Flying a Kite

Ruffling breeze, kite-flying weather, springtime on the coast.

As grade-school kids in Carmel Valley Village, we were free to play on the Tularcitos Elementary School field after we'd gone home, changed into "play clothes," and gathered up our kites and reels.  We walked the quarter mile to get back to the field, chattering about our kites, their tails, the string we had, past kite-flying exploits and legendary disastrous crash landings.

The field itself was a long mowed-weed expanse bounded on the east end by chain-link fence, the south by a nursery and a swampy meadow, the west by school structures and blacktop playground and to the north by a shallowly sloped section of the field.  The prevailing wind blew from west to east steadily, and in spring it was especially dependable.

Our kites were homemade rigs made of balsa wood, string, glue and any kind of sturdy paper we could use.  My brother's kite was made of two colors of transparent cellophane, which gave it a more admirable appearance than the usual shiny thin paper kites were usually made of.  Most of the time, we had bought kits and put them together with glue and dreams.

The finishing touch was the tail of the kite, a thing of beauty and mystery.  Everything about the kite's  ability to handle the wind and varying air depended on the perfection of the tail.  For us, this meant tying a rag onto the kite with knots in it and experimenting with the number of knots and the length of the rag that would trail in the breeze.

Once we had made a decision about the balance and weight of the tail and the kite together, we got a ball of cotton string, put a stick through the ball to use as a handle and sent the kites aloft.  With one hand gripping the kite's leading triangle of string and holding it up and behind us, we ran into the wind and felt the kite lift off.  You'd play the line, tugging on the line to gain more and more lift while you played out the string steadily.  If your kite was noodling around up there and veering side to side drunkenly, you knew either the tail was not doing its job or the string was too slack.  Tensioning the string and then playing it out, eventually you'd get your kite up to a height where it seemed to take the wind in its teeth and run.

Then, you'd play out your line slowly but surely and hope you could get it to stay up and eventually nearly disappear in the distance.  That was the coolest of all.  You'd have to have several big balls of string knotted together, end to end, to begin with, or you'd never have any hope of disappearing your kite.  If the wind was right and you had a zillion miles of string, and if you played the line with skill, the kite would fly steadily away to be a speck in the distance.  Then, the only way to tell you still even had a kite flying was the steady tug in your hands as you held the stick handles.

Kids would stand holding their reels of string, facing east, tug on them once in a while and scan the horizon and sky for birds and signs of slower air or -- worst of all -- the wind to stop blowing.

My brother would say, "I think my kite is about five miles away by now. I can't even see it. It's a goner."  He, being the oldest kid, would have appropriated as much string as possible, developed the best tail for his kite and built the sturdiest one.  I tried to make a kite as good as his, but mostly I just admired his superiority in secret while I tried like mad to beat his kite-flying skills.

One day, his kite was so far gone I wasn't even sure he had it anymore, but I didn't say so.  We saw the line played far out east, kind of sagging in the middle, pulled gently down by gravity.  After I'd had my kite up a reasonably long time, I began winding the string back onto the roll again and bringing it back to me.  My brother started rolling, too, but nothing came back.  The string had broken, the kite flown to Mars or crashed down onto someone's tree or rooftop.

Looking dismal and glum, he had to admit his kite-flying days were ended until he could build another.  It would be awhile before he could amass that much string again.  He was a good scrounger; his string reel had been admirably fat.  The kite had been a beauty, strong and true, a legend already, not so easy to replace.

Feeling an esprit de corps, I gave him my kite to carry home, entrusting him with that honor.  He walked quietly, but I had a feeling he was scheming and planning to build the ultimate kite.  My place as best kite handler was perhaps to be short lived, but the title was rightfully mine since my kite had gone the farthest without crashing.  It was a bittersweet thing, winning a title over my big brother by beating him at his game, knowing he had no intention of letting me keep the honor and admiring him all at the same time.

He looked intently at the tail of my kite, "I think if you add an extra knot to your tail, it could fly even farther."

"Okay, but it flew a long way anyway."

"Yeah, just sayin'."

"'kay."

"Race you home!"

He won the race home and I never flew my kite farther than his ever again.