I awake slowly, the energy building. It's as if currents of the earth shifted overnight and began to flow through me as I slept. Most of the time you can ignore this kind of pinko hogwash. Maybe like me you know it exists but life is generally easier if you don't focus on it. Then one morning you find yourself swept up in the flow. I'm convinced I'm the best kind of manic. I am a current rider. I was born for this somehow; to wait, shivering with anticipation for years, sometimes even dormant with slack will, biding time without knowing when it will end for the river to jump its banks and find me.

I'm writing this for you, so you know you're not alone. We burn brighter than most. It's not something I asked for. I was born like this. It's something I've learned to cultivate. I'm warm in a cold room, the blankets in any bed are almost always too much, sitting still for any length of time is far outside my interest. Moving uphill under stormy skies on some rocky mountain I'm in the eye of the storm, surrounded by energy, gathering what I need to myself to fly higher. Downhill is uncomfortable and slow. Uphill I flow.

I love comfort like any human shaped by a thousand generations to equate comfort with life; I'm no fool. And yet, discomfort and struggle and mighty goals call to me, a siren song to personal culmination. This will to power is applied to anything; the mechanics of roasting coffee, the structure of a backpack, the clear path I glory in laying out from ignorance to excellence.

I'm impatient with inefficiency, offended by the improper use of our all our human time. The shuffling line to board a plane, the long preambles of business, the slow driver in the fast lane. That's not to say I'm pushy or a bully or a reckless driver. I am convinced that we each have the right to live our own experience, and the general inconvenience that is a side effect of giving someone the right to fumble through their experience is well worth the personal freedom we each have.

I like to sit and listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall.  It makes me feel like some ancient being, perched up on the walls of crumbling civilization with the moon at my back and the blackened plains of what was the world splintering out before me; who listens to albums any more?

That’s not to say I’m not pulling the bricks out with the rest of ya; I spent all of Sunday vibe-coding two projects, marveling all the while that what I’m doing now was so far out of reach I didn’t even dream about it a few years ago.  Now more than ever, the velociraptorian velocity of the world is stunning.

The arrival of full and complete agency in the form of vibe-coding is not just a few hoodlums cracking away at the gate; it is full hair-on-fire gasoline-fueled Mad Max style barbarian change blasting in on a world that is still, incredibly to me, unsuspecting.

It’s similar to living at the foot of Vesuvius; you fucking KNOW that thing will blow, and yet here we sit, cooking our eggs in the cinders and taking the heat for granted.

In this last decade or less of full human autonomy, remember what it is to be alive.  Remember what it is to throw your toes over the edge, to look down and quake and thrill.  Remember the cold water of the Pacific, the dark shapes in the push and swell of a night dive.

Remember what it was to wheel and spin on rising air in the company of eagles, equal parts of wonder and understanding as we captained plastic bags and bits of string through the invisible ocean of sky.

Feel the sun on your face in the morning, the first sip of coffee, the remembrance of what it was to hitchhike as a kid.  They will be gone.

The world we came from was so safe and unthreatening and we had no idea that it would end.  We are all, and I’m right there with you, hell-riding on the back of this monstrous steel dinosaur just beginning to wake up, and we titter and thrill at the shivers rumbling through its armored skin as we slide down it’s shiny scales.

That ruby-eyed monster will crush us all and yawn before it wanders off to breakfast on Mercury.

Until then we live, my friends.  Until that day comes the best of us will continue to get after it, from the squat rack to the second pint of ice cream.  

We follow the scent of struggle and satiation a bit further in our quest for internal excellence, we revel in the joy of earned indulgence, and in all things human we revel in contrast.  This, that feeling of the bottom and the top, the heat and the cold, the sorrow and ecstasy of life; those ends of the arc of experience are the only true joy we may be able to hang on to once the machines rise.

Until then, we live. 

To life!

This was originally written for SAILING Magazine, and is published here with the consent of the Schanen family (owners of the J/145 MAIN STREET on Lake Michigan- http://sailingmagazine.net).

Once every 24 hours, for a scant 15 minutes or so, waves break on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal. The break is less than 200 yards from the moorings.  I was easily visible when I paddled out to seek solace, and perhaps a wave, at the change of the tides. Every night somebody would approach me at the Balboa Yacht Club bar wondering if I was the man who had been surfing those little waves, laughing, falling and standing up in the chest-deep water. I would say “yes,” and wait for the inevitable next question:

"Are you the guy on the J/22 ?"

"Yes." "Where did you sail from?' "San Diego.” And, off we'd go into conversations about small boats and big storms, keels caught in fishing nets, homemade boats pitch-poling in the Bering Strait and that love of the ocean that pervades every time sailors' speech. I would tell my story of how I got into sailing, how long it had taken to reach Panama, who I had for crew, if I had running water, what fish I was catching-- answering the questions all sailors ask each other.

I grew up on the East Coast; then moved to Indiana when I was in high school. Later, I enlisted in the Navy.  I got out of the Navy in September 2000, and bumped around Australia with a friend for two months before flying back to San Diego and deciding to sail to Virginia in a small boat. I had been on a sailboat a few times with my aunt and uncle in England and a few times with friends of mine on San Diego Bay.

Originally, I wanted to do the trip in my Lehman 12. I was talked out of it by friends, most of them professional sailors. I settled on a J/22 and bought “Synchronicity” eight days after I returned from Australia. I renamed the boat “Apocalypso” and 14 days later set sail with Jason Bell, a man who would end up being one of my closest friends.

The two weeks between the purchase of the boat and casting off from the dock of the Coronado Yacht Club were a maelstrom of organizing, buying and attaching various instruments to the boat.  I bought a Siemens 75 solar panel to supply the boat with power and a 12-volt marine battery. I installed a Garmin 162 GPS that never failed and a tiller autopilot that failed constantly. For comms I ran a Standard Horizon VHF that kept me in contact with other boats at anchorage and intermittently provided me with garbled voices at sea; and for glorious music we put in an Alpine CD player with Bose 151 outdoor speakers to keep morale high.

I had another reef put in the main (for a total of two) and had a used genoa re-cut to fit the J/22 .  I took one main, two kites, a genoa, a racing jib and a working jib. The main, working jib and spinnaker saw me through to the Panama Canal.  After that I used only the main and jib for the slog north.

Jason and I left Coronado on December 27, 2000.  We slipped away from the dock and our families and friend, headed out of San Diego Bay and pointed south, Panama bound!  As soon as we got out of the bay, we put up the chute and took off doing 7 knots down the waves enjoying our newfound freedom. That first night was amazing. It was the first time I'd been night sailing on the ocean and I was aboard the smallest sailboat I'd ever been on this far offshore. There was a northeast wind blowing 12 to 14 knots, the chute was full and pulling us along with that indescribable swaying power a big sail out front has  Scattered clouds passed over the moon and I had the first watch. What a life!

We cruised down the coast, harbor hopping along the way. We did a few hundred miles at a crack, occasionally doing more, with a longest distance of 500 miles that took us five days. We got caught on kelp, watched the big Baja sea lions playing in our wake and saw in those days all things to satisfy a soul.

I watched dolphins playing in the bow wake, felt the colors of sunsets on my face and the whip of the wind as it cracked my lips. I grew tan as only sailors can and built muscle from working the boat. I grew lean and strong on fresh fish, fruits, nuts and vegetables and learned to live and breathe with the wind in the sail.  I connected with the ocean on a level I have felt at no other time, a bond that will always pull me back to the freedom of the sea.

Eleven days after we left, we coasted into Cabo San Lucas. Mexico, spotting an orca in the harbor on the way in.  Two nights later, the stench of packed humanity too much for us in Cabo, we raised anchor and headed south and east.  A north-northwest wind blowing 15 to 20 knots dared us to throw up the chute, and the Vendée Cortez began. We screamed across the Sea of Cortez in 52 hours, chute up the whole way, the roar of water racing by the hull putting us to sleep every three hours. 

When it got bad, Jason would come up and switch with me if I was on watch. I would open food packets and feed him while we talked. When I accidentally jibed in the dark and tangled the chute around the forestay, I had to wake him up to untangle it.  He freed it so fast and easily I felt foolish.  As he crawled back into the small and musty cabin, cackling in his Scottish accent, I realized he must have done it a hundred times while teaching at work.  By the time he left me, I felt comfortable do everything by myself, but until I understood the basics, Jason worked overtime with me.

We stopped in El Salvador and northern Nicaragua for emergency anchoring, ignoring what the guidebooks said about the dangers of Central America. We explored an almost untouched world, where pleasure boats are seldom seen and where beer and stories flow freely. It was an awakening of sorts for me, to realize that most people still have hope and joy. I was still building an identity, and while the Navy had given me many good things I had overloaded on suspicion and aggression. This trip helped me drop some of that.

Two months in, I lost Jason as crew when we pulled into southern Nicaragua and he was offered a job as skipper of the Farr 63 “Northern Winds.” While the friendship we had forged could not be broken, the lure of a steady paycheck took him away.  It took me a month to get the boat back together. We had taken a fearsome beating between Puerto Madero and San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.  Once I had gotten all my parts shipped to Ricardo's Bar in San Juan del Sur and installed them on Apocalypso, I soloed to Playa del Coco, Costa Rica. It was my first solo sail, and the steady wind combined with never-ending tasks brought me the discovery of joy in a day’s loneliness at sea.

In Playa del Coco, an adventurous blonde named Laura signed on as crew. I didn't tell Laura until we were well on our way that I had only been sailing for three months. Although Laura did not know how to sail, she was willing to learn and showed a great interest in boats that fueled my love of the ocean and sailing.  Laura stayed with the boat through the Panama Canal and as far as Key West. Florida.  She listened to my fluent Navy cursing when our four-horse engine died and showed me how to cut the cheek meat out of the fish we caught; her father had worked as a fisherman in Alaska.

We shared the life of bon vivants, swimming with pilot whales and exploring hidden anchorages.  In one anchorage, on the east side of the Golfo de Chirique, we met the hermit of Bahia Honda and stumbled on an island town where the locals whispered about Laura's naturally white-blond hair and gave us dried fish and beer.

We left Bahia Honda with the cockpit full of coconuts that we picked by climbing high palm trees. As we sailed south down the Peninsula de Azeuro with the fading sun to starboard, the gentle clunks of loose-rolling coconuts brought us back from daydreams of reaching the Panama Canal.

The night before our arrival at the Panama Canal shook my faith in my ability to sail and navigate. We kept getting tangled in fishing nets in the light and variable winds, and the compass was difficult to read in the hazy light of the moon. I was tired from three days of little sleep and going over the side to cut the boat free of those dismal nets that stretched down into green-gray depths.  After getting out of the cold Humboldt Current the last time, I told Laura I was going to bed and didn't want to be woken until the sun was shining and we were making 4 knots directly toward the canal.

I woke up to the sound of the engine and hazy pale sunlight on my face.  I looked out of the cabin at the clean, glassy water of the northern stretch of the Golfo de Panama and knew the peaceful relief found at the end of a nightmare. Arriving at the canal was a victory for me.  It meant I was more than halfway through my journey, it meant that I had gotten across Tehuantepec and past the Papagallos, and it meant I could skipper a boat!

After staying on the Pacific side for two weeks, we finally got all our paperwork together and shot through the locks in a day. From Cristobal we headed north, stopping at Isla Providencia where we experienced true Caribbean hospitality and the friendliest port captain I have ever met along with townspeople that could not have welcomed us more warmly.

From Providencia we flew on fast reach to Roatan, stopping only long enough to resupply before heading north for Isla Mujeres off the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The draw of returning home became more powerful the closer we got to Key West, erasing from my mind the life I would have to lead upon return to the States and a “normal” job. We took a six-day beating from Isla Mujeres to Key West rather than sit in the anchorage scaring ourselves with weather reports, and only now do I realize the luxury of being concerned merely with physical survival.

We pulled into Key West on May 14, 5 1/2 months after leaving San Diego. Those 150-odd days were some of the richest of my life and I looked for a way to squeeze in one more journey before selling the boat to the right buyer.

I found my buyer on the Internet, but I would have to deliver the boat to Kingston, Jamaica!  After enlisting the help of a fellow I met in a Publix grocery store, I hoisted sail and again surrendered myself to the sea.  Frank was from Berlin, Germany and between his heavily accented English and my high school German, we laughed our way through muddled conversations about girls, beer, toxic chlorinated American water and sailing. We stopped in Nassau, Bahamas, then swept down the Exuma chain to Georgetown.

From Georgetown, we headed southeast to the tip of Little Exuma where we ran aground on crystal white sand.  Far from our finest moment, it ended after bumping over six sandbars and grinding into the seventh.  With no other course than to turn up the music, jump over the side and take a long saltwater bath, we waited for the tide. When it finally rose late in the evening, we dried off and headed on port tack for Cuba, the Windward Passage, and my final port of call.

We made landfall in Jamaica at 7 am, June 28, seeing the lighthouse at Point Moran. We drifted along the shore, smelling land in the smoke of hearth-fires and waiting for the huge convection machine of Kingston Harbor to start cranking. We were sucked west along the southern coast until we turned into the harbor where we had to beat upwind to the yacht club.  That was the worst part of the trip.  It wasn’t from the feeling of ending a journey, but because the wind really pumps down the harbor! I recorded at least 30 knots on my anemometer. 

As I pulled up to the gasoline dock at the Royal Jamaica Yacht Club, I saw four men sauntering towards me down cracked concrete stairs.  They eased up next to my boat as a group, and their questions broke the silence of a voyage completed. 

"Are you the guy on the J/22 ?"

Long before I was a paraglider I was a backpacker. I grew up in the time of external frame packs, lived through the transition to internal frame (an Arc'teryx Bora 40 was my first), got into ultra lightweight packs, and only then found paragliding and temporarily forgot about the principles of carrying a load in the wilderness. With a paraglider, you don't need to carry it that far. The whole point is to fly.

Still, eventually you land. Perhaps you get into hiking up the mountain first, as I did. Either way, you're faced with carrying the load for a distance further than most pilots will. Most pilots did NOT get into flying so they could hike. Their needs are met by the current backpacks on the market, which could be accurately described as "sacks with straps". Sure, they're a little nicer than that, and certainly Niviuk has come out recently with packs that are built to carry a load, but as an intermediate pilot flying mostly in Southern California, I've got specific needs not met by the paragliding pack industry.

So, what are those needs? Here is my initial "wants" list:

• Tough, rip resistant. 
• Reasonably lightweight
• Clean outside; able to slide through dense brush
• Accessible pockets for radio/phone/nav device.
• Snack/water pocket. 
• Frame support, carrying 40 lbs
• Pack small, into a paraglider harness
• Giant opening to be able to fit harness and wing in
• Helmet exterior mount option with netting or fabric? 
• Stop sweat from my back while hiking from contacting the wing inside the backpack

Of course, what you want initially in any project and what you end up with are two different things. I started out by approaching world class gear designer Dave Schipper, co-founder of Slot-USA, a desert lifestyle gear company.

Dave has been in the game a long time and has seen the gear industry from pretty much every side imaginable. He's been a pro athlete (cycling), a mountaineer on K2, been on the design side from concept to carry, has extensive (you might say exhaustive) experience on a sewing machine, has worked both overseas and domestically in manufacturing, and has more time above 10,000' (more like 20,000') than most paraglider pilots.

I was fortunate enough to meet Dave on a canyoneering trip north of Moab a few years back. He is the consummate outdoor professional, an impression that began from the time we shouldered our bags; he had made his own, specifically for canyoneering. At every belay he was ready; smooth and competent with the casual excellence of someone who has done the same task well thousands of times already.

We stayed in touch after that trip, and I would occasionally mention the dearth of good paraglider bags on the market. Busy with launching Slot (a desert lifestyle & gear company), he couldn't spare time initially for my ultra-niche ask of a one-off paraglider backpack. Eventually he made a proposition: I come to his home base in Moab and we'd spend 3 or 4 days together in a sewing bee making up a custom pack. I booked my ticket.

Of course, building a pack isn't about just sewing, it's all about decisions. Those decisions start NOT with how the pack should be made, but what you want the pack to DO. I made out my list and sent it to Dave. Then we started trimming it down.

Now, I'm not the world's greatest paraglider pilot. I'm competent enough to fly on my own and enjoy it, and at this point in my flying progression I generally make safe decisions. That, by the way, was arrived at after not making safe decisions and going through 3 crashes in about 18 months, any of which could have killed or maimed me. I walked away from all of them by the grace of something greater than I and started making safer decisions.

Not being superb means it's more likely I'm going to hike more than a better pilot. I like hiking, so I don't consider it a penalty. Still, there's no sense in wearing a hair shirt if you don't have to, and carrying a sack with straps for a few miles in the summer heat is definitely "hair shirt territory".

Let's start with what I didn't like about the packs I was seeing. They were too light, had no shape or frame, didn't carry well, and were either big and floppy or so small that packing your paraglider in there was like stuffing a gorilla into a football. They let my sweat leak through to the wing, their zippers broke, the straps ripped out of the seams, and all the pockets but one tore within the first year of having 'em.

Ok, my first point was that they were all made of lightweight materials. That looks pretty in a grassy field.

It also sounds cool if you're thinking about getting into hike-and-fly, a sub-discipline of the sport where you're expected to carry your pack a long ways (the hike part) before or after flying. Lightweight works well if you fly in areas where you have lots of grassy spots to land, or your "carry to launch" consists of moving your pack 100 meters from the back of your car to a launch site.

Lightweight is far less useful if you land off-piste and have to bash your way through manzanita and sage just to get to a dirt trail. I've done that, in some cases literally using my pack as a battering ram or dragging it behind me in a tunnel through brush. If you've never landed out in Southern California it's hard to believe how long it can take to move 70 meters through head high coastal scrub to a trail. Two of those sessions will make a lightweight pack look like you filled it with tuna fish and threw it at a hungry grizzly.

Lightweight is also less useful if you're not into shaving ounces. At 44 years old I ain't the spring chicken I was, but I can still hump a 40 lb ruck 10 miles over rugged ground and not have to make any special preparations for the effort. An extra pound or two for me isn't a big deal. This pack weighed in 2 lbs heavier than my old one. The Advance pictured above was 1.6 lbs, the new one is 3.6 lbs. I'm guessing most of that is the backpad assembly and the big beefy zipper. Winning.

So, I wanted a pack I could drag through brush, throw in the back of a pick-up truck, chuck down on a dirt patch, withstand a light rain, and not need to baby. I wanted a tough pack. For the main fabric we chose something from Dimension Polyant, similar to X21 from X-Pac. There are no labels in Dave's fabric selection; he knows everything by heart. A tough fabric that is relatively lightweight and waterproof, this material was a superb choice.

Second, and more importantly, I wanted a pack that carried well. Tough fabric is an easy fix. A pack that carries weight well, distributing the load to where it's best managed, was the prime goal. I wanted a pack I could carry all day, just like a regular hiking backpack.

A frame that is stiff enough to be useful and that connects the back with the hips (the vertical carrying load to the horizontal weight load) and that is small enough to stuff into the back of a paraglider harness; THAT is the money shot. That's where we started.

Dave spent a few hours with me in the months leading up to our sewing bee. He asked questions about what I wanted and why I wanted it. He drew out quick sketches explaining why one or another thing might or not be a good idea. I had more ideas than experience, so it took a while for Dave to navigate through my eager ignorance and get down to what mattered.

We settled on the idea that we'd use a very narrow internal frame and a detachable belt that would still connect solidly to the pack. The core of the frame would be a single aluminum stay that slides into a durable cloth sleeve sewn onto a hard plastic rectangle with foam pads on the far side. Dave drew that out, then I started cutting and gluing foam & plastic.

The pad would be thin enough to allow the whole pack to fold up and slide into the back of my paraglider's harness compartment. The pad was flanked by two more foam + hard plastic shapes that gave the back shape, but folded on a "cloth hinge" to allow for compactness.

We layered mesh over the foam side (against my back) to improve breathability, and then changed the way I packed my harness and wing so the wing was on the outside of the backpack, opposite to my back. No chance of sweat wicking through and getting on the wing, which had happened before.

Now, to the crux of a stiff frame: How does it connect to the hips? As all serious backpackers know, putting the load mostly on your hips and not on your shoulders is the best way to comfortably carry a load a long distance. When the load gets to the hips, that belt has to be stiff enough to carry it and not just sag under pressure. This means the hip belt should have a solid connection when forming the bottom of an upside down "T" with the back pad.

An upside down "T" is difficult to slide into the small compartment on the back of a paraglider harness, so Dave decided to use a removable hip belt that was stiff, and sew a "tunnel" under the back pad on the pack such that when the hip belt slid into the tunnel, it created structural contact with the back pad. We laid out a bunch of hip belt options, then picked the best one.

Since I wanted a pack big enough to easily slide my wing & harness into but that also compacted, I compromised on the "external smoothness" and we added 3 compression straps on each side. These straps aren't for tow-truck style pressure, but rather to snug up the load as close as possible to the back and keep the whole package tight and acting as one carrying unit.

Dave added in two key pieces I would have completely overlooked; load lifters that snugged the top of the pack into the body more, and hip stabilizer straps that connected the bottom of the pack more securely to the hip belt. Those are my understandings, not Dave's explanation. :)

We also tested out isolation straps on the top of the pack. These were meant to stop the helmet from swaying around a bunch. As it turned out, we'd made the compartment small enough that they weren't needed. I may cut them off, though I'll test 'em out on a few more hikes before I do.

All of this involved an incredible amount of sewing and thinking on Dave's part, and it was awesome to watch a master at his craft. I mostly sat at the table and lent an extra hand where I could, but the lion's share of the work was his to execute. For those of you who haven't seen a prototype pack like this before, this is about as clean and beautiful as they come. Sure, there are a few small blemishes in there, but damn is this close to the kind of perfection we all strive for!

Dave also included small details, like two different straps for lifting the bag. One, the thick grey one on top, is for yanking the thing off the ground and throwing it into the truck that drives you up to launch (I don't always hike up). The other, a thinner purple strap, is for when you want to lift the bag up on your shoulders. The different heights of those may seem inconsequential, but having the option is one of those "A pro knows" moments.

When it came to pockets Dave likes to keep things smooth, without a ton of different options slapped randomly around the pack. I like pockets everywhere, but I also trust that Dave probably has more pack knowledge in his little finger than I do in my entire meatsack. We settled on a wide shallow pocket stitched onto the front of the pack that, when unzipped, acted as a "workstation" for all my gear. Flight deck, radio, tracker, and miscellaneous stuff slides in there. While we probably made the pockets a *little* on the tight side, I love the workstation concept, and I'm shifting to the "less pockets" camp.

For carrying water I can throw a bladder inside and refill to an external hip-belt bottle pocket. Dave compromised his "no pockets" aesthetic so I could have my hip belt water bottle. I'm not a fan of bladder & hose, even though it's clearly a more efficient option.

We ended up running out of time to finish the pack to Dave's standards. He'd like to see a nicer shape on top for the helmet along with a few other things. We scavenged the hip belt & shoulder straps from a Slot pack. We also missed a few things we meant to get to, like a bladder pass-through in the top of the pack if I decide to go that route, and molle straps on the hip belt so I can attach that external water bottle holder.

Still, I left Moab with a paragliding backpack that is better by far than anything I've seen on the market for the kind of paragliding I love the best; a little known, a little unknown, and just as much hiking as flying.

Here's to hoping you got some inspiration out of this for making your own pack. If you're an industry pro looking to work with one of the best in the biz and learn from my mistakes, reach out to Dave at Slot.

Here's a quick vid of flying, packing up, and hiking out.

https://youtu.be/ZEVMyOLYzY4

Rock on!

I am an edgewalker. I am some strange amphibian in a world of lakes and raised dikes. I cross from one body of water to another, swimming on the surface, perhaps porpoising down, though never to the bottom. The bottom is deeper than I am willing to go. I wander always, restless to see more. Each lake is new; the thickness of the water, it's consistency, it's chill or sun-warmth. I am a connoisseur of water, I taste it in my skin, filter out oxygen through my gills, feel the varied press of it between my webbed toes as I swim.

I move knowledge from one lake to the next. It is a function of moving, at the core of my being; I always will move knowledge. It flows in and out of me, seeking some kind of equal osmotic pressure. In new lakes it rushes in, in old lakes it leaks out. In every lake there is something that can eat me, in every lake there is a small garden I can tend and eat from. I tend, for a while. Then I move on.

I haul myself out of one lake. Its inhabitants marvel at my ability to live outside of the water. I know I am merely crawling where others can run. I cross to another, to a new realm with a new king and new laws. The pattern remains. In crossing from one to another I carry with me some of the old and the sparkle of the new. In some lakes I am king for a while. In some lakes I can barely swim, the water is too slippery to support me and I thrash to live, gaining the shore and gasping for a while. Perhaps I wade in the shallows there for a while, peering into the deep.

Occasionally I fly, in my dreams. I see all the lakes stretching to the horizon; there is no end to them, no end to the new. The pattern repeats over and over, always slightly different, always the same enough that I am home in any lake, and none.

In some lakes they fight each other. In every lake, they fight each other, struggling to see who is the best, who has the best ideas, the best way. They fight, and win, and die, all for the same lake.

Some are like me. I meet them on the high ground. We cross paths like bears in a wood; I see them, they see me. Perhaps we stop and smell for a while, sensing the travels and travails and victories of the other. Then we move on, for bears do not run in packs, and only seldom gather to dance in a great circle under the moon, silent in ecstasy that none other know.

I wish, maybe, to live in just one lake, to know the cast of the bottom as a child's basin and every plant and grain of gravel and ancient gurgling of history in it, so that no mysteries remain. Then mystery calls me again, and I move to the next. I am an edgewalker.

Look, I'm a normal guy trying to do difficult things. The idea is in reaction to the “that guy’s got hollow bones” comment that paragliders will say when they see a really good pilot, especially one doing better than them*.  It's the same kind of thing you'll hear with climbers talking about Honnold’s amygdala, or race car drivers talking about [fill in the blank]’s reflexes. Yes, those things (well, when they're real) matter way out at the .00001% edge.  That's not me. What I’m finding, a little to my chagrin, is that I’m a normal dude. No exceptional strength, or reflexes, or eyesight, or even hollow bones. About the only thing slightly special is I probably have a better baseline breath-hold than most people, but it’s only above average, not exceptional. Does that mean I can't be exceptional?  No.  Normal people willing to put the work in can go from normal to exceptional without leaning on any special gifts. The work is hard, it takes a long time, it’s not particularly sexy except in a one-liner retrospect, but Work is the path that leads to results. After the third flying incident this year that was a near miss, (write up on the first, write up on the second) I’ve been thinking heavily the past two days on how I want to progress in flying. Hurtling toward a rock, hitting it with my ass and not knowing why I missed being paralyzed, then tumbling hard enough to crack my helmet has made me re-think a few things: -the risk of getting good fast -what my actual goal is -how I should get there, as thought of by a mature human Pilots around me have been saying that I’m pushing too hard. I was blowing that off with various rationalizations, from “they’re older and more risk averse” to “they’re not in as good of shape” to “they just don’t want to be exceptional.” While those might all be correct, it doesn't invalidate the core sentiment. I’ve been pushing hard, and in this case I was pushing the edge of how close to the hill I can turn. Obviously I went over that edge and just got bloody lucky.  The luck and the downtime healing from concussion has led to three conclusions. First, at the risk of getting good at a slower pace, I’m going to slow down my pushing, although I think of it more as being far more careful about the feeling I was getting of flying “loose”, which had begun to surface in my mind.  I never felt like I was pushing hard.  In fact, I always felt like I was being more conservative than most pilots, but I had begun to feel that I was getting sloppy with flying as I explored new territory like turning tighter. Second, what is my goal? The big goal is to fly the spine of Baja, but like all goals that’s finite. It’s a good driver but at some point it gets accomplished, and then what? My overall goal is to enjoy the process of mastering flying. Infinite mastery takes a lot off the edge of getting good fast, which is, if I’m honest about it, dangerous. Third is “how should I get there?” I don’t have this one answered yet fully, although as a start I’ve decided to be much more thoughtful about progression.  I’ve decided to sit down and write out before launch what I want to accomplish with the flying that day, and to write down after landing what actually happened. For me as a writer that seems like the most logical thing to do; for others it may be too cumbersome. That's where I am now, and what I've learned from 3 near misses this year in a paraglider.  As long as I stick to those principles, I'm looking forward to another 30 years of slow, inexorable, and safe progression, at the end of which I should be approaching the far end of "infinite mastery." See ya in the sky! *to be clear, no one is saying that I've got hollow bones. :)

I hit the ground (again) the other day flying, took a 50% collapse (half the wing just faded away) about 75 feet above ground.  Managed it well enough to land without injury, but it definitely wasn’t a planned landing and certainly could have been much worse.  The 2 other guys who were on site at the time seemed more shaken than I was at the time. Apparently it looked pretty dramatic.

I questioned them both along with my own memory.  Between their observations and mine, I certainly could have performed better, but I performed well enough to pass through the experience without physical harm.

Perhaps that’s better than if I’d correctly or accidentally done the right thing (weight the open side hard and pump out the broken side.) I had practiced that in the course last summer and perhaps a hundred times on the ground while kiting, but not enough to make it a habit or muscle memory response.

The bigger event a few months back had me doing *enough* of the right things like keeping my hands up, staying calm, and not pumping the wing to collapse, so I’m grateful for that.  Still, I question:  Is my learning ability so rigid that I only pick up things learned through fear and huge consequence?  I’ve certainly read and studied a bunch about what the right thing to do is, and if you’d given me the scenario on the ground I could have talked you through exactly the right things to do.

Have you found this true for you?  I wonder if I haven’t achieved more just because I’m too lazy to push hard and learn all the time and I end up just stumbling upon learning experiences when it comes down to the wire.

Again I find myself with a fear injury.  Until I took up this sport I didn’t know they existed. I flew again that day, and the next, but it’s been a few days and I’m still far more nervous in the air than I was.

This whole investigation into flying as a measure of self-control has me inexorably hooked.  On the best days I take a good amount of joy out of flying, but on these, the post-crash periods, each flight is an uncomfortable balance between fear and progress.  I’ve learned that it’s usually better to just land when I start to get spun up, although the old techniques of 4-4-4 and self-talk are being proven over and over again to be useful in the interim.

Visualization at home is also helping, although I don’t do it near often enough.  Funny, that we should know of all these effective tools and only practically apply them occasionally.  A measure of both weakness and strength on my part, and a constant reminder to me that the quality of the time I spend on the planet is solely up to me.

This is in response to a friend asking me about my recent crash on a paraglider. He talked about his reason for walking away from paragliding as well as asked the questions you'll see at the bottom. For those of you who fly, I'm a 60 hour pilot under a Gin Carrera Plus, all up 85 kg (75-95 wing). Psyched on flying and ground handling. I stopped keeping track of ground handling hours at the 35 flying hour mark, but at that point it was 1:1 GH to flying. ******* Was about 300’ up and too far back into a ridge, approx 6 miles from launch at Palomar. I hit rotor, the wing collapsed. I then accidentally stalled it and mismanaged the stall (not letting it fly, being too quick on the brakes) all the way to the ground. Landed around 6 m/s about 2’ up a steep dirt slope next to a rural highway (S6). Not terrible, but definitely lucky to walk away with just a bloody knee and a 2 week headache. Both seem cleared up now. Wing fell into one of the lanes. No traffic, so I balled it up, hobbled across the road and packed up, assuring myself that I was a lucky bugger for about 20 minutes straight. Walked a mile and a half until I caught a ride back to the LZ. I probably should have thrown the reserve, although in retrospect I would have drifted into trees and had a far more costly retrieve. As it was, no gear broke, snapped, or tore and I flew again the next day. I’ve talked to more experienced pilots and they agree to a (wo)man that I should have thrown my reserve no matter the potential equipment cost. Lessons learned: -Let it fly. Thought I’d gotten this at the 1 SIV I did (at about the 20 hour mark). It wasn’t deep enough learning to be reflexive, which is totally my fault. -I need to practice wing control on the ground and in the air (to include the “300 stalls” rule) way more before I get more serious about XC. The XC is super sexy but without the tools to manage the situations that inevitably arise I’m an idiot to chase it. -More SIV is essential. Probably also a good idea to do an XC course. -Fear injuries are real. I’m still nervous flying, 4 weeks, 12 flights and 5 flying hours later. I’m not sure how to best handle it. I’ve had some great flights and some ones that were more or less unpleasant. I think lots more ground handling plus flying in really clean & easy air for a while, plus just flat-out more flying will cure it. Thinking of it in the same manner as a physical injury, all that makes sense. I do feel like a weakling when I get scared at takeoff or in flight. It’s a new one for me, I never thought anything would really scare me or freak me out that way. I also feel an obligation to go back and figure that out, to master it, and to decide on my own terms when I want to stop flying. Questions & Answers 1. Is the risk manageable? Yes, but safe progression will take full focus, maximum effort, and an acceptance that the consequences are higher than reasonable. The question I ask is “Is the risk acceptable?” My answer is “Yes”, but I know it’s not the reasonable answer. 2. Do you have the time to dedicate? Yes. I’ve got 10 hours/week to manage all my flying time (prep, set up, flight, pack up, and travel time.) That gives me 3-5 flights totalling 2-4 hours/week of flying time depending on conditions. That seems acceptable to me. I’ll probably expand that to 15 hours/week in the summer, but for now 10 hours is what Lee & I have agreed on. 3. Do I see mega adventures in the sport or something done for relaxation? Both answers have limits and guardrails to them. Mega-adventures, learning how to manage fear and excitement, seeing parts of the world in a way impossible via any other method, and the privilege of flying a line no one has flown before. I don’t think I can do a sport for relaxation. Release and restoration of my natural connection to earth energy certainly, but I just can’t connect relaxation with the effort to improve. My goal is to vol-biv the Spine of Baja. No one has done it as far as I can tell. I’d really like to be the first, but I can see that pushing to be the first before I’m ready to safely fly it jacks the odds of disaster way beyond what is reasonable, even for me. Just flying it will be enough. I’d also like to compete in the X-Alps, but I’m more psyched on SoB to start. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on flying, the quest for excellence, and laying out important questions. Psyched to see you soon. NFH

I’ve been thinking about networks lately, inspired by recently reading Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Seventh Sense. The driving takeaway is that developing a sense for understanding the networks in any given situation gives an advantage over an understanding based on older frameworks.

This is not “networking” in the sense of trying to meet as many new people as possible in 30 minutes, or a network in the sense of the people you know. Neither of those ideas will allow you to gain the perspective on how multiple networks interact, which is what Ramo’s Seventh Sense gives you a feeling for.

This seventh sense is not generally a naturally acquired sense. Much like flying, which Ramo has also done at a high level, developing a sense for networks requires lots of practice in tuning in to non-normal feedback.

Perhaps learning how to fly a paraglider recently has attuned me to this oddity. In most other sports, from running to lacrosse to wrestling, your “normal” senses are what give you the advantage. Speed, balance, agility, or strength. None of those are particularly useful in flying sports, where the essential senses are an understanding of where you are and where you’re going in three dimensional space.

While you might argue those are important in other sports, like wrestling, you’d be off by a few orders of magnitude. The difference between a wrestling takedown and going through massive sinking air in a paraglider are more like the difference between knowing English grammar at a doctorate level and fluently speaking Hungarian. They are different worlds.

Now, this isn’t a comparison in difficulty levels. The sense and agency to execute or react to either one take years of practice to develop. It’s just that our six senses (the five physical senses plus a sense for history) is relatively natural to develop in the modern world and the sense for networks isn’t.

Funnily enough, if you go back to indigenous cultures they also developed their senses for networks, which is why you could walk through the woods with a Native American in the 1700s and marvel at their ability to know where an animal was without seeing it.

It wasn’t just that their senses were sharper, it’s that they understood how their network reacted. They had a feeling for the rippling messages passing back and forth throughout the network.

The difference between their network sense and ours is that they had only a few networks to pay attention to and all those moved at an organic speed. Their family, the animals and environment around them, their enemies.

Today we are surrounded by networks moving at light speed. Many of them have grown far faster than our ability to co-evolve our senses to keep pace.

We tend to make the mistake of thinking about networks in just 2 or 3 dimensions; as if they were fishing nets laid out on rolling ground, with us as a knot (or node) connected to others with thin filaments. This is the “topology”, or structure of the network, but it doesn’t account for at least one important factor, which is time.

With a more or less ubiquitous connection available to anyone reading this, the time between each node is limited by light speed; far faster than the “limiting minimum”. This compressing of time has the effect of taking that “fishing net” idea and balling up a football field’s worth of net into something the size of your fist, then making it constantly in writhing motion as nodes connect, disconnect, or rearrange themselves.

Now, that’s just one network. Imagine a few dozen of those all enmeshed together, connected but separate, and you begin to get an idea of the world we live in.

Why is developing a sense for networks important? Simply put: They govern our world. Without a sense for networks, you are as ineffective as a one-legged blind man stranded in the high mountains. Perhaps you survive in your little area, but knowledge of what lies beyond, or the ability to see it, or the ability to effect changes in your life are outside of your ability.

Rather than focusing on the complications of understanding each piece of a network (beyond our capacity) or becoming overwhelmed by the incredible interconnections of large networks (your location, friendships, modes of communication, and buying habits all represent different networks enmeshing), developing a sense for networks requires two habits we all have but use less and less: The habit of listening, and the habit of deep thought.

Listening is commonly thought to relate only to sound, but in developing a sense for networks we must listen not just with our ears, but our eyes, our heart, and our very mind.

This habit of listening ties directly into the habit of deep thought. Listening is just the gathering of information. For listening to be useful, we must consciously attempt to collect, organize, and gradually synthesize the various piece of information we gather.

This takes time and effort. Just as any other skill or sense we care to develop, the network sense can be sharpened through attentive practice. Here are ways you can develop this sense.

• Become aware of and curious about where networks are around you.
• Consciously assess the networks around you. Anything from the movement of cars through traffic to the hum and throb of ideas moving through your circle of friends; use each opportunity to assess how a network affects the environment.
• Spend time investigating how your different networks interact. Friends you email, people you “see” on Facebook, a local stranger you always see at the coffee shop; be curious about the connections beyond your immediate awareness. This applies especially to our digital and physical worlds. Behaving as though the digital is make-believe and the physical is real and that they don’t connect is a common error.
• Engage with your networks and notice the effects. Being an observer of a network is vital, but participating is equally important. Assess your position as a node or link in any network. Query as to how many connections you have. Assess each one for power, speed, time to travel, willingness to participate in the network, ability to change the network’s ability or reach. Pay special attention to those nodes or links that cross between networks.
• Seek out larger and smaller scale networks, from international relations to local neighborhood councils. Having experience across a wide variety of networks allows you to attune quickly to any new network.
• Spend time in natural networks. You were born with the ability and predilection to understand the natural world. Work to develop that understanding. Go into the mountains, or the prairie, or on the lake or ocean, and imbibe the sense of a connected world. Use your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and sense of balance to explore the world.

As you begin to develop this sense for networks and their power, you are taking tentative steps in the direction of a new dimension not yet fully explored.  I highly recommend reading The Seventh Sense to move far deeper into the discussion. In the meantime, go with care, enthusiasm, and a great curiosity. I’ll see you there!