It was not the New Zealander who took me up, a tan and talkative strider of a man who spoke passionately of the region’s farming system on the drive over the mountain, weighing forth on irrigation and cold-weather storage. Not he, nor the gregarious German lug who took my friend away, clutching him between his meaty thighs in much the same way as I would have pictured a mother bird carrying her hatchling to level ground. None of these, but a stone-silent man who fetched from the roof of the van the bulky roll of gliding apparatus and immediately set to fanning it out on the sunned matting that covered the slope before us. He was a tall and thin fellow, much like myself, with a tall, flat face like a sheet of concrete. He moved through his preparations wordlessly, as the two other pilots and their passengers wandered off in conversation to some other launch site, flattening the blue-and-white canvas to his liking as he tested the give of each of the narrow lines that kept the structure together. I observed the strain of his lanky muscles through his skin as he bent over his work and wondered of the resilience of these slender fibers against the unpredictable motion of a mountainous windstream. I wondered if he would be able to keep up.
We stood atop a slope that veered down off and into the open valley, a valley guarded loosely by a ring of shallow hillocks much like ours, shelved into narrow bands of farmland like a smeared deck of cards. Phewa, the city’s lake, floated dully off in the gray distance, flanked on its left by the Pokhara tourist ghetto from which we had made our ascent. Besides these, it was a country of grass and trees, settled here and there with short plank houses off tamped pathways. It was a warm and windy day, electric. The breeze flushed through the valley, bucking over the sides. The treetops swayed in a hand jive of greens.
My pilot had spread out the glider on a well-worn platform of staked burlap sacks. The platform reached out perhaps twenty feet, followed by twenty of grass, and then nothing. I side-saddled down towards where he was harnessing himself to the canopy. I concentrated on my ankles in their strain to keep me upright. In silence, I waited as he secured his pack and then turned to me. He spoke: “Walk. Run. Sit.”
“That’s it.” Yes, I could hear in his voice something of his origins. An Eastern European shift to his words that summoned thoughts of cold winters and sadistic policemen. Bulgaria, Estonia. He spoke the word “run” like the Spanish word for rum: Ron. Like “own,” preceded by the Slavic R: Ron.
I had been waiting for a tutorial, a VHS. Anything. A diagram offering a brief explanation of wind currents and resistance physics. I wasn’t going to get any of these. We stood silently: me, the pilot, and the glider that trailed behind him, waiting for some secret signal offered by the shooting breeze. It occurred to me that today wasn’t a particularly windy day, as far as such things go. I estimated our combined freightage to 400 pounds. I thought of the absurdity of a wingless mammal jumping off a mountain. Man insisting on flight, too. I saw the kites in the distance, slim crescents of all colors buoyed by sky like an airborne fermata. I saw these crescents suddenly emptied of wind, slackened into crumpled bedsheets, the passenger torn down into the vacuum. I imagined the flood of wind in my ears as the cloth vessel tore into the trees below: death, abrupt or prolonged.
“Walk,” I heard a voice say behind me. A rustle behind the voice signaled a change in the wind. I walked, and the burlap platform quickly diminished before me. The horizon bounced in my view. Later, suspended in the clutch of canvas and wind, I said this to myself: “I am going to write a story. And if I can describe what I am seeing right now, that will be enough. It will require no characters, no drama, no message. If I can only describe what I’m seeing and what is running through me, it will be enough.” I am sorry, but I could not.
The canopy tented behind us, rising into the clear air. My feet solved the burlap and moved into the low-cut grass as my pilot cinched and guided, making the final adjustments necessary for our escape. “Ron,” he said. “Keep running.” |
