Hang Gliding

I have always been fascinated by hang gliding and the brave men and women who are hang gliders. I watch them soar and sail overhead, wafted about by the winds, riding the air currents like birds as they bank and swoop far overhead, their bodies extended in a flying position.

Their wings spread out above them, their feet tucked into a harness, and they fly out over the ocean or glide over the beach or the land below until they decide to guide themselves reluctantly back to earth. If the thermal currents are right, they can stay up for hours.

I have talked with many hang gliders and they all say it is such a peaceful, quiet feeling up there, such a totally different perspective than being earthbound. I will admit it, I have a fear of heights, like many people. This is an understatement in my case, I am just a big chicken at the thought of flying in these flimsy-looking devices!

They look so fragile and have no motor or mechanical means of support, I don’t know how they ever thought up this sport, the thought of being air bound like that terrifies me! And yet, it is so beautiful to just watch them!

The concept of flying like a bird has been with humans for eons. If you go back to Greek mythology, you can find and read about the legend of Icarus. He was a mortal man who aspired to greatness, and his goal was to fly to the sun to prove he could.

According to the legend, he and his father constructed two great sets of wings from giant bird feathers and leaped off the top of some high mountain. And the wings worked! He was able to fly like a bird.

But Icarus had a fatal flaw and that was his pride. Because he flew too close to the sun, and the heat of the sun melted the wax holding the wings together and he plunged to his death.

Perhaps this pride, or hubris as the Greeks called it, was the moral of the story. That man should not aspire to be something that he is not, that a man is a man and will never be a bird.

It is like the old maxim “Make sure your reach does not exceed your grasp.” But then again, if you don’t try, you will never know, and most of the great inventions conceived and constructed by man have all had legions of vociferous critics at the time.

The first airplane flight by the Wright brothers or the automobile and even the train were all considered dangerous. At one time they were all denounced as foolhardy and bound to failure by the more conservative, less inventive, less creative, less visionary type of people.

So like I said, even though I am terrified of hang gliding it also fascinates me. I live in San Francisco, and there is a well-known hang gliding spot just a few miles from my house, at Ft. Funston.

It is a designated hang gliding area and is free for observation. There is a large parking lot and a hiking trail down to the beach far below where people can walk their dogs, jog, hike, or even ride horseback.

You can watch and talk to the people who hang glide while they unpack their gear from their cars in the parking lot. They are just regular people, not Olympic athletes. There is a bleacher-like viewing stand to watch the hang gliders swoop and sail majestically far overhead.

I have gone there alone often. I have also taken my family and many friends over the years out to this vantage point where you can watch them take off. What I really love is the transition from man to bird they seem to make so effortlessly.

I watch them lay out their gear very precisely and then strap on their wings and walk to the very edge of the cliff. They wait patiently for an updraft, land-bound and normal. And then POOF! They are gone.

They are carried aloft by an upsurging current of air, and they are no longer ordinary people, they are birds! Once they launch themselves, only they decide when to come back down to the ground, to revert from air-bound birds to earthbound humans.

They are like a modern-day Icarus, whose flaw was perhaps not so much in the concept of attempting to fly but his mad, vain doomed decision to fly to the sun to prove his immortality. Just because he thought he could. You can fly like Icarus with only a few lessons and a modest investment in equipment, and without the deadly ending!

Legends, however they are interpreted, are a lesson to us all, but then again, nothing ventured, nothing gained! Go ahead, try it.

Fly Like an Eagle!

Fly like an eagle!

Legends, however they are interpreted, are a lesson to us all, but then again, nothing ventured, nothing gained! Go ahead, try it.

Fly like an eagle!