The dunes of North Carolina’s Outer Banks are a dramatic setting for a wedding. The whitecaps of the inrushing sea, whipped up by steady Atlantic trades, raise their ceaseless voices to the wind. Tight formations of pelicans patrol the skies. The constant swirling breezes make a mockery of satin dresses and coiffed hair.
As bride and groom join hands against this turbulent backdrop, the heroic challenge of love comes into focus, a challenge that flies in the face of nature — of mortality, even. What can two people achieve, one wonders, given the unimaginable weight of ocean and sky?
But then they look into each other’s eyes, the bride trembling, the groom nervously moistening his lips, and repeat the hallowed words. It’s done. They kiss. Family and friends tentatively applaud. Someone lets fly a joyful whoop, and the celebration begins.
A seaside wedding anywhere would be picturesque, but the Outer Banks have a special claim on new beginnings. The very first English settlement in North America, the ill-fated Roanoke Colony, is just a few miles down the road from Kitty Hawk, on an island in the Croatan sound. The similar word “Croatoan” may ring a bell: it’s what Sir Walter Raleigh’s friend John White and his men found carved on a tree near the settlers’ mysteriously deserted camp.
The Croatan Highway runs north and south along this thin spit of land that separates the Atlantic from the inland sounds. The Virginia Dare Trail, a more scenic – and slower — road parallels the dunes. The road was named after another pioneer, Virginia Dare, said to be the first child born in the Americas to English parents, in 1587.
But the most famous “first” near Kitty Hawk is a humble field in Kill Devil Hills, the site where, on the frigid, wind-whipped morning of December 17th in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first controlled flight of a powered aircraft.
The Wright Brothers National Memorial is an irresistible draw to a pilot. Imagine the thrill of landing a small plane on First Flight Airstrip, just a stone’s throw from the birthplace of modern aviation!
But you don’t have to be a pilot to get into the spirit of the place. The afternoon we visited, the park was host to a kite festival. Huge silk whales floated in the sky, accompanied by the undulations of a fluttering scuba diver. Precision fliers made their kites hover and twirl a few feet above the ground. Stunt kites with long noisy tails chased each other into death spirals.
The Wright Brothers started with kites, too.
We learned a lot about Orville and Wilbur at the Visitor Center. I knew they ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, but I wasn’t aware that they were very accomplished bicycle racers, whose excellent fitness and coordination made them ideal test pilots. Or that they funded their years of research and experimentation themselves, with money they made in bicycles.
I found this point particularly interesting. At the turn of the 20th century, the race was on to find a solution to powered flight. The United States War Department bet heavily on Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution. Langley’s well funded research yielded a series of embarrassing public spectacles. It was up to the private sector, in the form of two young bicycle enthusiasts from Dayton, to attack the problem systematically and, above all, efficiently, as if every experiment were coming out of their own pockets.
Which it was!
They started simply, with kites, then moved up to gliders. They chose Kill Devil Hills for three reasons: privacy; reliable trade winds; and deep sand, which made an excellent cushion. When the science of the day proved insufficient or plain wrong, as in the case of the ideal shape of a wing, they invented the wind tunnel and got to work building models.
The key to their success lay in understanding the scope of the problem that faced them, which they broke down into three main challenges: how to create lift in order to get their craft off the ground; how to generate thrust to push it through the air; and, hardest of all, how to control the craft, so it could not only fly, but also turn – and all without crashing.
Each of these challenges called forth amazing innovations, like a propeller whose blades were miniature wings; a custom-built gas engine for power; a system of racking the wings of the aircraft to induce a roll; and a coordinated rudder to keep that roll from slipping into a crash.
They used their high school math; their physical training; their ambition, ingenuity, and dogged persistence, until finally, on that blustery December morning, after four solid years of work, the two of them managed to conquer the sky.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 20 October 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
