Joe Bennett: The quest to soar like birds and fill that 'lonely impulse of delight'

A rare NZ falcon in flight. What trouble the hang-gliders take to achieve a fraction of a bird of prey's instinctive gift, says Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

I lie on the sofa mid-afternoon. Looking up through the window all I can see is a snatch of ridge and then sky. Sky so blue it startles the retina. Not a wisp of cloud, not a comma. It's always good to lie down and look up.

When I grow older with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

In truth the blue isn't blue. There's nothing blue there. There's only gas that bends the light somehow and fools our retina. We like to think we master things, but we are subject to limitless delusions.

I watch my patch of blue, not thinking, just floating through a sea of odd ideas and memories, synaptic connections that fire then fizzle and are gone. Then into my sky comes a something, arched like an eyebrow, a tiny figure suspended below it. A hang-glider - if that's still the name, though I suspect it's not.

One Saturday afternoon in the early 70s I was playing cricket at the foot of the South Downs in England. Hang-gliding was new and less efficient than today. Few gliders managed to land back on the top of Downs. Sometimes they came down on our cricket ground and halted play. That afternoon one crashed into power lines. There was a vast discharge up the metal struts. We smelt the sizzling of flesh.

The appeal of hang-gliding is obvious. To sit or lie in the air, riding it, lord of the sky, the dream of flight without expense of effort. Photo / Getty Images

The appeal of hang-gliding is obvious. To sit or lie in the air, riding it, lord of the sky, the dream of flight without expense of effort. Like the hawk that circles above this same ridge, the hawk that I have often watched, that flaps low and hard to break from the land, then catches the rising air and swings in every-rising ever-widening loops to a height no hang-glider can reach and surveys the world with an eye that can spot carrion from a thousand feet.

What trouble the hang-gliders take to achieve a fraction of the hawk's instinctive gift. What effort and expense goes into it. The thousands of dollars of gear. The car to lug it all to the launching site. The need for a good day - not too much wind nor yet too little. The hi-tech clothing. The harness and helmet. The monstrous wingspan. And still not a patch on the hawk. But they are driven by the same thing as drove Yeats' airman, that "lonely impulse of delight".

It's not unique to hang-gliders. As kids in winter we used to slosh buckets of water across the playground after school in the hope that they would freeze overnight. The practice was condemned by the authorities but the risk was irresistible. For before school the next morning you could run at the ice then launch yourself and slide on your school shoes perhaps five glorious yards, your arms held out for balance and it felt like a form of flying, like movement for free.

There was a cost, of course. Returning to the reality of friction at the far end of the slide took some judging and if you got it wrong, your shoe soles caught and momentum flung you forward and rolled you hard across the asphalt. But it was worth it. It was worth the holed trousers, the abraded flesh. It was worth friction's riposte to escape its grip for a few bright seconds.

Skiing is just playground ice for adults, adults who travel at vast expense to the mountains, burning fossil fuels to get them to a place where they can stand high in the world, warm in their clothing, so as to slide back down without apparent effort. This brief defiance of the rules of physics is at the heart of the giant leisure industry.

Every swimming pool has a hydro slide, every adventure park a flying fox and every second back yard a trampoline. What is bungy jumping but a pretence that you can leap off a cliff and live, that the ironclad truths of life on earth are actually negotiables?

We live in a world that holds us close with friction and with gravity. But we pursue a fantasy that it needn't be so, that we can break their grip, that like Torvill and Dean we can slide our easy way to love and happiness or soar like eagles on the deep blue air that "shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless".