Four Wings and a Prayer (20 page)

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE
of August in the summer of the absent monarch butterflies. In less than two hours I would be airborne with David Gibo, flying in a two-seat training glider above the farmland surrounding Arthur, a small agricultural village in southern Ontario, about an hour west of Toronto. We had driven up at midday, stopping for lunch at the local diner, a spare eatery with little to recommend it except that it was there and reliably patronized by members of the York Soaring Association, Professor Gibo’s glider club. Though he was so engrossed in a conversation with a fellow pilot that he kept forgetting to look at his menu, I was obsessed with the French fries and chocolate milkshake that I ordered with abandon on the theory that this might well be my last meal. And if we didn’t crash, if I didn’t die, I kept asking myself, would I be revisited by this food at fifteen hundred feet?

“In most planes, stability is a good thing,” the other pilot was saying to David. Did that mean that gliders were not stable? I wondered. Flying in an airplane without an engine—this was definitely the most dangerous thing I’d ever done on purpose. And it
was
on purpose. I wanted to feel what it felt like to be carried along by wind. Or I had wanted to feel it. An hour, now, from takeoff, and I was no longer sure.

“Being stable requires less energy,” the other pilot said loudly. He had an Australian accent and a confident manner. Gibo had told him I was going up for the first time, and I had the feeling that this speech about stability—a very calming word—was for my benefit exclusively.

“Monarchs are stable in their gliding configuration,” David said. “If they have an active control system, their nervous
system and muscles are going to be operating, and they’ll use
more
energy.”

This I understood. A monarch can carry only about 125 milligrams of lipids—its fuel—in its body. It takes just ten hours of powered flight—the kind of flying that is characterized by beating wings—to deplete that store.

“The idea is to get from here to there with as little energy used as possible,” David said. “On the other hand, when they’re attacked they have to go into violent maneuvers. They can flap and unflap their wings and beat them in different planes.”

But what about us, flying in a craft with fixed wings and no fuel? What did we have to work with?

Not a lot, it turned out. At the gliderport David showed me our plane, a battered twenty-five-year-old Schweizer 2-33 trainer. Disproportionate to the airplane’s body, like the arms of a rangy teenager that had grown faster than his torso, the wings spread out on either side of a remarkably small and compact hull. The hull was painted orange in a somewhat haphazard manner, the green and black of earlier paint jobs peeking out here and there. The steel housing was battered and pinged, and the effect was hardly reassuring. It looked like a jalopy.

The glider’s wings were orange as well, and rounded on top—airfoil wings. This, I knew, would help keep us aloft. As air moved over the top of the wing, the airfoil would slow it down and disperse it. With more pressure below the wing than above it, the airplane would be pushed upward. This was lift. A monarch’s wings were orange with black, too, but all similarities ended there. Butterfly wings were flat. Lift came from flapping, from churning the air until it created a whirling mass that moved along the leading edge of the wing.

The gangly orange sailplane, though not nearly as elegant as an orange-and-black monarch, had certain mechanical advantages over a butterfly. It had a rudder, located near the tail, that kept the fuselage aligned with the direction of flight. It had a pair of ailerons, one per wing, that controlled airflow and offered lateral control. It had elevators on the tail to make the nose point up or down. It had spoilers to reduce lift. Each of these was available to the pilot should he wish to change the airplane’s flight angle, its altitude, or its direction.

Professor Gibo was explaining this as we hoisted ourselves into the rudimentary and snug cockpit, me up in front, he in the back. Feet forward, I wriggled into place like a sausage being packed into casing. The plane—the inside of it, anyway—was narrow and tinny. There just wasn’t much of it. And once the Plexiglas canopy was lowered, it seemed smaller still. Not a good place to be a claustrophobic, I was thinking, looking out the bubble overhead. Or to be a control freak, either, since there were almost no controls. Just the altimeter, rudder pedals, spoiler aileron, and elevator stick, and the tow-release knob to disengage the umbilicus connecting the glider to the tow plane.

“I don’t need to know about any of these, right?” I called to David, looking for assurance that he, indeed, would be piloting the plane. But David couldn’t hear me. The tow plane was buzzing up ahead and the yellow rope between us was losing its slack. After another second it grabbed the little orange glider as if it were a recalcitrant child and pulled it down the grassy runway. We clattered along, then lifted off the ground for a second like a kite on a short string, dipped back down, then took off again for real as the yellow rope stretched and grew taut. Twenty, fifty, one hundred feet and climbing. As I
looked down at the receding ground, a line from a nameless poem went through my head: “From this there’s no returning, none.”

“Watch the tow rope,” David called out to me over the loud, maddish complaint of an airplane being yanked through the air. “You’ll know when we’re going to hit a bump because you’ll see it in the rope first.” I guessed this made me feel more secure, though “more secure” might suggest that I felt
somewhat
secure, which at that moment I did not. We were bobbing around pretty regularly, mirroring the fits and starts of the tow plane but on time delay, like bad lip-synching. Still, knowing when it was going to happen let me tense up beforehand and brace myself.

“Five hundred feet,” David shouted, a fact that I accepted ambivalently. Up was definitely better than down, but up meant we were moving farther away from the ground, from the world where gravity was as transparent and unthreatening as air. “Seven hundred feet!” I caught sight of the altimeter. It was inching up. But I didn’t need an instrument to tell me that. The fields and farms below were growing distant, flattening the third dimension till it looked as if, really, there were only two.

As we approached a thousand feet, David asked me to call out the readings. “You have to release the rope at two thousand feet,” he added.

“I do?” I yelled back. Apparently, I did. There was only one release knob, David explained, and it was by my knees. I put my hand on it and looked straight ahead at the rope, which was sending a wave in our direction. Bump.

“Fifteen hundred feet,” I called. The higher we went, the more the sun bore through the canopy and spread heat and
light relentlessly. No wonder David was in short sleeves and a wide-brimmed floppy hat. There was no escaping the sun. Off to our right I could see another glider, off its tow, making tight circles.

“It’s in a thermal,” David shouted, seeing it, too. “Don’t worry. We won’t hit that plane for the same reason you don’t run into the car in front of you, or next to you, when you’re driving.”

Really? I knew plenty of people who had inadvertently rear-ended another vehicle. Didn’t they count? “Seventeen hundred feet.” The climb was steady, and the horizon stretched in front of us, and with no landmarks there was no way to distinguish eighteen hundred feet from nineteen hundred feet. But we had reached nineteen hundred feet and were pulling up to the invisible station. My hand tightened on the release knob, independent, it seemed, of my reluctance to separate from the motor that was carrying us aloft. Something about letting go felt suicidal, like pulling the switch on one’s own electric chair.

“Two thousand feet,” I sang out to David.

“Two thousand feet,” he confirmed. I pulled back on the knob, which resisted for a moment, then gave way with a jerk and a loud pop that startled me. The yellow cord snapped away, and all the noise did, too. Quiet rushed in around us, a whispering quiet, and the plane untensed like a hand gone from fist to open palm, and for the first time since taking to the air we were flying, really flying, and it was, much to my surprise, glorious: serene, buoyant, unlikely, glorious. The air, which until then I think I had not seriously taken into account as a force in my life, was holding us up. I could feel it, as if it had especially large fingers that pressed
into my flesh. Air was a fluid, David had told me earlier, and now, buoyed by it in a tangible way, I felt what he meant. He pushed gently on the right rudder pedal and we turned slightly, then rushed forward in a graceful swoop.

“The clouds are pretty fragmented,” David said, referring to the thermal updrafts we were seeking. David’s voice was calm and measured. He was a seasoned pilot. I figured if he was untroubled by the fragmentation, I should be, too. I leaned back in my seat and looked out the window. I could no longer say that I didn’t like to fly.

A
MONARCH TRAVELING
to Mexico from where we were in southern Ontario would have to fly about two thousand miles to reach one of the overwintering sites, and it would take it ten or eight or six or fewer weeks to get there. Powered flight—flapping—would propel the bug forward, but at a cost in terms of both fuel consumption and time, since powered flight, despite its name, is relatively slow. When most people think of monarch butterflies’ migrating to Mexico, though, and then going back to the United States and Canada, that’s the image they have in their heads—a small and fragile and vulnerable creature flapping like mad in a determined and enervating manner.

Up in the cockpit of his Grob 103, David Gibo understood in an intimate and practical way that a butterfly could not possibly flap its way to Mexico. Gibo could travel on the wind for hours in his fixed-wing airplane, soaring and gliding across the sky using thermal updrafts, or rising columns of warm air. The butterflies, he reasoned, must do the same thing. Gliding (nonpowered flight in still air) and soaring
(nonpowered flight in moving air, such as a thermal) were the methods that enabled both him, in his Grob, and a monarch, with its aerodynamic constraints, to travel long distances with little wear and tear and even less fuel consumption.

“Typical gliding and soaring flight, with the wings outstretched, [does] not generally require any effort from the insect,” noted the German zoologist Werner Nachtigall in his book
Insects in Flight.
“No energy is expended, either because the wings themselves automatically take up the gliding position as soon as the flight muscles are relaxed … or else [because] there is a ‘click mechanism’ which puts the wings into the right altitude mechanically. This latter method is how butterflies assume a gliding mechanism.”

It was in the same book that, shortly before heading up to Toronto to meet David Gibo, I had read this: “[A glider pilot] climbs steeply in one thermal, then leaves this and glides obliquely downwards towards the nearest thermal, in which he soars again, and so on. By this means he can make long, cross-country flights without having any engine. The only snag is that each time he must find another thermal before his downward glide has taken him to ground level. If he does not he must land.”

Up above the farms of Wellington County we drifted with lazy purpose, circling laconically and moving in a direction that felt like up. I knew that some gliders could course the sky all day, and that some had reached altitudes that required supplemental oxygen. Our goal was to stay aloft as long as possible, which meant at best twenty or twenty-five minutes. I also knew that sometimes the thermals were so prevalent that it was hard to come down, though this was rare, and that most of the time pilots crossed the sky as if the
thermals were stones in a stream—upwardly mobile stones that moved them both up and over at the same time. Lose the thermals, and you were on your way down.

“We’re in sink!” David said from the backseat. His voice was steady, uninflected. My eyes fixed on the horizon, trying to see what he meant.

“What is ‘sink’?” I asked, seeing nothing but wispy clouds and another glider, far enough away to look smaller than it was. David adjusted the rudder and the aileron. The nose of the plane, which was pointing downward, wiggled up.

“It means that we’ve lost the thermal and we’re losing altitude,” he said, but sounding calm and businesslike.
Sink.
It was a delightfully descriptive word. I knew I should feel scared, but I didn’t. I checked the altimeter: we had dropped five hundred feet within a matter of seconds. Even so, we were already on our way to another thermal, banking sharply as we aimed for a destination in the sky that only David Gibo could make out. In less than a minute we had caught the updraft as if it were the 1:17 commuter train pulling out of the station.

“Usually what you do is fly a pattern in order to fly into a thermal,” Gibo was saying. “Now, with the butterfly, it goes in the direction it wants to go, finds the thermal, and then behaves appropriately.”

I can’t say I was listening attentively when Professor Gibo explained this, or when he mentioned that meteorologists had picked up migrating monarchs on radar, flying at five thousand feet. Instead I was thinking about the words
We are in sink,
and the fact that we had been falling from the sky and that the sky—invisible and elusive—had held us up.