The Tao of Supersoarability

During my recent travels (travails?) I had the chance to read two extremely thought-provoking books. One was The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, which hopefully I will comment on sometime in the future. The other is a fantastic book I purchased from a used bookstore about a year ago by Paul Ciotti called More With Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight.

More With Less is the story of aerodynamics pioneer MacCready through his career of adventures: from soaring (motorless gliders) champion in the 1940s, to the hang-gliding subculture of SoCal in the 1970s, to building the first human-powered plane, to building the first solar-powered plane, to winning a solar-powered car race across the Australian outback, just to name a few.

Along the way, of course, MacCready works with some fascinating personalities. One, hang-gliding pioneer and aviation writer Richard Miller, lived out of a VW Bus for most of his life and while an aeronautical genius, was a little loopy. However, this paragraph, paraphrasing an article Miller wrote for Soaring magazine in 1972, to me has significant merit:

Tao was the unifying spirit which animated any great project or organization in their quest to solve a problem or achieve a victory. Inherent in Tao, unfortunately, was its ephemerality - it only lasted till the goal was won. After that, the fiercely focused quest for victory always seemed to degenerate into a nervous search for security. "It's the epic of the frontier," wrote Miller. "The pioneer who had to dig for water, fell trees and hunt game to provide for his wants, gives way to the settler who finds his surveyed section lot ready equipped with access road, sewage pipes, and utility poles." There was also the matter of complexity. As planes became larger, more expensive and more complicated, they weren't so much thrilling expeditions into the unknown as corporate projects, business propositions beyond the control of a single man. "Thus Tao was diminished," wrote Miller, "and discontent was felt in the hearts of men."

This paragraph really resonated with me. While flying is one of the most incredible things I have ever done, one of the reasons I stopped is akin to the feeling Miller describes - when you're up there, while you are alone and entirely dependent on your own faculties, you're still not quite part of the air. You're trapped in a cramped cockpit behind a roaring engine.

Someday I will go hang gliding. To me, this represents the ultimate commune with the nature of the skies. A glider "makes an aerial excursion, not an incursion. His passage leaves a whisper, not a shriek."

Soaring was a "metaphor" for life itself. There was nothing more elemental than the notion of bobbling along in zero sink, at six or seven hundred feet, fighting for your own mortality against "the forces trying to pull you down."