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| date | 2001-04-08:16:06 |
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The word for the day is: "Ouch." Spring is blowing briskly in the wind, which makes it a good day for kites. I gave Tim a really cool auto-gyro kite for his birthday last summer, but we were never able to get it off the ground, as we had a very poor summer and fall for wind. Today looked perfect. We ran some errands this afternoon, and then headed up Fort Henry Hill, where the old fort overlooks the harbor. Walking up out of the lee of the hill, we just about took flight ourselves, and I sent the kids back down a bit, well out of the way of the soon-to-be whirling blades. The kite is shaped like a news helicopter: it has a thin plastic body with a tail-boom (no rotor on the boom though--the pull of the string keeps the body pointed into the wind.) A pair of blades are attached to a clever rocking axle that is connected to the body by a plastic stalk; the body and stalk are all one bit of plastic, die cast or stamped or something. The landing gear is made out of coat-hanger wire bent into the shape of skids and snapped onto the lower part of the body. The string is attached to a grommet under the nose. The trick is to get the blades spinning, and then the wind is supposed to keep them spinning and provide lift. This is the principle that allows wounded helicopters from crashing too badly: auto-rotation, ungramatically called "auto-gyro", which mixes Greek and Latin roots. The father of a childhood friend owned an auto-gyro that could be towed behind a car--I never saw it fly, though, and after a few tries with the kite I was beginning to suspect that the whole thing was a clever joke by the aeronautical engineering community. Still, I persisted, while the kids looked on from a varying distance. The rotors had some advice on how to twist them to increase the speed of rotation, and thinking that as there current speed seemed to tend inexorably toward zero I'd try that. It improved things a lot: after a whack from my finger to get them going, the rotors started to pick up the wind and were soon buzzing merrily around, fast enough to make me glad I'd taken the warnings pressed into the body about losing fingers seriously. But when I tried to let the thing go I must have disturbed the flow of air or let the edge of the circle of the rotors get into the wind shadow of my body, because they quickly spun down, leaving the kite dangling lamely at the end of the its string down by my ankles, while I held the string aloft in my upraised hand in the best posture of failed kite-fliers everywhere. Not to be daunted, and warning the now-rapt kids to stay well off to the side and not downwind of me, I got it going again, all the while leaning slightly back into the fresh gale coming off the lake across the crest of the hill. The rotors caught the wind again, and gave off a hum and then a buzz which stepped suddenly up to a whine as the kite tried to leap out of my outstretched hand. Then it exploded. Alex found one rotor about thirty meters downwind. Tim picked up the other, as well as the hinge and part of the stalk, nearly the same distance away but far off to the side. If the pitch of sound was any indication, the rotor tips must have had an appreciable Mach number just before the over-stressed plastic gave way. We seem to have found all the bits, so after a bit of repair work, the kite may actually fly. We had some other kites with us, but the wind was too strong for all of them, so we went down by the water and the kids pitched rocks at the last remnants of ice while I basked in the sun at the foot of one of the fort's sentry towers. A few bits of floating ice showed that strange linear structure it gets just before breaking up, so I pointed that out to the kids, though they were mostly interested in trying to skip rocks off them. A whiff of skunk wafted by at one point, and I heard some chittering that might have come from within the tower--with the wind whistling in one ear and out the other and my hearing not so good to begin with, it was hard to tell. But I'm pretty sure a couple of skunks were having sex in the tower, now long abandoned and not part of the fort that's open to tourists. After coming home the kids took two of the other kites into the backyard so they could get tangled in the strings while I basked a little more on the back porch. I'm still trying to throw off this damned cold, so the more sun the better! Tim had a couple of good flights with the biplane kite, which is hard to handle at the best of times, which these weren't, with gusts looping around the house in all directions. Alex had one really good flight with a small bat-kite, which unfortunately come to rest in one of the old, unpruned fruit trees, now full of buds of just the right side to catch up the kite-string in dozen different ways. I tried pulling it loose, but unsurprisingly broke the string. There is some law of entropy that favors tangles: I guess the number of ways for a string to be tangled is nearly infinite, and there's only one way for it to be untangled, which explains how a string left all by itself, much less one being pulled around in a tree, winds up in a rat's nest. The only way to get the thing down was to climb the tree, which Alex offered to do but he was wearing his winter boots, the ground still being a bit damp, and in any case I didn't think he could get much higher than me, despite being far lighter, and probably couldn't handle the rake that I wanted to knock the kite out of the branch-tips with. So I went up myself--the tree branches out from the main trunk only a few feet off the ground, and from there I took a couple of easy steps up on fair-sized branches, slipped, fell, cracked my tail-bone something dreadful on the branch below and bounced the side of my head off the next branch over. As a followup, I landed in the main crotch on my stomach. As I fell, before I actually hit anything, I remember thinking that the tree was just designed to break bones: the branches are strong and densely packed enough that it would be easy to get an arm or more likely, given the way I was falling, a leg, trapped between them and then bent to the breaking point. I've always found I have a surprising amount of time to think while in the midst of sustaining bodily harm. Jan was out all afternoon, so it was just me and the kids, and although Alex would have done the right thing and called 911, that's not the way a father thinks. What a father thinks is, "I'm going to be lying hurt on the ground and who will be minding the kids?" So I gave a loud yell before I actually hurt anything, thinking it might attract the attention of the neighbors (it didn't.) In the event, though a bit bruised, and slightly dizzy, nothing bad happened. The base of my spine hurts when I cough, and if I move my head too quickly it takes the world a moment to catch up, but both of those seem to be passing now. I spent the tail end of the afternoon cooking dinner--our first barbecue of the year!--and basking a little more in the sun, listening to the red-wing blackbirds trilling in the bush behind the house. |