Shark Kite

The Kite:

Six feet of terrifying jaws and black nylon, dredged fron the depths of Spider Girl's basement, and about to embark on its maiden flight.

A Fierce SHOWK! Tew-Wor of the Seas! (Note: You had to be there).



The Dog:

Loki, soulful-eyed, stick-carrying, and not much interested in kite-flying, but happy to be along on the mission.

The Beach:

Gartley Beach just past high noon on the first full day of autumn. The tide is far out, the driftwood stacked high, and our picnic is eaten while we lean comfortably against the logs. We contemplate the skies and test the wind.

The Plan:

To make our shark kite soar majestically throughthe air, say, MORE than five feet off the ground. A challenge on this gorgeous, but rather windless day.

Kim told me of another day of kite-flying long ago. She had won a large Coca-Cola themed kite in a store promotion. It was the kind of large kite that comes with a warning label that it is not to be flown by a person weighing less than 120 pounds.

They can have amazing lift apparently, a thought which brings to my mind a scene from the novel The Wasp Factory in which a little person is inventively murdered by being tangled in a kite string and swept off over the cliffs.

Anyway, Kim and a friend(themselves little people) were on a beach near their university trying to fly the giant kite and having a varied amount of success, although thrillingly the kite would sometimes lift them a small ways off the ground in their attempts.

They later returned to the university common room which overlooked the beach where someone greeted them with:"Hey, you shoulda seen it! Two idiots were down on the beach trying to hang-glide!"

Tai, another friend of mine, keeps a kite in the trunk of her car, an essential along with the spare tire one presumes.

I remember the day we flew it was so windy that we just sat cross-legged on Jericho Beach as Tai's kite (the Batman logo I believe) went higher and higher all on its own. None of this running about backwards over the sand kind of effort!

I've read about kite festivals in countries like Afghanistan where hundreds of kite-flyers gather to pit their kites against the others until only one remains. The kite strings are covered in a sticky mixture of ground glass and cut like knives through their rivals' strings (as well as being cruel to the hands). There is an excellent novel called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini in which he describes a young boy's determination to win this competition.