The Last Beautiful flight of an American Icon
It all began innocently enough. The wife had picked up some cheap kites to bring to fish camp. Little did she know what would become of it. Little did she realize that lives would be at stake. Innocent fun for the kids, she thought.
There were three of them. Paying with a crisp ten dollar bill at Walmart she left with the kites and a handful of change.
The first was a fancy red dragon kite. The thing had multiple wings, a long tail and looked fierce like Smaug of the Tolkien tales in a cheap-plasticy kind of way. Unlike Smaug though, this kite was a big puss. Touted as a “trick-kite” capable of flips and the like, it turned out to be more of a duck than a dragon. Lame-duck that is. No doubt flips are cool but as we found out soon enough they are hard to perform from the ground. It wouldn’t fly. It seemed that Smaug was more of a land lubber. Strike one.
Number two was a penguin kite. “Now this kite has potential”, I thought to myself as I assembled the thing. Anything had to be better after the let-down of Smaug jr. With a steady 15 mile per hour wind from the Southeast Corey let it go; this had to be the one, and in truth, it was great for about five minutes until it took a direct nose-dive into the hardpack of the mudflats. The broken stanchions and torn plastic were beyond repair. It was a sad moment; Strike two,but there was another.
I cringed a little as I saw the last of the kites. I reached into the tattered duffle bag and pulled her out. It was a Barbie kite. Hazelee was beaming as I began assembling it. Let’s see, traditional shape, clean lines, giant barbie doll face....check.
“Let er go!” I shouted and Hazelee did so. I pulled back hard like I had on the other two but I quickly found out that it was not necesary, Barb took to the sky like an Arctic tern. Within a minute she had taken all of our line and was as steady in the North Eastern skyline as Mt. Susitna. Hmm.
“Haze, come hold this.” I had an idea. I returned with an old spinning rod and a full roll of one pound-test monofilament fishing line. Before long, I had ol’ Barb hooked up to a fishing rod and after flipping the bail, we had let out several hundred yards of line. No more than a small dot in the sky far away I suddenly realized; Barb was legit! Corey, Hazelee, and I stood there on the mudflats cheering up at the most plastic of American icons high in the sky. Fly Barbie fly. Smiling down at us with her pouty lips and high cheek bones, she seemed pleased to please.
“Here hold this, I’ll be right back.”I left Corey and Hazelee again standing there with the fishing pole, tethered by over a quarter mile of string to the far off kite. I ran to the shed for more line.
“ What are you doing?” Tamra appeared on the corner of the cabin porch with her hands on her hips.
“We are flying a kite honey.”
“ I see that. How high are you planning to fly that thing?” she asked. I could tell by her tone that she was going somewhere with this I just wasn’t sure where.
“As high as we can of course!”
“That’s too high! You’re going to hit a plane”. I snickered outloud at the thought and quickly regretted it. A part of me was a little proud that we had flown a kite so high in the sky as to be a perceived threat to safe aviation. Maybe with enough line we could fly Barb into the Ozone layer and beyond. Maybe Barb would be detected by the high-powered radar systems of NASA, or the U.S military. (“Uh, sir, I think you’d better take a look at this.” There zoomed into some fancy screen would be Barbie’s face, long flowing blond locks, big blue eyes. )
At fish camp we are situated in a major flyway from Anchorage to Beluga that is frequented mainly by small planes. They buzz by us all day long following the coastline as a safer alternative to flying over Cook Inlet itself. A lot of these pilots choose to fly right off-the-deck Barbie level or lower.
“Are you kidding? You can see Barb from miles around. She is a beacon of all that is good and true in this world!” She wasn’t buying it.
Maybe she was right. After all, overcoming the humiliation from the boys at work from being taken-down by a Barbie kite would be too much for any bush pilot to overcome.
“ Okay hun.” We reeled her in, tucked her into the shed and sought after other, safer activities like napping.
