Zhiyuan

I rode my bike into the dawn this morning. The sole mourning dove; the rooster’s call now muted beyond shuttered barn doors; wild hare bob into ditches; blue heron rises to the sky; dove song, rubber tires on gravel song, like the sizzle of bacon in a frying pan, all surrendered to the smell of earth and the bold stir of crimson on the sumac of early light.

Later I rounded a bend on a narrow road; up ahead a kite raised high in a cloudless stretch of horizon; contrasts of green and orange danced in a pale and windless sky. An alligator is what it looks like, I said to no one as I continued on my path, curious, imagining the hand that tethered a line that spanned heaven and earth; then the line suddenly disappearing beyond a knoll of ancient lilac. Stopping by a culvert dented with traces of heavy tires, I rested my bike on a farm gate that opened to the smell of fresh-mown fields.

There seemed an invitation to follow through bales of hay stacked in what held to be a play-board of checkers where the pieces —kings and queens—stood square and high. The expectation of finding youth at the end of the kite string was soon turned on end. The hand of a man—grey-bearded, hat and coveralls— gently unwound the tether string from a hoop he held, and as he did so he seemed to beckon the kite to take freedom, to rise with the sun and the lift of warming soil on this Tuesday morning.

I wasn’t sure whether he was ignoring my silent greeting or perhaps he didn’t hear. It was less my shadow and more the grasshoppers that flurried with my footsteps in squeaking grass that he noticed my presence. “Fun!” is how he answered my inquiry as to whether the kite had a special name. “Yeah,” he continued, “the instructions give it a name but I keep things simple. Fun is what it is.” And simple is what this moment was.

I noticed a smile beneath the brim of his straw hat as I crouched down beside him. He kept his focus to the sky and barely looked my way when I asked if could sit awhile. “No harm ifn’ you’re in no hurry.” he said, offering the gift of quiet on a hillside with a stranger. “Darn well makes a body sad when hayin’ time comes round,” he spoke before I could ask his name. “Cuz you don’t need no almanac to tell ya what’s followin’ on its tail. It’s that damn cold,” he was adamant.

I fell into his same trance-like gaze over to the far shore of the ethers and began to wonder what it was that was so soothing and naive in emotion in seeing a kite lifted in the air. The want to fly that has captured humankind since the beginning. I know I’m not alone in wanting to soar with the geese in their loud parade from the marshes of October. Or to glide with the turkey buzzards on high that kite-like, with wings unmoving hold in the updrafts, breathing scents of forests and fields alike as they seek their quarry. I mumbled something to that effect to my newfound friend. “More like fishing,” he said. “It’s not about catchin’ anything but just being out here with something other than work,” is how he put it.

Interesting that the earliest kites—Zhiyuan (paper glide)—apparently flown in ancient China were used for measuring distances and wind speeds and direction: a paradox, really, because instead of the beauty and art form we associate with kites today, most of the early exercises were for military purposes. Then there were the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright who long experimented with kites before the launch of the first aircraft at Kitty Hawk. Ben Franklin’s famous image of flying a kite made of a large silk scarf in a thunder storm to capture ‘electric fire’ was part of a quest of 18th century global experiments to understand ambient electrical charges generated by thunder storms.

“Ya see, I like to fly it from here cuz my knees don’t hold too well to running when you want to get it goin’,” my musings interrupted with practical advice from Frank—turns out that was the kite flyer’s name. He pointed over there to a low-lying ridge. “I do a high start they call it. Set the kite atop that knoll and then unwind a bunch of slack and then walk down over here a ways and even on day like today with hardly a breath of air she’ll lift easy enough with a few tugs of the string and without me doin’ any damn runnin’,” he was clear. “It’s easier on both of us, me and my kite,” Frank ended.

As I cycled my way home that morning, I stopped to look back; Frank’s green and orange kite still holding in the sky: I pondered that image of spirit and simple joy as I continued on, as I navigated the corduroy gravel and potholes of Closson Road and thinkin’ that my trek encapsulated life as I know it, perhaps in the way that Frank would put it: come what may, it’s all in one.