Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

It's the anniversary of the Wright brothers' first successful powered manned flight in a heavier-than-air craft. The centennial, in fact. I noted a year ago that this was coming up, and thought about how much I'd like to be in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, today. I had entertained plans of organizing a whole bunch of my friends to road-trip down there together. But I got distracted. December seemed a long way off, in January. And in March and April, I figured I'd see what I could do about saving up some money for the trip first. Come August, I was distracted by other things. And in November, I realized I'd missed a year worth of planning time, that my finances had never gotten any better (they've gotten worse), and that most of my friends wouldn't have time to drive a couple states away mid-week, the day after the third LotR movie came out ... and that all the inns and campgrounds in the Outer Banks were probably full by then anyhow. I screwed up (but then, if I had made the plans in time, I probably would've had to bail for lack of funds anyhow). So instead of watching the reconstruction fly (did the weather cooperate this morning?), I'm sitting at home pondering the significance of this date in history.

I've been to Kitty Hawk a few times before. Even without marking the passing of a nice round hundred years, standing in that place and thinking, "This is where we got off the ground...", well it's a powerful thing to me. Something that for years I've felt I need to drag various of my friends to, so they can feel what I feel when I stand there. Of course, I don't know how each of my friends will react if I do get them there, but I'm sure some would feel something similar. "From here to the Moon in a handful of decades." And, "This isn't where the dream started, but this is where someone finally made it work, after millenia of dreaming." (How old is the story of Icarus?). Almost as long as I've known silmaril, I've wanted to take her to Kitty Hawk and watch her face as she walks onto that site. (And even if people don't react as I expect, Kitty Hawk and Nags Head and the rest of that area is just a cool place to experience, though it's probably best at the start or end of summer, rather than mid-December.)

The first time I went to the Outer Banks, I was a child. I don't think I'd ever seen a sky quite that blue before. My youngest brother turned the most amazing colour in the sun (we're all in between my mother's complexion and my father's, but each of my siblings tans a little differently ... Mark got extremely dark.) That huge dune rose up, inviting play. And the beach was a nice beach far less crowded than Ocean City, Maryland, which was where we usually saw the ocean. And then we went to the Wright site, and I thought it was really cool ... but not as cool as when I went back as an adult and stopped to think about what it all meant, not just "Hey, the Wright brothers! Here's what their plane looked like!".

What that twelve second flight meant to history, to my world -- the world I live in a century later that's so different from the world the Wrights worked in -- and even beyond the literal and tangible economic and social ramifications, what those twelve seconds represent in my worldview, in my dreams, in my ... I guess the right word is "mythology".

"This is where it finally worked."

And the next day, probably for the first time ever, a child stuck his arms out and ran around the room making airplane noises (to show a news reporter what he had seen).

I can scarcely imagine how it must have felt to have been there on that day, a hundred years ago. To have been lying in that plane (steered by wiggling one's hips, right?), or to be standing on the ground watching this machine, the result of months and months of work, become airborne under its own power. Did they realize that they had just changed the world, or did that awareness come the next day or the next month? Either way, the air must have been thick with magic.

I can imagine building my own craft and getting it off the ground, and how thrilling every precious second would be. But I can't quite imagine being the first. If I were to try to build my own plane from scratch, I'd be constantly aware that I was trying to garage-hack something that I already know works in principle. From ultralights to huge cargo jets, from a Piper to a supersonic fighter, I know they're up there. My father flew small planes before I was born. I've been a passenger on an airliner. Most afternoons I can see contrails from my window. There's stuff in the sky all the time.

It's difficult to imagine the moment of shock that must have preceeded the thrill and elation, for the people who did it first. Hey, it worked!

A hundred years ago.

I knew that others had been working on the problem of flight for centuries, and the idea of powered heavier-than-air flight for at least a while. I didn't realize until recently how much of the basics the Wrights had to come up with all on their own. How much of the work they thought they could build on top of was wrong, that they had to re-invent and correct. It's almost scary to realize that even if nobody else had thought of it before, if nobody else had been working on the idea before them, those two bike-repairmen probably still could've invented powered flight completely from scratch, since they almost had to do pretty much that anyhow. (But would they have had the nerve to try if they'd known how little of the earlier work they could use?)

A machine got off the ground under its own power. And that had never ever happened before. [see comments for correction]

This is a very special anniversary. A hundred years ago, our world was changed.

Hey, any time my friends want to take a road-trip to Kitty Hawk, check to see whether I'm available. It's been a couple years since my last visit, so I'm overdue.