I'd just moved to North Carolina, and I wanted to see with my own eyes where the Wright Brothers had done it. I pulled my husband out of our motel bed--the view outside the window was of a wall of dune, with the sun rising behind it--because I wanted to get there when the museum opened. Ours wasn't the first car through the gate; it was the second. I found my heart pounding. Strange. I'm no aviation buff, I know nothing about planes other than how to sit in them and ask for a blanket. But my eyes pricked in the white light. I could see the two wooden buildings, and the stone markers laying out the first attempts. The museum building itself was disappointing--a mid-century scoop of white and orange sherbert thrown down on the tree-circled plain. The trees weren't there when the Wrights came to Kitty Hawk for the openness and the solitude. The sand they coveted for its soft landings has long since been replaced by grass, carefully planted to keep the dunes from shifting, from blowing clean off the map. When we arrived, a lawn mower was plying up and down the site, stodgy as a cow.
We walked slowly through the museum, which wasn't all that bad on the inside. The history of the flight was laid out on the walls, step by step. We went from glass case to glass case. Here were copies of the earliest letters, asking for information and advice from experimenters who had tried but failed. Here was a notebook, and a propeller blade, and here the metal husk of an engine that had crashed. The family that had arrived ahead of us wandered through and looked vaguely bored by all the detail; their little girl tapped on the glass in front of the engine block with her plastic dinosaur toy. When her mother said, "Don't do that!" the little girl, true to the spirit of invention in the room, began tapping on the wooden frame next to the glass, instead.
"Isn't it wonderful," Orville Wright wrote, "that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them."
In the next, larger room were replicas of the Wright Glider and of the Wright Flyer. A mannequin lay prone on the Glider but not on the Flyer. True, the gliders were the brothers' first great successes, teaching them the rudiments of how to fly before they flew; before the gliders came the kites, which taught them the rudiments of how to steer before they steered. Still, when Wilbur won the coin toss on December 14, 1903, and was the first to try the Flyer out on the sand, he misjudged badly and pulled the nose up too fast, making too steep an ascent. The machine stalled and crashed before it went anywhere, and the men had to spend several days repairing it before they could try again.
I grabbed my husband by the sleeve and pulled him through the glass doors out the back of the museum. There was no one on the distant field of sand, grass and stone. We would have it all to ourselves. I hurried toward it. This was where they had done it. December 17, at 10:35 in the morning. It was 9:35 now, about the time they would have been getting everything into place. We passed the replicas of their wooden camp-shed and hangar. It was so cold, that winter, they'd had to sleep under five blankets with their caps, clothes and shoes on. But the winds were steady, and that was all that mattered. The sheds were rough and small and primitive. We walked the distance it took to drag the Flyer from the hangar out to the launching rail. The brothers needed the help of five men from the local lifesaving station, who had been signaled with a flag that it was time to haul the 640-pound Flyer into place. I straddled the rail, which was used to get the machine rolling, and held my breath. The two brothers had held each others' hands tightly for a moment, witnesses reported, before letting go.
I had my husband take a picture of me where the flights began.
We walked out to the first of the stone markers. Orville. 120 feet, 12 seconds. Wilbur. 195 feet. Orville. 200 feet. Wilbur. Their father had named them after preachers he admired. I choked up touching each stone, as though it had something to do with me personally. Nonsense. I wasn't even sand in 1903.
The longest flight was the last one that day, Wilbur's. 852 feet, 59 seconds. When you reach this, the farthest marker, you can look back and see how little and yet how much it was. Resting after that flight, the men had left the Flyer on the sand and were stunned and unable to save it when a huge gust of wind rolled it over and over and wrecked it. They were done for that year. But in the distance, on Kill Devil Hill, you can see the looming monument erected a quarter of a century afterward to that morning's glory. From below, it looks disturbingly like a pedestal cigarette lighter.
Up close, again, it isn't so bad. Begun in 1928, the winged style is Art Deco, and the little green busts of "the bishop's boys" at the base bring it down to earth. It looks strangely like a tomb, with its great bronze door decorated in panels showing the fall of Icarus and what looks like a god grasping blades in his hands. The brothers aren't buried inside, but in Ohio, next to their mother, who was mechanically minded, and built toys for her children, who later built their own toys, and then bicycles.
I tell my husband we have to go back to the museum because I need something. Badly. I didn't know it until just then, but I need that picture of the moment the Flyer left the ground. It isn't so much the machine itself that arrests me: it's Wilbur, standing off to one side, all of his weight on his forward leg as the Flyer leaves the earth--yet he's the one who seems lofted, out of body, as if he can't quite believe it, as if the whole thing, a decade's work and centuries before that, has taken him by complete surprise. The photo was taken by a man who had never operated a camera before in his life. The whole moment seems ridiculous, impossible. Blink. Over.
I ask the ranger on duty if he likes working at the museum. He's from San Diego, and has only lived and worked at Kitty Hawk for five months. He seems pleased but not overly enthusiastic. Hey says you get to see cool things, and points to a military helicopter that has just landed behind the stone markers, bringing in a special group of visitors, although he can't say who.
"They were supposed to come a few days ago, but the wind was too strong."
In front of the camp-shed and hangar a group of ten geese have landed and settled into a ditch. A tour bus from Mount Zion Church rolls up to the museum and opens its door. Every human being who gets out of it is old and gray. Wilbur Wright died at age 43, of typhoid; Orville sold their airplane business and lived for forty years without his brother. He lived long enough to see the huge monument go up on the hill, and said of it that he was glad at least it wasn't "freakish." Above the monument the moon has risen so high I can't get it into my camera's frame along with the obelisk. I have to choose one or the other. I choose the moon.
--MD
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