Rebecca's Writings - An Ab Initio's Eye View on Gliding in Omarama

13,000 feet over Lake Hawea and my first time on oxygen

I started flying in April 2011 in the UK. I am just pre-solo. Flying in Omarama with GlideOmarama's expert instructors is a dive in at the deep end of gliding. I was experiencing writer's block before I started learning to be a glider pilot but as soon as I started flying, I started to write again.

I will post occasional writings on flying in Omarama here, written from my Ab Initio's eye view.

10th February, 2012

Collecting Flying Dreams

Thoughts, dreams and memories of flying blur and merge, mingle and boil in my imagination, swirling into a blue shapeless mass. I've stopped trying to separate them out; let them mingle I say. Flying is a bit like dreaming, and a bit like fantasising too. Dreams are strange emotional echoes of experiences, memory and fantasy. Before I started gliding, I only flew in my dreams. I continue to dream about flying but I’m rarely in a glider. I fly by myself, will myself up into the air by sheer power of thought. I fly over roof and tree tops; I’m never very high in these dreams, never high enough to need oxygen. Some part of my mind in sleep won’t take me up as high as I can go in a glider. Why can’t my dreams take me to the edge of space to look back down on this spinning blue marble? Perhaps this is because sleep is a kind of high altitude mental flight and when I dream-fly over telegraph poles and rustling waving treetops, I have descended from the outer reaches of sleep. Waking up is a kind of landing. I’ve asked fellow fliers if they dream about flying, and most people say they do. Many recall having flying dreams as children. Do you dream about flying? Some people collect stamps, sports cars, model ships or antiques; I collect people’s flying dreams.

8th February, 2012

What Shape is the Sky?

Flying, I realise that the sky is shapeless and yet fully three dimensional. It has ups, ins, depths, circles, spirals, spheres, rivers and shapes of every imaginable and unimaginable form. The sky is almost impossible to describe. It's uncontainable, ever shifting, disarming, soulful, unmappable. Flying, I wrap the sky around me like a vast silk gown. Worries and fears from the grounded world shrink when set against the giant scale of the sky. I drown my worries up here; I hold them under with strong arms. They flail and kick and then go still and cold beneath my grip. I release and let them float away. I look ahead at the far horizon and at the haze of blue that is both empty and full, constant and ever-changing.

Painting Thermals

"The spiral expresses in me a sense of protective solitude." Peter Lanyon, British post-war painter-glider pilot.

'Thermal', Peter Lanyon, 1960.

In his abstract paintings inspired by his gliding, Peter Lanyon attempted to "paint the environment inside and out".

6th February, 2012

Grace Under Pressure

Flying in Omarama confronts me with myself and with the elements of which we are all a part. My fearful nature is tested. Where will help come from? As painter-glider pilot Peter Lanyon said, you have to rescue yourself. Gliding, you put yourself into an emergency of sorts and emerge out of it by saving yourself. Flying also involves a certain amount of letting go into the riskiness of flying unpowered in the only partially controllable unknown that is the sky. It’s on the cusp between the known and the unknown that things can happen. Work the edges, as they say. See what happens. Will it but also let it be. Grace under pressure. Lose yourself. Find yourself. Let the sky flood inside my mind to expand those interior reaches where fear shrinks in the face of the vast scale of the sky.

5th February, 2012

I'm Turning into an Air-Head, Becoming Bird Brained

What Learning to Fly Does to the Mind

Before I began gliding in April 2011, I was a thoroughly grounded person; I was not “air-minded”. From the moment I left the ground on my first flight at the Black Mountains Gliding Club in Wales, I was hooked. I spent that spring and summer flying as much as possible. Throwing myself whole-heartedly into learning to fly affected me psychologically and reshaped how I see things in the following ways, all of which are extremely positive:

Gliding has changed the way I see the sky. What had seemed a remote and empty space up above my head quickly became a swirling ocean I wanted to explore. I found myself looking up at the sky constantly, fascinated by the way it changes from one moment to the next. I had been somebody who's eyes were trained on the lower terrain, on buildings and trees, but now I look up and into the sky and think about it in terms of what it would be like to fly in it. I'm now sky-minded, an air-head, bird-brained.

In the UK, I'm learning to fly in the Black Mountains, over the landscape that raised me. Flying over the hills I have known intimately since childhood has changed my perspective on them. I often fly over the family farm where I grew up and looking down on the shapes of the fields I know so well from the ground gives me a different perspective on my past. Sometimes I think I see myself as a little girl playing in the farmyard. Seeing the shapes of familiar small towns and villages from the sky enhances my understanding of their history and the way they've developed over time. More generally, viewing the ground from a glider has given me a new way of reading the landscape. Seeing the terrain in terms of where you are likely to find lift and where you can safely land out changes the way I relate to it.

One of the things I particularly like about gliding is the way it forces you to sharpen your observational skills and really look carefully at what nature does and how this planet works. I never used to think about what direction the wind was coming from or about which side of the hill the sun reaches first or leaves last on summer days.

Gliding means developing the ability to focus. My writing requires intense focus but it isn't life-threatening if I drift off mentally down some interesting tangent that’s come up while I’m writing. The focus and decision-making required in gliding are good for my brain.

This narrowing of focus on to what's happening in the immediate present moment, combined with the broadening of my attention up thousands of feet into the air, assessing the whole sky and attempting to grasp its vastness, mean gliding has both broadened my sense of what's possible and honed my mind. Gliding has both expanded and focused me.

And I had hoped to stay out of incontinence pads at least until my 80s, so I am somewhat surprised to be wearing them now. Also, I have a new personal currency. When I see something I want to buy but probably shouldn't, I measure its value to me in terms of the cost of aerotows. A pair of shoes have to be pretty amazing these days to be worth spending the equivalent of an aerotow on.

4th February, 2012

Flying Lesson

I take a swig of water. It smells of chlorine because it’s tap water made warm by the sun. The water slips down my dry throat and I take hold of the stick. The voice in the back tells me again to move the stick only millimetres. You’re a subtle person, he says, so make subtle movements. I still find it hard to believe that a millimetre this way or that can have any effect on the way this bird-fish-mammal moves through the air. Instructions swirl inside my head as the horizon, ancient mountains, twists and slips across the canopy as we circle inside a thermal. I’ve flown so little that I hardly have any memories of thermalling to draw on but flying feels like something I’m re-learning. Soaring already has the quality of a memory. I glance up at the ragged base of a cumulus cloud and find it hard to believe that this gas giant hanging in the sky has the weight of a small lake. I remember being told that the whole sky is my engine. What a big thought. Unpowered flight makes no sense to me and yet it feels completely natural, like swimming. I know I can’t breathe underwater but up here in this oceanic sky I take a deep breath. I open the air vent and feel the rush of cold air push against my cheek. Lake Wanaka below is so blue I feel like a homesick fish. The peak of Mount Aspiring in the distance pierces the clouds and I relax inside, and let the joy of being up here well up. I know that in order to fly solo I must learn to be decisive, something I’m not good at. Go there. Plan B, plan C. I’m worried that I don’t know how to talk to myself in flight. It crosses my mind that when I fly solo, I might try singing to myself instead.

The Mackenzie Basin Mountains

Gliding in this extraordinary landscape changes the way I see and experience it. The land and skyscape seem to be alive. I explored this idea in a 5-minute free-writing excercise:

The Mackenzie Basin Mountains

They're higher than I've ever climbed and they’re deep-rooted, anchored down inside the earth. Yellow flowers and light brown waving grasses are sprinkled across them so that from the air, flying past at 80 knots in a glider, I want to reach out and run my hand across their velvet backs. Are the mountains alive? Do they breathe in some long geological timeframe inaccessible to the human senses? If they are alive, they are not asleep. They watch and learn, observant to the core. They refuse to judge us as we soar over them in winds that gnaw and bite at them. Do they live by a code? The code of mountains written in rock millennia ago, when the world was new. Never judge, they say, always look and look. Cultivate resilience, they say, but give in to the cooling power of water and surrender your bones to its liquid, thirsting mouth.

28th January, 2012

Flight Notes

Sometimes I write a few thoughts and impressions in my notebook straight after a flight. These are rough and formless but they capture my immediate response. Here's one:

"Flood. Dizzy. Blue thermals. Rise up and resist. Calm. Thoughts: why am I doing this? How will I get back? Will this mountain grab me in its gravitational pull? Don't look down at the dark rocky peak of the mountain you are spiraling over. Don't look. So small. So fast. The invisible air is thick and foreign and familiar. It won’t leave me, won’t let me fall will it? Who’s in charge? Find the edge, the centre of the thermal, the edge of the cloud, the windward side. Where is the lift? Next to the sink, as in life. Knife’s edge. Cut it back, turn it around. You will not fall.”

The Curiosity of Fear

I am passionate about gliding. For me, it's physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual even. I'm curious about all aspects of flying, including fear. I am interested in my own fear. I am frightening sometimes, especially flying here when trying to get up into wave, in the turbulent air beneath. I am not used to it. My body tenses in rejection, muscles flutter and kick as the bumps ride up my back. My body and mind ask me quesitons. Odd things surface - questions, images and memories: 'Why are you putting yourself through this?'; 'are we supposed to fly?'; 'I want to get down'; 'will this ever end?'; 'do you know what you're doing?'; 'is the wind attacking me?', 'will that mountain reach up and grab me?', 'does that craggy peak know I am here?'; 'does the wind hate me?'. Images come to mind: a glass of cool water placed on a bare table; lying on my back on a flat newly-mown lawn, safe and grounded; deep sea diving; the homemade spaceship cockpit I made as a child out of cardboard boxes, painted egg boxes and old plastic bottles. I control my fear by accepting it fully, letting it flow through me like the braided Ahuriri river I see below, and I become curious about it. I want to explore my fear in the same way I want to explore these mountains. If I try to repress or ignore my fear, it grows, deepens, darkens and magnifies.

26th January, 2012

Written into the Landscape

The wind is howling at the mountains, coursing through braided river valleys, running up gulleys, gnawing at craggy peaks. The human names written into the landscape here express some of the heady mix of emotions and ideas at play when gliding. I stare at the large map of the Southern Alps on the wall of the Terminal Building on the Omarama Airfield and certain names jump out at me: the map has become a key into the experience of gliding here: Mount Aspiring, Mount Horrible, Magic Mountain, The Barrier Range, Cloud Hill, Old Man Peak, Mount Awkward, Cloudmaker Lake, Mount Misery, Pleasant Valley and Eureka.