Kaua'i Reflections, Day 2: Caves and Canards

3:00 PM

"So this is a constant-speed propeller, right?"

My father - ever the pilot. Not far from the dead fields and gray slate frigate of yesterday, we're standing on dry, red clay. Dad is inspecting a propeller. I'm watching the windsock. Fifteen knots - good to sail on, but I have no idea whether it's good to fly in. In fact, secretly, I'm hoping it's not.

Because I'm scared.

Let me back up. We're standing on a beach, father and I.

12:00 PM

"You know what I think that is?"

I'm watching the riptides crumble sand into brackish khaki water, curling it back with monstrous force. Warning signs, again. Caricatures of drowned swimmers, human geometry swallowed by water geometry. I'm watching the riptides and I have no idea what he thinks that is.

"I think that's a tsunami warning system."

I look back and see four green saucers on a pole. At the top lay a crown of solar cells. The system looks new, freshly painted, speaking of recently-released government funding and academic zeal, merged together in a single, unholy product with a shape only true utility could produce. Even cell-phone towers were prettier than this.

"There are sensors out in the water."

Indeed there are. Well - there are now. Tales of a mountain of black, boiling water surging through southeast Asia seem to be the stuff government proposals are made of; private or public, we find our inspirations in storytelling. There were numbers before. Probabilities, calculations, and risk mitigation routines. Now, there's tragedy.

I have my eyes on the riptide, and my mind on the sky - we're going to be up there in a few hours. We signed on to try something new, something dangerous, something interesting to both of us. They're called ultralights. A hang-glider, strapped to a little cockpit with wheels, strapped to an engine. Space for two. A way to see the island. A way to experience flight.

Experience flight.

3:21 PM

I'm five hundred feet up in the air and my stomach is like a puppet on a string - various pieces of it are being yanked up and then dropped earthward as turbulence rattles the little cage I'm buckled into. We are climbing rapidly - five hundred feet a minute. More and more land drops away as the propeller behind us chews up the sky and bellows wind under the huge cloth wing. We are flying, and an old familiar sensation creeps up on me, rising from the historical muck of my very youngest days of flying. The feeling of fear.

Jim, my pilot, follows Cole, the pilot in my father's ultralight, and we race for Waileau crater. As we do, Jim guns the throttle and follows a current up; I look over his shoulder to see the digital readout peg at 3,600 feet. Below me, everything is ants. Ant people. Ant cars. My nervousness kicks in, and I suddenly can't control the shaking that takes over my legs. As Jim eases the throttle, my control returns. Take a breath.

I have no idea what I'm doing up here. I had the same confused feeling exiting the Grand Caravan at 10,000 feet two years ago on a tandem skydive.

They say my old man has air in his bones - that he's made for the business. Maybe I'm trying to figure out if I've got it, too. If I did, maybe that'd just be another way to get closer to him.

Or maybe I just have no idea what I'm doing up here.

3:40 PM

Thirty-six hundred feet, and we're closing on the crater. Helicopters below us fly a counter-clockwise pattern past waterfalls, dropoffs of over a thousand feet. Jim brings us up to the crater, exposed up to craggy green scraping the bottoms of clouds. The turbulence worsens, drops of rain appear on my face mask.

"Wettest place in the world," Jim says, pointing to the green slice at the top. "Right up there."

Maybe that's the point of this. Places. People. Best-of. Jim and Cole have been in the business over thirty years, with an attitude and local knowledge to match. You don't find extraordinary people doing ordinary things. You don't become an extraordinary person doing ordinary things.

It's my turn to fly now. We bank the contraption over the water and he hands me the controls - you steer with a big metal bar. Up is down, left is right. Simple. And then he turns on the iPod, leaves the controls to me, and begins to dance in the cockpit.

I really have no idea what the hell I'm doing up here.