches tandem gliders. Learning to fly a hang glider on your own is a lengthy process, but after about 10 minutes of instruction, a student can join an an experienced pilot for a 15 to 30 minute jaunt from the top of the mountain (about 2,500 feet) to Stinson Beach over three miles away. Only first, you have to ...

"Help me build the glider," said instructor Eric Mies, unfurling an enormous nylon tube and a box of metal ribbing. Assembly of aircraft required, I thought to myself. Very reassuring.

But as Mies showed me how to insert metal ribs into his delta-winged craft and carefully explained the principles of glided flight, I began to appreciate how simple, yet well-designed a hang glider is. It's essentially a flying wing—about 25 feet from wingtip to wingtip—from which the helmeted pilot is suspended by a thick harness that straps around his body like a lifejacket. He controls the glider's altitude, attitude, and air speed using wires that can reshape the glider's airfoil and by shifting his body weight from side to side. With this simple contraption and helpful air currents, experienced pilots can fly for hours. International record holders have traveled hundreds of kilometers in their hang gliders.

I, however, was not an experienced pilot.

"How's it going over there, Karen?" I inquired of my partner, stalling for time while she worked with another instructor. I glanced at Mies to see if the tactic would work. He wasn't buying.

"Listen up, Ron," he said as he slid the final ribbing in place. "The one thing we both have to do at the beginning of the flight is run down this cliff to gather air speed for take off. It's very important that you match me stride for stride because if you don't ..."

The cliff face descended at a 35 to 40 degree angle for about thirty yards, then steepened, descending into a thick copse of shrubbery and old-growth pine forest. I recalled NASA footage of the Apollo rocket liftoffs with Walter Cronkite's voice over explaining, "The first minute of flight is perhaps the most crucial to ensure the survival of our brave astronauts." This brave aeronaut resolved to run like hell.

"Ready?"

I murmured assent as convincingly as possible, but it sounded faint and high pitched like a baby chick. Karen, worrying over the assembly of her glider, wasn't even looking up.

"GO!"

Running down a steep slope side by side with an aircraft strapped on our backs, we couldn't have stopped if we wanted to. Eight feet into the run, we were sprinting at an impossible rate when the glider, gentle as you please, lifted us off the ground, nosed into the wind, and began to climb. Trees fell away below us. The California coast beckoned ahead. In less than five seconds from the time we started out, we were airborne.

I hate to fly. But flying in a hang glider is different from flying on an airline. For one thing, you have control over where the glider goes and how it gets there. You are suspended in space like an enormous bird, wind on your face, world at your feet, with the sound of rushing air currents a steady roar. Flight feels like pushing off the wall of a pool—smooth and powerful—except that rising air near the face of the cliff adds a third dimension: lift. Several hawks floated by. Mies watched carefully to see where they headed, following updrafts invisible to us, and banked our glider to follow.

I understood at that moment why some have described hang gliding as a spiritual experience. While crossing the street or driving a car both demand faith in providence and the predictability of human behavior, they occur so frequently that we seldom consider our own vulnerability when performing them. Racing off a cliff with a kite strapped to your back allows no such illusions. You survive the experience only if your skills are true, your equipment well-maintained, your glider supported by air currents rather than dashed against a rock or cruelly impaled upon tall trees. To hang glide is to express a leap of faith in God's plan for you that is not so very different from the trust that Abraham showed on that long ago day when he took Isaac up the mountain to make sacrifice.

The hawk in front of us slowed to inspect our craft. A bird in its element is a living expression of faith, as close to an angel as most of us will come. It knows things we do not know and performs with ease tasks we cannot do, hoisted by an invisible hand, guided by an invisible voice. This particular angel studied our flying technique for a moment and found it lacking. It peeled off.

After twenty minutes of gentle gliding, we scoped out a strip to land on the beach, watching warily for kites whose strings could foul the glider's cables and send us tumbling from the sky. Mies brought the glider down head-high over the sand. Then, as the dunes rushed by parallel to our bodies, he slowly raised the nose of the aircraft, stalling us even as the wing braked our motion. Touch down felt as easy as stepping off a stool.

Above us, we watched Karen's glider begin its descent and in moments she too was on the ground, grinning at me with ridiculous enthusiasm as an instructor unharnessed her.

"That was AWESOME!" she said, then added, "Thank you so much for coming with me."

We stood there, we two, each knowing what the other was thinking. We had faced our fears together. We had risked everything together. We had bonded in ways we could not explain and had shared an experience we could not yet describe. For a moment, we were Wilbur and Orville, Frodo and Samwise, or perhaps just Burns and Allen. But no matter what, we were a team.

An act of friendship and a leap of faith. Perhaps the two are—and always have been—one and the same.

Photo credits: Sfhanggliding.com