RABBIT HOPS

It was scheduled to be a fine soaring day so Anton and I launched early, intending to stay up forever and soar as far as possible. There were no clouds anywhere and according to the forecast it might stay blue all day, but a quick climb in our local mountains gave us altitude for a forty-mile glide to the next hills so why wait? "It’ll be booming soon enough, and any clouds we do see will mark the best lift around. Let’s go!” We reached the hills east of Apple Valley plenty high, but found nothing at first. "No sweat. Lift here hasn’t developed yet, that’s all. We shouldn't have long to wait.” Scratching among more than fifteen miles of rocky peaks we found tantalizing hints almost everywhere but could never establish a climb. Meanwhile our teenage line boy Zeke (brilliant talent, very inexperienced and krammed to here with overconfidence) launched thirty minutes behind us. Starting exactly where we did he climbed fifteen hundred feet higher, and so approached these same hills in better shape – at the perfect time to catch tremendous lift only then blossoming directly above us. While the kid settled into his second climb and we inched gradually lower, one teensy cloud began forming high overhead, now far beyond our reach. Craning my neck, I saw Zeke silhouetted against that cloud, a nat on the ceiling. My smile was grudging but proud when he broke squelch to note how small we looked from two miles up. He was bound for glory that day and we were landing at Rabbit Dry Lake. After rolling to a stop we called up to Zeke to relay a message for a retrieve tow ASAP. With lots of day still left, we needed only a relight to get us back in the game. "Shouldn't take too long," I enthused. "Glad we have water?"   Our retreive was delayed first by an intractable tow pilot demanding a lunch break, then flurries of unscheduled activity on the flight line and so on. Through the entire heart (read heat) of that ideal soaring day we stood on the dusty lakebed, close together in the wing’s scant shade, trying not to irritate each other. It was 3:00 p.m. when we finally got our relight. Being midsummer, time did remain for brief exploration of bigger mountains nearby and then an easy flight back home – but our lawyer Barrister Murphy had other ideas. I learned a lesson about haste that morning. Anton apparently had not. He did okay with the temporary blindness of aerotowing from a lakebed and a minute later we were crossing back over our launch point. There, the sand we kicked up was almost as high as we were and, thinking it marked lift, with no warning Anton released the tow. So unexpected and sudden, for one long moment I tried not to believe what I'd seen. It was real though. You see, Anton is a first generation hang glider pilot renowned from the earliest days. To him 500 feet seemed high enough for almost anything, but it leaves a sailplane flown perfectly almost no margin for a low thermal save. Working a lively dust devil from that height is possible, depending on a zillion variables – maybe. But this was not such a thing. It was only sand kicked up by the propeller and already settling back to the surface. As were we. Our tow pilot was headed home by then, straight away, and not responding on radio. If he gave a *#?! about soaring (or us), he’d have turned back at least once to see how things looked... But nah.   So after an unrefreshing 4-hour break on the lakebed we were right back where we came in, below pattern height fifty miles out, with the nearest little peak a thousand feet higher five miles away. Shadows were starting to creep across the lakebed.

Oh, it worked out all right. In many ways low saves are all alike. Same proximity to earth and hazard, same uncertainty, same certainties, same dodge and duck, cut and thrust, same dancing on the pedals with your feet off the floor. Each save is different too, whether time of day, location or level of desparation. But unlike most things in soaring, low saves are always subject to a binary verdict, yea or nay. Our jury took another sweaty hour to decide this case as we clawed our way up out of there in the day's last lift. Altogether it amounted to fifty miles out and then barely back along nearly the same route. In two flights. (Don't look Mom. Hands.)

And remember our line boy Zeke? He was making the final turn of his first 200-mile triangle as we launched that second flight, and would ramble home from another direction, beating us back by half an hour. Later, he could not help repeating, "You guys sure looked small down there!" Yeah Zeke, well in your own way you did too.