More kites

We bought another kite over the weekend. One modeled after a U.S. Navy Blue Angel F/A-18 Hornet. It’s pretty sweet. The wind was a lot stronger that day. You could just hold the kite aloft, let it go, and — woosh! — it would zip up into the sky. For the first time, we could let out all the string on our kites. Here’s a picture of our new kite buzzing a jet that just took off from the Oakland airport.

Assembling the thing was about as complicated as building a real F-18. There were about half a dozen struts: two that snapped together to form the rigid spine of the jet, two small ones that held the vertical tail fins upright, and one for each of the wings. Cheap kites have sure come a long way, a point driven home forcefully by something else we saw there.

When we first arrived at the park, we walked past a 50s-ish couple messing around with a small kite. As I got closer, I could see that they had fashioned their craft out of brown paper shopping bags and wooden dowels. It was shaped as a deltoid, that is to say, a quadrilateral with two disjoint pairs of congruent adjacent sides; that is to say, a classic kite.

Wow. I had forgotten all about those kite projects. I can remember making shopping-bag kites as a kid, though I’m not sure exactly when or where. If it wasn’t at home, it was probably at school or at one of the numerous summer camps I attended.

It took them about as long to prepare their kite for flight as it for me to assemble the Blue Angel. When they did get it up, it sort of veered wildly from side to side. After a few minutes, it crashed, and though they stayed at the park for quite a while, I never saw them go airborne again. So, mega points for retro-style, not so much for actual air-worthiness.

Oh, and there was a pretty cool sunset, too. You can see the Golden Gate Bridge on the left.

Kite is game

You know something? Kites rock. The past few weekends, Tala and I have taken Harlan to kite heaven, otherwise known as Cesar Chavez Park at the Berkeley marina.

The park is perfectly sited for flying kites. Check it out on Google Maps. Not only does it jut out into the bay for maximum wind exposure, but if you zoom out on the map, you’ll see that there’s only about a 2-mile finger of terra firma that lays between it and the entire Pacific Ocean. The wind today was rather mild but even so it had flags and banners snapping. Moreover, the park has several gentle hills and valleys, all carpeted in lush, shin-high green grass.

It really is a delight to walk, and we’ve gone over on several weekends to admire the squadrons of kites that always seem to be patrolling the park’s airspace. The place has such ideal conditions that it’s the site of the annual Berkeley Kite Festival, which features some amazing kites. So last weekend, Costco had a deal on big kites spanning 6′. We picked up one that looks like a dragon and today was our first chance to try it out. There’s Harlan, above, performing some corrective action.

At one point, Tala and Harlan had wandered off, leaving me in sole custody of the dragon. As I stood there, back to the setting sun, letting string out or taking it in, and occasionally jerking my hands from side to side, it struck me what a similar sensation it was to playing a video game. Gripped in my two hands, the kite reel felt not unlike a game controller of some sort (Wii kite peripheral, anyone?), and my mental state seemed similar to what I feel sometimes while playing — a sort of detached focus on the objective at hand, with hands and eyes working together sort of quasi-automatically while a portion of my brain thinks about other stuff.

In a way it’s not really surprising because both activities are a form of play. I’m sure there are many other pastimes have similar effects on people, but I’ve never before felt such a close association between two pretty different activities. I found kite-flying sort of hypnotically addictive, and Tala mentioned that maybe it’s what draws people to fishing as well. I can definitely see getting into kites, especially with this world-class proving ground just two miles down the highway from us.