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Musings from Moyieboy ... |
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Fishing for kites |
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June 1, 2017 |
By Ken Carpenter
The old Peanuts comic makes occasional use of a
kite-eating tree, a sinister creature that
seemed to lurk around waiting for Charlie
Brown’s kite to get far enough off the ground so
it could hopelessly entangle it within its
limbs. The tree never failed.
My own kite flying experiences were not quite as
predictable as Charlie Brown’s, but they were
even less successful. I did not need a tree to
gobble up my kite, though a few did, because a
kite under my power would rarely fly high enough
to get caught in a tree.
The strongest memory I have about kite flying is
doing a whole lot of running with the kite
bouncing and dragging behind me. I would sprint
until I was exhausted, then fall on the ground
next to the traitorous kite wondering why I even
tried in the first place.
“I don’t need no stinking kite flying around
with the birds,” I would mutter to myself.
“Kites are stupid anyway.”
The cheapo kite would then disappear in my
closet until the next time I felt like
experiencing failure, and I would run off in
search of a more fruitful way to pass the time.
Smashing bugs with a rock comes to mind.
I recently saw a couple kids successfully flying
their hoity, toity kites and I flashed back in
time to 2005. I had never thought of kites being
murderous, but 13 people were killed and 500
injured at a kite-flying festival in Pakistan.
This was dumfounding to me. Except for the ‘duh
Ralph’ kite string in a high-wire method of
suicide, how could kites be so dangerous?
Two dudes fell off of a roof, two were hit by a
car, one was hit by a stray bullet, one ‘duh
Ralphed’ it, and the other seven expired due to
unexplained head injuries.
The Mid and Far East take their kite festivals
serious. There were 60,000 people celebrating
the start of spring at the gathering in
Pakistan, most of them flying kites, and many of
them flying them from rooftops.
The first documentation of kites taking to the
air was around 1000 B.C. in China, but it is
believed that South Sea islanders may have used
them before that. Kites are still used for
fishing on the South Sea Islands.
Kites are associated with gods in the Polynesian
Islands, and their patron saint of kites is
called Rongo. He sounds more like the patron
saint of drunkenness to me with that name, but I
admit it has a ring to it.
There have been hundreds of uses for kites
through the centuries, many of them of a warlike
or scientific nature. Benjamin Franklin was the
most famous kite-flyer ever for his renowned
lightning-down-the-kitestring trick.
In Asia the most popular form of kiting is a
kite-fighting competition that has both
contestants trying to cut the other’s line. This
is done by coating the line with glue and
powdered glass, then getting it into position to
saw their opponent’s line in half.
Must be nice on the fingers too.
Every year Ahmedabad, India, has a kite festival
free-for-all that can see as many as 100,000
kites in the air at once, all tying to cut each
other down. I don’t know how many casualties
they normally have, but it was the ancestor of
the deadly Pakistan festival.
Some kites in Japan are so big it takes 50 men
to control them. They obviously have more luck
than me, or they would end up in a big, gasping
pile connected to a hopelessly battered kite.
One of the memorable visions of my life was The
Kite Fisherman, a legend from 1978. Two good
friends and I were cruising around Napa,
California checking out the scenery when we
looked into a field and spied a perplexing
thing. An elderly couple was sitting on lawn
chairs in the middle of about five acres of
grass, and the man was vigorously working his
fishing pole.
“There’s no water out there,” one of us said
stupidly.
“Maybe he’s trolling for gophers,” said another,
only marginally less stupid.
“Hot damn, he’s fishing for kites, and he’s
caught one too!” said the third, gaping into the
sky where a kite was flying far overhead.
I never did find out what the limit was on
kites. |
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