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A few paragraphs from:
MAGIC WINGS
by Alden Moffatt
I had intended at first to swim in the oceans off Hawaii. I am a fish when properly immersed. But the Pacific here is cold and murky, so I looked to an ocean of another kind. As I watched the hang gliders from my kitchen window across the lake, I knew that was also my destiny. I bought a glider with some of the proceeds from a business deal that would never happen again and I set it up at the training hill. Those first rides were low skims across the ground, with long landings on the 12 inch wheels, shoes and belly dragging and adrenaline pumping. My wife was there holding the video camera. She said, "I think you need some instruction before you kill yourself!" I spent enough time and money repairing the glider, and that too led to my introduction to Badger Martin, who came highly recommended by my doctor, who just happened to be Zeek Vladimir, a great Oregon pilot. Even with patient Badger instructing me, I was discouraged often by the fear of heights, broken glider parts, winds too strong or not strong enough, days too hot or too cold. I didn?t have an instinct for three dimensional space either, so I'd land too close, too far, down wind, side wind, in a tree, not very birdlike. There were 50 flights carrying the glider to the dry hill top, followed by the long wait for the perfect, uphill breeze, and finally the ten second flight and the usually mediocre landing. Then there were another fifty flights from the petrifying heights of the Hornbrook hill. I remember saying to Badger as we looked at that hill for the first time, "This will be the most amazing thing I've ever done". And Badger looked at me like, boy, you ain't seen nothing yet. And with an ulcerated knot eating a hole in my stomach, I set up the glider on top there against a backdrop of the dizzying heights of that 320 foot hill. At Hornbrook I spent half a year of scattered days. Then Badger said I was ready for the ultimate, the mountain launch. You know, when I started this, I set my sights on eventually gliding fearlessly, twenty feet off the ground at the bunny hill as my goal in life. How on earth did anyone ever convince me that I had to become a real live pilot and fly from the treacherous abyss of Woodrat Mountain? But I did own my own glider, and I did pay for lessons, so like, I had to do it. My whole body seemed a bit knotted up that day. The ulcer in my stomach had spread out and become one with every cell. I heard my dead ancestors turn in their graves. Perspiration squirted out of my face. My hands were so tight on the down-tubes I nearly crushed them, and in the background, where I could barely hear him, though he was right alongside me at launch, Badger Martin said, "Relax. Light touch. If you start running, run like hell and don't stop running until you are ten feet off the ground." I ran, and quickly the ground fell away. My teeth ground together but I tried to keep that light touch. By the time I was over the landing area I was exhausted and could barely decide what to do. I made a right turn, then a left one, then pulled in a little. Then the pond got awfully intimidating, and so did the power lines. And the trees got bigger. I put myself right between the trees and the pond and then I slowed down and so my final turn didn't work. The tree got too close and there was no way to avoid it. So I decided, ' Well, I might as well hit it square.' The glider stuck in the oak branches fifteen feet off the ground and didn't fall back. And there I dangled, kicking around helplessly, uninjured but pathetic, while a small crowd gathered.
MAGIC WINGS, by Alden Moffatt, the story of a man's struggle learning to fly a hang glider in the mountains of Southern Oregon. 154 pages, Paperback $14.95 + $4.95 S/H..... If you have ever looked up at the birds and wondered what it would be like to fly, this is a MUST READ book. Or, if you have flown for years, this book records the anxiety and exhileration of first flights in a way you will love remembering and sharing. This is not a book about catastrophe and disaster. It is about life and living it to the fullest, about the philosophy of risk taking. It is about adventure and discovery, inside and out. It is about the mark we have made upon the world (compared to the one we think we have made) and the oblivion to which all our work descends. Come along for a wild ride into the vastest, little explored wilderness, just above the ground. MAGIC WINGS is filled with heart pumping action and adventure, tension and gossip. MAGIC WINGS is "Enjoyable," "Excellent," "A Page Turner," "Very Remarkable," according to readers, and from John M. Schwarz, english professor at Fullerton University, now retired: "A helluva good book, honest, clearly written....reminds me of those other American classics of the wilderness: HUCK FINN, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST, MOBY DICK."
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