Flying Lessons

Your humble narrator remembers learning to fly…

Amarillo, Texas was where I first learned how to fly. It’s also the first place I really remember from my childhood. I was five or six years old, and there were Horned Lizards and Tarantulas in the vacant lots nearby, and it was Paradise to me.

Mom made a me a blue satin Batman cape which I wore constantly. I would wake up at dawn, put on my cape, and roam the housing area as the dry tumbleweeds rolled by in the Amarillo wind.

The tumbleweeds were huge, not much smaller than I was. At some point I must have seen a picture of Comanches hunting buffalo on horseback, because I mentally transformed the tumbleweed into buffalo and myself into a horse-back warrior. I remember gallop-running after the buffalo on my pretend-horse, with my Batman cape flying out behind me. Hurling my sidewalk-sharpened stick-spear through the buffalo.

I remember, too, that around this time Dad made me some cardboard wings. Each wing was made of two pieces, one piece for my upper arm and another for my lower arms. This meant that I could bend my arms, making the wings far less cumbersome to wear than one-piece wings. Dad had clearly put some thought into the design. The wings were made out of rectangular pieces of cardboard, and were attached to me by arm straps. They were wonderful.

After Dad fitted the wings to my arms, he squatted down to my level and looked straight at me.

“You know these are just cardboard, right?”

“Yessir.”

“These are not real wings. You cannot fly with these. You know that, right?”

“Yessir.”

“You will not jump off of anything while wearing these wings, right?”

“Nossir.”

“Okay then. Go have fun…and try to stay on the ground.”

I went tearing around the neighborhood in my new cardboard wings, arms outstretched, legs pumping and cape flying behind. I found that by running as fast as I could into the wind, I could feel just the beginnings of lift, of flight.

If I could only go a little bit faster, would I be able to actually fly?

The answer to this question came from an unlikely source. Mom and Dad had recently decided that I needed more spiritual guidance. And so, once a week, they would drop me off at a local Sunday School, where I would be immersed in a form of Texas Fundamentalist Spirituality.

This religious instruction mostly involved sitting in a circle with other children and chanting songs.

We’d also watch re-enactments of Old Testament bible stories. The teacher performed these plays by moving pipe-cleaner figures around in a box half-full of what appeared to be cat litter. She would perform each character’s lines using a different voice - gruff and deep for one, a quavering falsetto for another. She would pause occasionally and look expectantly at us. That was our cue to perform a specific chant or song.

It felt a little unsettling even at the time.

One of the Sunday School’s central precepts was that of biblical inerrancy - the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired and therefore contained no errors. It was to be interpreted quite literally.

And this was where my trouble started. I unfortunately generalized this inerrancy doctrine to include all written texts. This misunderstanding has caused me no end of grief. But for this story, the pertinent literally-interpreted-text was from a book about Golden Eagles.

This eagle book contained an “Eagles and Man” chapter, which had an illustrated account of Icarus and Daedalus. In the story, an evil king imprisoned them in a high tower from which there was no escape. But Daedalus crafted wings from wax and eagle feathers. He and Icarus leapt from the tower and soared to freedom. All went well until an overly-enthusiastic Icarus flew too close to the sun. His wax wings melted, and he fell to sea.

Hmm. Okay. The message I took from The Text was that the basic concept would work. Artificially winged flight was, indeed, possible. I also learned that Icarus and Daedalus had trouble because they used inappropriate materials. If they had used cardboard for their wings, Icarus would not have had his materials failure.

Also, I could feel some lift from my wings when I ran, but it wasn’t sufficient to become airborne. Icarus’ pioneering work said that if only I could find a higher elevation launching point, such as a tower, I’d gain speed as I glided to earth. And then…true flight. I would replicate, then surpass, the performance of Icarus and Daedalus. After all, I had modern cardboard, not some primitive wax-and-feathers device.

I found a brick wall that joined one of the houses at a 90 degree angle. By bracing against the two walls, I clambered up the brick wall like some proto-Archaeopteryx. 

I reached the top of the wall and crawled out to the center. I teetered unsteadily as I stood up. The wall couldn’t have been very high, but it felt like I was at the top of the world, with wind whistling past.

The wind was pushing me, lifting against my wings. I bent my knees and crouched, leaning forward. The wind seemed louder now and my cape was making snapping and popping noises in the turbulence. I imagined that once I got up to speed, the air would become viscous and supporting. I wondered how small our house would appear when I was at altitude. This was going to be great.

I leapt forward and out into the air, wings spread at the perfect angle, legs straight and trailing the way I’d seen birds do it. I had a brief sensation of speed - oh so very much faster than I thought it would be.

And then I smacked into the ground. Really hard. I knocked the wind out of myself, and I think I sprained my ankle. I wasn’t hurt badly, though, and was able to limp back home.  I wasn’t eager to tell Dad what had happened because he had explicitly told me not to do what I’d done.

I now suspected that my eagle book’s tale of Icarus and Daedalus was not entirely accurate, and I wondered what had actually happened to them. Perhaps Icarus was as nervous about telling Daedalus as I was about telling my Dad.

Daedalus would maybe have been in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. He would have looked up, seeing Icarus limp inside. “Dammit Icarus what did you do? I told you to stay on the ground.”

Icarus was shamefaced. He knew he needed a story, fast. He would have blurted something like, “Umm..well, the wax melted! It was the sun! You should have seen!”

Maybe that’s what happened, and the Icarus and Daedalus story grew from that.

I wonder.

Here’s a funny thing. I adapted this writing from an email that I had sent to my sister a number of years ago. When I wrote that email to her, I was laid-up with a recently broken arm. I had fallen off of a horse and landed badly.

The thing is, I fell off of that horse while trying to replicate something I’d read about in a book about horse training.

Proving that the “literary inerrancy” issue may still be a problem for me.