Let’s Go Fly a Kite, 2012
I’ve never thought of myself as a kite person. Last year I
balked when my wife suggested that it might be fun to go take pictures at a
kite festival at the oceanfront. I imagined hoards of kids running around crying
and tangling their lines while their parents screamed at each other to get out
of the way.
I was wrong.
When I was a kid you were supposed to know how to make a kite
out of balsa strips and newspaper, with a tail made of old cotton rags. I made
a few of those and some actually flew. I lived a block from the ocean, where
there was nearly always a breeze.
I’ve come to believe, later in life, that the beauty of kites
might be wasted on kids, especially today when the idea of standing on the
ground holding a string strikes a lot of kids as, well, slow. Instead, kites
are probably for people who enjoy, or will grow up to enjoy, sailing. They’re a
more cerebral bunch, appreciative of how the air moves above us, and how its
movement isn’t a function of push so much as a function of pull. They want to
learn how the wind comes and goes and how to notice how and when it changes.
They want that contraption of paper and balsa to dance, bobbing and weaving
hundreds of feet above them. It’s not hard to imagine that they see themselves
bobbing and weaving up there in the air as if in flight.
And so it was this past weekend that I went down to the
oceanfront to see what there was to see at this year’s kite festival. If nothing else, I’d get a good walk on the
Boardwalk, maybe run into a few friends and do some people watching.
I did run into a few friends. I did people watch. And I was
pleasantly surprised to find that the kite festival wasn’t at all what I
expected. It turns out these kite people are a serious lot. Whole groups of
them came from hundreds of miles away to compete in the sun and sand.
Several large areas were blocked off on the beach. There were
sections for giant kites, like the ones shown above. There were sections for
smaller, handmade kites. There was a tent where you could learn to make your
own kite from paper and balsa and another large marked-off area where you could
fly them.
To be honest, I didn’t see many kids flying kites. The
professionals, though, were announced as if they were Olympic stars, with great
attention given to the trickiness or complexity of the design of their kites.
Serious kites, it seems, are more than paper and balsa and a tail of old rags.
A common theme in the introductions was how the contestant had made the kite
being flown “on his own sewing machine.”
It was a beautiful morning on the beach. I’d like to say
there were huge crowds of people there to watch the kites. But there weren’t. Most
people watched for a few minutes and then wandered on while the kites hung in
the air far above their heads.
Kite Colors, 2012
On the way back from Ocracoke a few years ago, my son and I stopped at a kite festival at the Wright Brothers Memorial. Not only was it an appropriate place for the festival, but you could climb to the top of the hill and look down on the kites. I think the same octopus was there.
ReplyDeleteI haven't been able to fly a kite in several years but still have several stored away in the garage. I think of it as a version of fishing only instead of reeling in, you reel out.
ReplyDeleteMy favourites are the kites that need you to work to keep them up rather than just leave them tied off to a post.
Oh, I'm a huge fan of kite flying--they're beautiful. Something about them being free yet tethered is interesting to me. Love the octopus!
ReplyDeleteHello mate greatt blog
ReplyDelete