Touching the Face of God: Part I

Like Edgar Allen Poe*, I pride myself on being able to describe anything via the written word. But my confidence in my descriptive powers is a little bit shaken as I put the fingers to the keyboard to recount my first experience hang-gliding.

I’ll make it easy for myself and do the nuts and bolts first. Three of us did it: my former life-partner Shirley, author of Eclipse Court, our 14-year-old son Tristan (hers biologically), and me, on July 9 of this year. We did a “low and slow” session for rank beginners at High Perspective, a hang-gliding school north of Pickering, Ontario, near Toronto. (Our 11-year-old son Raphael, mine biologically, we figured isn’t ready for low and slow yet.)

What exactly does this involve? Well, after you sign the waiver (which is a very heavy waiver, requiring many initials), first you strap on a hang-gliding harness, which is like a big apron with leg loops, a big metal bar with a metal catch at the front and various straps that attach to a big carabiner at the back. And of course you put on a helmet.


Me in helmet and harness (photo by Shirley)

Then you get a little training using simulator devices: first, a big tripod with a hook on it and a bar that you hang from by the carabiner, as if on a glider, gripping the bar; this is to learn the way to move your body so as to control the glider.


Tris on the simulator, with James instructing (photo by Shirley)


In case you don’t know, a hang-glider is controlled totally by shifting your weight in relation to the control bar, which is a triangle of aluminum attached to the wings, so that you are shifting your weight in relation to them, which changes their angles and so determines your glide speed and direction. Sound absurdly simple and ridiculously physical? It is, and I’ll come to the implications of that, which are many.

We then used a dummy control bar to practice carrying the glider on our shoulders, which you have to do before you take off, and switching your grip from the glider-carrying grip to the flying grip. It has to be very, very relaxed, James, our instructor, told us – just thumb and forefinger and so loose you can slide your hand up and down easily. I will come to the implications of that very loose grip later, too. It’s key.

Then we and James hauled out and assembled the “Condor”—a training glider that is designed not to go above 50 feet—and carried it to the take-off starting spot.

Everything became more surreal from this point.

Before I go on: I am a connoisseur of fear. By that I mean, I have studied it (amateurly) in its myriad faces and varieties, both in myself and others. I have felt it, and fought it, and lived its nuances, and become very self-aware about how it works in me. I don’t think I am a naturally-fearful person, based on my experiences taking karate; I saw what naturally-fearful people tended to do, and what I did, and I saw there was a difference. But I have lived with an underlying crippling fear that pervades every aspect of my life, for as far back as I remember, and was in denial about it until fairly recently, because it goes so far back that I just thought it was normal, at least for me. Essentially it’s an aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder, from a traumatic sexual-abuse experience when I was a toddler, which I experienced as life-threatening. I’ve come to know fear as a wall that seems absolutely impossible to break through, fear as a paralyzing state that can sap all strength out of the body, fear as a living death; I’ve also come to learn how, at the moment of success in the face of what is feared, fear can dissolve into absolutely nothing in an instant, as if the wall was never there and the paralysis never happened. More than anything, I am very aware of how fear can disguise itself as reality.

So, as we got closer to the moment, by days, then hours, then minutes, I was naturally asking myself how nervous I was, knowing that I can be nervous without admitting it to myself. As we placed the glider for launch, I was nervous, but it wasn’t sweaty-palms or heart-pounding severe. It certainly wasn’t going to make me chicken out, even when James declared that in honour of my being the weightiest of the three of us (I am not svelte as I was when I was, say, studying karate), I would go first.

But there was this very strong sense of ‘I can’t believe I’m going to do this,’ which was as much amazement as fear, I think, which Shirley had too, though she denied having any fear at all. The calmest of us was Tristan, who genuinely knows no fear. This is a boy who, when he was two, heaved himself off an eight-foot ledge with rocks under it purposely. (Fortunately, he was merely bruised.) Put him on anything fast and he just wants to go faster.

How a low-and-slow lesson at High Perspective works is that you get a tow from the winch, a machine that’s basically an industrial-strength motorized kite-string. Michael Robertson, the owner of the school and a kind of zen master of hang-gliding—he’s been doing it for 40 years—is operating the winch, in one corner of this huge mowed field; you are in the middle of the field, several hundred yards away from him. The end of the cable is attached to the metal bar on the harness—to you, that is, not to the glider—and it basically pulls you forward and up into the air, exactly the same as a kite when a kid runs into the wind with it.

James hooked up my harness onto the glider, and had me do a “hang check”—he lifted the nose of the glider and I let my weight hang in the harness—to make sure everything was connected properly, which is done every time you hook in. Then he got me to lift the glider—the only thing that big I’ve ever been able to lift, with a wingspan of something like 25 feet—up onto my shoulders. Via radio he asked Michael to put tension on the line, while he had me stand still, resisting it. After asking me if I was ready, to which I answered the confidence-radiating “Uhh, I think so,” James radioed Michael, “Clear and launch, clear and launch.”

So there I was, looking through this triangle of wires at this long path across this field and this very distant machine (though Michael’s voice was loud and clear on a radio attached to the glider), with this cable attached to me and this thing on my shoulders that was, at least theoretically, going to lift me into the air. On retrospect, I was still really disbelieving it at this point, which I guess was at least part of the problem. I think also I was excited/nervous enough that my mind wasn’t all there, so I wasn’t listening to instructions as well as I would otherwise. And so began my pain and frustration.

It’s one of these things that you just can’t do until you get the feel of it, and you can’t get the feel of it until you do it. The cable pulled hard on me, and I ran, and what seemed to happen is that it outran me, and I ended up crashing to the ground without having got off. James told me that what I’d done wrong was held the bar too tightly. I hadn’t noticed how tightly or loosely I was holding; I wasn’t even really aware of my hands at all, just the running, and the emotion, mostly fear and futility. This happened about three or four more times, up the length of the field, and then I was too close to the winch and had to give up and let the next person, who was Shirley, have a turn.

She didn’t manage to get up on the first pull, but she did the second, and I asked James, “What did she do right that I didn’t?” He just answered, “Let herself relax.” No surprise, Tris had the easiest time of all of us. For our bird-boy’s last flight, Michael didn’t even have to say a word of instruction to him, he did it so perfectly. “Kids haven’t learned yet that they can’t fly,” he said to us afterwards, possibly explaining why Tris heaved himself off that ledge as a toddler. “But we adults have, so we have to unlearn it.”

My second try, I was truly scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it, not now or ever, and at the same time determined. Determined is the wrong attitude, of course, because it makes you tense, and I knew that. Still, the whole thing was more familiar now, and I’d seen both Shirley and Tris get into the air.

Oh, the worlds of frustration. First time I tripped and crashed… second time I just crashed because I felt I was being pulled too fast, same as the first times. “You’re still holding on too hard!” James kept telling me. It didn’t seem like I could control my hands at all. I started to feel, I’ll never get it; I’ll blow it, like everything else in my life.

I actually have not blown everything in my life, not even everything physical; I have a black belt in karate, for instance. But I blew everything physical as a child, because I was always more afraid than the other kids, and that habit of thought sticks. I didn’t understand the fear back then, and simply hated myself for it. Now I understand it, from understanding how huge the effects can be of a very early trauma.

Was I in tears? No, but I knew very well if I thought much more about it, I would be. I have been down this road so many times. I am in tears as I write.

But Michael and James have tricks up their sleeves, for getting recalcitrant newbies into the air. “She wants to let go, but her body’s not letting her do it,” Michael radioed James. I think if he knew about incest survivors, he’d have figured out that I am one (yes, that too—different series of incidents.) I have never met an incest survivor who wasn’t a control freak in one way or another, over-compensating for the ultimate helplessness. For all I know, he did figure it out. “No-hands launch,” he instructed. They’d mentioned this already—that sometimes, when people hang on too hard, they’ll get them to launch without holding on at all.

“Hook your thumbs in your harness,” James commanded me. “When we are no longer beside you”—it was him and another instructor’s helper, Clifton, who’d be running on either side of me—“grab onto the bar.” Clifton didn’t hear that, being busy, I think with the ATV that he was using to give us and the glider rides back to the starting point, because I remember him saying, “Um… she’s got to grab on sometime.” I told him not to worry, I would. Grabbing on wasn’t the problem. Letting go was.

I hooked my thumbs in my harness. If these guys knew this would work, I was willing to trust them. And I ran, and then it seemed I was crashing to the ground again, having lost my feet again.

But then, like a miracle… the glider and I were going upwards, with no effort on my part at all, no hands, no tension, no struggle. It just happened. Everything went smooth, and the ground fell away. I was flying.


This is the part that I have doubts about my ability to describe. There is simply nothing like it, at least not that I’ve experienced. I will never be the same person again; that’s how it feels. My life has become three-dimensional. Hang-gliding is transformative. (And it’s not just me, because Shirley said the same thing, and Michael knows all about it.)



If you are in an airplane, you feel like you are in a big metal container that is flying. Hang-gliding, it’s like you are flying. Because you are controlling the glider with your body—because the action is so absurdly simple and ridiculously physical—the glider feels like it’s part of you. (I did take hold of the bar at the right time, and controlling the glider by shifting my weight, I found easy.)

Once you are in the air, you don’t feel any danger at all; at least that was my experience. You never feel like you’re going to fall, perhaps because the sensory feedback of the glider is so immediate; you feel like it’s a pair of wings, and they’re yours. You feel in total control, because it does exactly what you want depending on how you make the smallest of weight shifts.

And yet my mouth was dry when I came down. Pure excitement? A bodily fear? Did I feel I had succeeded at something that was better than I, who always failed everything, deserved to? Or was it simply that I had really not believed I could do it, or survive it (Michael’s theory) until I did? I’m in tears again as I write—but very different tears.

Damn it, words simply cannot do it justice. Hang-gliding is spiritual. The title of this post comes from the poem High Flight, written in 1941 by Royal Canadian Air Force pilot John McGee, Jr., inspired by a flight to 33,000 feet in a Spitfire, but which applies at least as well to hang-gliding. (Incidentally, he was 19 when he wrote it, and was killed four months later in a mid-air collision, still 19.)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

I didn’t get to such an altitude, but the feeling of something divine, I did. The Christian worldview sees the sky as Heaven; I wonder, however, if what makes hang-gliding feel as it does is that it is so similar to the flight of the disembodied soul in the Eternal Return, between lives—the ultimate freedom that, at some level, we all remember. I know that when I want to describe hang-gliding to someone I ask them if they've ever had flying dreams, because I have, and hang-gliding is the closest you can come in real life to what a flying dream feels like.

Hang-gliding is a metaphor for life, at least mine—but then maybe I am not so alone as I have sometimes felt, and this is true for everyone. If you can let go of fear, let go of over-control, let go of self-doubt and negativity and pessimism, and simply trust that what you are doing will carry you… you will fly. Hang-gliding teaches you that in place where you learn things most deeply and indelibly: your body.

I am working on figuring out how to hook my thumbs in my harness in other aspects of my life.

We had time for one more flight each, and this time I managed a take-off with my hands on the bar, a nice high flight (for a noob), and a landing that was not that far off landing on my feet.



I was getting the feel of it, and we had to quit, as the sun had set. I can’t begin to tell you how desperate I was—am—to do it again. I really, really did not want to stop. And yet part of me still can’t believe I did do it. Shirley, same.

And I am already thinking about how to apply what I’ve learned to the writing. Shirley and I will be doing an IM role-playing/writing demonstration at Six Degrees Muskoka on July 18—the computer screen gets projected big out the store window so passersby can read as we go—and our plan is to RP and then write the first time Chevenga tries flying, me from his point of view, Shirley from that of Niku, who teaches him. (If you’re in Bracebridge, Ontario between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. EDT that day, check it out.)

And it will be beautiful, because now I know how it will feel for him to get hooked on… to do a hang-check… to be standing with this thing on his shoulders, looking through a triangle of wires and thinking, am I really going to do this? Difference being that he didn’t even think flying of any sort was possible for human beings, until he watched Niku do a low test-flight just a moment before.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we’ll be doing it again, but this time it’ll be tandem flights: going up along with an expert pilot. Michael & Co. do them right in our area, Muskoka, on the lakes; the glider has pontoons and you get towed up behind a motorboat. (See video here.) You go as high as 1,000 feet. This time it will be all four of us, and Raphi will have his first hang-gliding experience.

Best part: if you’ve done a low and slow lesson, you get to take the bar for a lot of the flight. That means learning a lot more. I will post Part II tomorrow later as I have time.

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*“I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.”

-Marginalia Part V, re “A Dream Within a Dream”

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UPDATE: If a novelist is somewhere between a journalist and a poet, then I lean more towards the journalistic side, and Shirley more toward the poetic. See her blog post on the hang-gliding evening, complete with video and a very beautiful poem, here.