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The year was 1971. It was the beginning of third term of Adam’s third year of dentistry. Up to now, his course was comprised mostly of lectures and lab sessions, all held within the historic grounds of Sydney University. This term, however, was the beginning of a new chapter in the lives of the young dental students. It was time to go clinical. They were torn away from the kaleidoscopic environment of the university, which was full of life, energy, political incorrectness and religious irreverence, and were transplanted into the cloistered, inbred corridors and torture chambers of The Dental Hospital, the skinny, pink building located right next to Central Railway Station in the heart of Sydney.
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The back of ‘The Cross’ wasn’t one of the city’s cleanest areas. There were many dark alleys and mysterious dead ends lurking in wait, like a transit station, where passengers changed trains, having come from a happy, sunny place, where they somehow lost their way and boarded another train, the destination of which was an altogether different, much darker, much more death-like place. And return tickets were as rare as a last swig of cheap whiskey out of a bottle found lying in the gutter of one of those filthy, stinking black alleys, just off the bright lights and constant traffic.
3
The grey figure, bent over and staggering, stumbled out of the main street into the welcoming blackness of the deep, dark alley. His hair was long and straggled. He wore an old coat, which covered his torn jumper and urine-stained trousers. In his right hand was a half-empty bottle of Old Timer, wrapped in a paper bag. To look at him, he appeared as a man without a face. There was just blackness where his face should have been because there was no more light to spare, in the whole universe, to shine on that place. If one could have seen it, one would have seen it covered in dried blood, scabs and scars from the injuries he had sustained due to his numerous falls while intoxicated. He staggered forward, deeper into the darkness.
He used to have a drinking mate whose name was Frank. They used to be diggers together. Fought for our fuckin cunt-ry, we did; fuck it! They went right back together, right
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back to Vietnam where they met up. They were the best mates you could ever have. They stood side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder. They covered each other and looked after each other. They fought like tigers together, for our fuckin cunt-ry. The time they had in the houses, fair dinkum, mate, she was a pearler, she was. When we got back, we stayed best mates, an because that mongrel war wouldn’t stop replayin itself in our heads, we got into some serious piss together an felt like we outsmarted that bastard for good. It was party time again. All right, so we got a bit wild n ratty, an we did end up in the street, but the grog fixed all that. Then Frank started complainin again, about how the fuckin war kept comin back, the burnin, screamin kids. He used to wake up next to me, usually behind some pile of trash, soaked in a cold sweat, screamin at the top of his lungs. He used to talk about seein devils an rats crawlin all over him, an wakin up after dreamin that a pack of savage dogs, all fuckin wild an frothin, were rippin his face right offa him.
A few nights ago, we were standin there, up near the top of William Street, just down from the big Coke sign. We were flyin. Ol Timer was pumpin hundred-proof through our veins. The colours of all the neon lights were meltin and blendin together. We leaned against each other to stop ourselves from fallin over. A big semi was roarin up William Street when somethin weird happened. All the swirlin lights just froze in one place an all the noise just switched off. It was as if there was a bubble around us an everythin outside just froze. Our eyes met, an as if by some divine miracle, we both instantly sobered up, and I heard Frank say, ‘See ya next time round, mate. Gotta go.’
An before I even knew what happened, me best mate stepped out into William Street, right into the path of that twenty-tonne semi.
As he ventured deeper into the blackness of the alley, he stopped suddenly. He was having trouble standing in one place. He took another good suck of the whiskey bottle. It seemed to him that it had got ‘mighty unusual quiet’ all of a sudden. As he stood there, rocking from side to side, he thought that he could see an outline of a man emerge faintly out of the darkness. This sent a shiver of fear through him. The bottle of Old Timer slipped out of his hand and smashed on the ground. Out of the darkest blackness of Bob’s universe, a deep, baritone voice began to sing in a Southern Baptist Gospel style.
‘You gotta go ta the lonesome valley,
You gotta go there on your own,
You gotta ask The Lord’s forgiveness,
It’s the only way ta get back home.’
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He couldn’t believe his ears when he heard the music, and he couldn’t believe his eyes when tears started to flow out of them, and he couldn’t believe his legs when they collapsed onto their knees, and he couldn’t believe his hands when they came together to pray, and he couldn’t believe his mouth when it uttered the words,
‘Dear God, I’m so … so sorry’.
4
The clinical part of the dental course was divided into several distinct disciplines.
Each occupied its own section of the hospital. There was a department solely dedicated to the extraction of teeth. Everyone just called it ‘Exo’.
The inevitable first day in the Exo Clinic finally arrived. That first day was meant to be an introduction to the course, which would ultimately teach the students how to precisely, and with the minimum of trauma, extract rotten teeth out of terrified patients.
All the students filed into the Exo Clinic like little lambs. There were half a dozen dental chairs in the room, all set out in a row. There were half a dozen staff dentists, with half a dozen assistants helping them, busy working in the wide-open mouths of half a dozen disadvantaged victims. There were the sounds of moaning and groaning, and of people saying, ‘open wider’, and the clanking of surgical instruments and extracted teeth on metal trays.
The students divided into six groups. Each group formed a tight semi-circle around each dental chair. Adam usually preferred to hover around the perimeter of a demonstration group, looking over the shoulders of the others.
The dentist Adam’s group was observing was a small Indian man. The patient was an older man, obviously worn down by a life that had exposed him to its more abrasive side. Adam’s first reaction was discomfort at the dentist’s debasing chair-side manner.
When he spoke to the patient, he spoke to him in that time-honoured, degrading, monotone voice, which definitively differentiates the public servant from the rest of the human species. He barely looked in the patient’s mouth, turned to the nurse and declared,
‘All teeth needing to come out!’
The old man’s eyes glazed over with fear as the little dark dentist approached him with a huge syringe and a six-pack of Xylocaine cartridges. As the dentist stabbed away, the students all winced and cringed, but did not make a sound, unlike the victim in the chair, who wouldn’t stop screaming and kicking his legs.
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‘Come on, come on, it’s not that bad!’ retorted the dentist as he buried another needle deep into the poor man’s gum. After a while, the man’s eyes just fixed themselves on a point in space as his face became totally expressionless. Understandable, considering that he must have been numb from the neck up.
There were eight teeth standing, like sentinels, in the man’s lower jaw. They had survived a misspent youth, a war, a marriage, a divorce, a property settlement, and finally a one-day-at-a-time, subsistence-scavenger existence. But they had met their match in the pint-sized dentist with the Indian accent.
Those teeth came flying out of the old guy’s mouth so fast that they almost made a drum roll sound as they hit the metal tray. Sure the molars slowed the dentist down a tad, but you wouldn’t have wanted to blink your eyes because you would have missed him bury his knee in the patient’s chest, take a vice-like grip of his lower jaw and with a loud crack of what sounded like breaking bone, that mongrel last tooth was out.
All the students’ eyes bulged clear out of their sockets as the dentist triumphantly held the healthy-looking molar high in the air for all to see. Adam thought that he could see a large piece of mandible stuck to one of the roots, but he wasn’t going to say anything.
‘Maybe that’s how they’re meant to come out,’ he thought.
The patient drifted in and out of consciousness as the dentist yelled, ‘Sutures!’
Up to that point, Adam hadn’t actually seen the surgical site because the students standing in front of him obscured his vision. As the nurse came over with the suture tray, he manoeuvred himself into a better position. He was horrified when he saw the size of the wound in the patient’s lower jaw. There was blood everywhere. As the dentist started suturing the huge gash, Adam collapsed to the floor like a rag doll. Everyone turned around to see what the thud sound was. They left him on the floor, but turned him on his side. He regained consciousness after about a minute. They sat him up on a chair and gave him some soft drink. He was a bit dazed, but not hurt. The nurse laughed and said, ‘We get one every year.’
5
Around about that time, Adam bumped into Ken, who he hadn’t seen for most of that year. It was one of those one in a million chance encounters. It happened in late spring, at one of Adam’s favourite haunts, The Watson’s Bay Hotel. He loved to meet friends there and sit in the sun in the beer garden, with nothing but the most picturesque harbour in the world to look at.
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He heard a voice calling his name. ‘Hey, Adam!’ He thought he recognised it and called back, ‘Ken?’
As it turned out, the two friends both sat with different groups, so they decided to exchange phone numbers and catch up with each other at another time. Ken briefly mentioned a new sport, something about hang gliding and how it was the best thing you could ever imagine. He also said that he was mates with the guys that made the hang gliders. Adam told Ken about the article he read about the sport. They agreed to get together on the weekend.
Next Saturday morning, as Adam washed his car in the driveway, Ken rolled up in his modified, sky-blue VW Bug. Adam heard the hot exhaust note from way down the street. There was a long, thin object strapped to the Bug’s roof racks. Ken stopped opposite the driveway, stuck his head out of the car window and asked,
‘You wanna come for a drive to Kurnell?’
6
The blue Bug roared down the Pacific Highway, over the Harbour Bridge, through the city and past Botany Bay, headed for the vast, high dunes of Kurnell.
They turned off the road and followed a sandy track deep into the desert-like environment. They were weaving between twenty to eighty feet high sand dunes. As they rounded a bend, a huge dune appeared right in front of them. It was about one hundred and fifty feet high, and standing right on top of it were two men holding down a hang glider.
‘Steve and Arnold are here,’ Ken commented. ‘They’re probably testing the new 200.
Arnold is Steve’s little brother. He wouldn’t be more than fourteen, the gutsy little runt.’
It was early afternoon and a solid twenty-five knot northeaster was blowing in, straight off the ocean.
Kurnell attracted the flying pioneers, not only because of the high dunes, but also due to its proximity to the sea. The wind blew smoothly there because it came in straight off the water with nothing to get in its way to make it turbulent.
Adam stood next to Ken, totally transfixed. He felt like he was hallucinating, like he was observing the distant future manifesting itself through some kind of cosmic portal, right there in front of him.
Steve was harnessed in the kite and was holding it in the wind, feeling the lift, while Arnold was holding him down by the front wires. Adam could tell that the wind was really
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strong on top of the big dune because he could see a plume of sand blowing off the back of it. He could see that the brothers really had to wrestle with the hang glider to keep it under control.
Suddenly Arnold scrambled out of the way allowing Steve to lean forcefully through the control bar and run into the wind. The previously flapping sail now filled with air, forming itself into the twin conical shapes originally envisaged by the inventor, Francis Rogallo.
With only two steps and a powerful lunge into the wind, Steve was airborne.
Initially, the kite lifted wildly in the strong lift, rising perhaps twenty feet above the top of the dune. Adam and Ken were frozen in a trancelike gape. Steve’s control inputs and reactions to gusts were relaxed and composed. He hung vertically in his harness with his legs crossed to emphasise his competence. After the initial lift, the hang glider began to descend down the front of the dune, gliding about thirty feet above the sand. The glide angle was roughly the same as the slope of the dune, around thirty degrees, making the glide angle of the flight about three to one. Steve glided gracefully for the whole one hundred and fifty feet, then, with a spectacular flare, landed on both feet at the same time, without taking a step. Young Arnold arrived seconds later, having run down the hill after his older brother.
That was the first time Adam ever saw a man fly. He was so amazed that he was momentarily totally lost for words.
As Steve stepped out of his harness, Adam noticed his physical features. He wasn’t tall, about five feet six, and he was light and muscular, especially around the shoulders.
He wore a pair of old, worn-out jeans and a faded-black T-shirt with the words Ultra-Light Flight Systems silk-screened on the front and back of it. His feet were bare and he wore his dark hair very long. His face possessed strong, classical features, strange to look at.
Adam hallucinated brief glimpses of an eagle’s face from within it. He just let that slide.
He was learning. Once, when he dared look deeply into Steve’s eyes, for the briefest of moments, he saw a steady gaze piercing straight through him, straight through everything, firmly fixed and focussed into the distant future. In that nanosecond, Adam hallucinated the image in Steve’s mind. He saw man flying huge air, in highly advanced, supremely efficient, ultra-light, foot-launchable super-wings. He let that hallucination slide as well, but a thought crossed his mind about how these strange flashes of insight
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began a few years before, not long after he returned back home from his trip up north, and the visit to the rockslide.
Ken introduced Adam to the brothers. The boys then listened-in as Steve and Arnold analysed the most recent alteration to the tune of their latest prototype.
‘How did it feel?’ Arnold asked.
‘Perfect. I think we’ve definitely got the centre of gravity right now, and the extra reflex in the keel is giving a much more positive pitch-up feel in the bar. Wanna go?’
‘You bet!’
As Steve and Arnold carried their glider back up the big dune, for Arnold to have a flight, Ken unloaded his more primitive wing off the Bug. He had ideas of launching from the big dune that day, but he first wanted to have a few shorter, warm-up glides off a smaller dune, right next to the big one. In the meantime, Adam was in heaven. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and the wind was blowing. There was the ocean right there, and people, who he was friends with, were flying, like birds, all around him. He couldn’t have dreamt anything this good. Except this was no dream, it was real.
It only took one flight by Ken for Adam to see that he was quite an accomplished pilot as well. After a number of flights from the small dune, Ken began launching from the big one with the other two. Adam got in the groove and became useful as a carrier and launch assistant. As he held the front wires of Ken’s kite, helping him to launch, he was amazed by the powerful lift generated by the sail. As Ken yelled, ‘OK’, Adam released the wires, moved out of the way and watched Ken lift off into the strong wind.
As the boys continued flying that day, they began landing further and further out from the hill. With each flight they honed their launch and glide techniques, constantly improving the efficiency of their glides. By the end of the day they were achieving glide ratios of nearly five to one, sometimes landing almost thirty yards out in front of the dune.
After his best flight of the day, Ken turned to Adam and said, ‘Feeling ready for a go?’
For a moment, Adam’s head spun and his whole body flushed with fear. He remembered other times in the past when he felt this way, and like in the past, he just blindly ignored all the overwhelming feelings and replied sheepishly, ‘Pretty ready, I think.’
‘Come on then,’ said Ken, springing into action. ‘You can start by feeling the glider in the wind, at the bottom of the small dune.’
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He helped Adam into the simple harness, which was made out of seatbelt webbing, and clipped him into the hang loop hanging from the top of the control bar, which was called the ‘A-frame’. He then taught him how to hold the hang glider and point it into the wind.
‘Feel it lifting?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Now start walking into the wind with it. … Don’t let the nose up too much.’
‘Wow, it wants to lift me off the ground!’
‘Come, let’s try from a few feet up the slope.’
‘OK.’
‘Now make sure you correct it if it starts going left or right. Don’t just freeze up.’
‘OK.’
‘This is high enough. Now, this time, just run a little and feel the lift.’
‘OK.’
‘Alright, run, and push the bar out a bit.’
Adam did as he was instructed. The glider almost lifted him off the ground.
‘That’s as close as you can get to flying without actually doing it,’ Ken said. ‘How did it feel?’
‘Unbelievable! I could actually feel the glider trying to lift me off the ground. I could feel the balance in the wing and how I could control it. Can I go from a bit higher?’
They climbed a few feet higher up the dune. Ken talked Adam through his first flight.
‘Run, run hard, that’s it, pull in, now push out, yes, yes, yes, that’s it, into the wind, into the wind, perfect, woohoo, now flare, flare, yeehaaa! You did it! Wow, how did that feel?’
Adam went completely mental.
‘Awooo! I can’t believe it. I just remember running and watching the ground fall away from me, and I remember my feet dangling, and I remember thinking, bloody hell I’m high, how am I gonna get down? And it was easy controlling the kite. And the landing
… how high was I? It felt like ten or fifteen feet.’
‘At your highest point,’ Ken laughed, ‘I reckon you were about three feet off the ground, but that’s good, real good.’
Adam looked at Ken and expressed his gratitude.
‘Thanks, Kenny, I’ll never forget this flight, and I’ll never forget this day, never.’
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‘No one ever forgets their first flight, mate. You did well, very well, and I reckon that you’re ready to go higher.’
Adam’s first flight spanned a distance of thirty feet, from take-off to touchdown. He launched from about ten feet up the slope of the smaller dune. The most significant thing about this achievement was that he launched with his feet, he landed on his feet, and he flew free, completely untethered, and that was what the birds did.
Ken was a good teacher. He put plenty of energy into his tutelage, carrying the glider up the hill for Adam and running excitedly back down underneath him, yelling out instructions and positively affirming his efforts. He made sure that Adam got plenty of flights that day. With each flight, they climbed another foot higher up the slope, and with each flight, Adam flew higher, further and more perfectly than the one before.
After about twenty flights, they were standing on top of the thirty-foot dune. It was getting late in the afternoon and the sun was beginning to cast long shadows across the now-reddening dunes. This was to be the last flight of the day.
This time, Adam was going for a strong launch and a long, high flight. Kenny released his hold of the front wires and jumped out of the way. Adam leaned forward through the A-frame in order to keep the nose of the glider down and thus achieve a more powerful penetration into the strong wind. As he reached the edge of the slope, he pushed the control bar out and let the hang glider lift high into the air. He shot at least ten feet above the top of the dune where he quite skilfully stabilised the wing into an efficient glide angle.
He was at least twice as high as he had ever been before, maybe thirty feet above the ground. His eyes bulged and his breathing stopped momentarily as he realised that to lose control now could result in serious injury. But his teacher was good, and he had prepared Adam well for this, his highest flight.
About fifteen feet above the ground, Adam gently pulled the base-bar towards his body. The glider sped up into a shallow dive. A couple of feet above the sand, he eased the bar out, levelling out the glide and, after a short delay allowing for ground-effect, he pushed the control bar out progressively and, with feeling, flared the glider into a perfect, no-step, stand-up landing.
The four boys all got together for a beer and some dinner that night. There was much discussion about that day’s flying, and glider design, and the giant hill down the coast at Stanwell Park, called Bald Hill.
‘No one’s ever flown off that big bastard,’ Steve said.
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‘It’s huge, four times higher than the big dune at Kurnell,’ Arnold added.
Steve said that he was planning to go there as soon as he was happy with the new wing. He said that he would have to wait for a southeaster to have his first go, ‘because Bald Hill has a south face that faces the beach.’ Adam recalled being there a couple of years before, on one of his drives. Steve described the place to Ken, saying that a pilot would find himself five-hundred feet above the ground in a matter of seconds after launch. No one had ever been anywhere near that high, ever before. Steve said that the beach was long and easy to land on, and if you couldn’t make that, there was an open paddock at the base of the hill.
A couple of deals went down that night as well. Ken ordered one of the new 200s, while Adam offered to take Ken’s glider off his hands. Everyone was happy, and as they ordered another three beers, and a Coke for Arnold, they all laughed as they exchanged each other’s recollections of their respective flights using exaggerated gestures of their arms and hands.
7
As Adam laid his head on his pillow that night, his mind spun in a state of ecstatic disbelief that the day had actually happened. Was he going to sleep or was he waking up from a dream? The thing was that his dreams didn’t measure up to what he had just lived through. He lay there looking at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Thoughts raced through his mind at a frantic rate. He thought that he was beginning to recognise a pattern in his life.
Every so often, life took him through a reality beyond belief, beyond fantasy. Things were happening to him that no one could have dreamed about. And as his mind re-lived that last flight and compared it to other classic days, like the days at Broken Head where he surfed perfection with Scott, he slipped into a deep sleep and dreamed that he had curled up in the bosom of a huge mother who introduced herself to him as his universe. And she let him know, in the innermost heart of his being, that she loved him more than any words, ever written, could possibly describe.
8
Unbeknownst to anyone, except a large sea eagle that lived on the rugged cliffs just to the north of Stanwell Park, there had been someone else who had already jumped off Bald Hill in a hang glider, years before. He was the first and he did it in his own, primitive, home-built wing. It was blue with a yellow stripe and it didn’t fly very well. The pilot’s name was Zeke and the experience, which he felt he barely survived, put him off hang
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gliding right up until the time when he saw those first, bold fliers showing up on Bald Hill.
Watching them pioneering the expansive, new airspace, inspired Zeke to return to designing, constructing and test-flying his radical and unusual wings.
…….
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