My First Time Hang Gliding
Exhilarating? Yup! Terrifying? Yup!
“Don’t touch that. And don’t touch that. And especially that!” Linda Salamone, 55, said while pointing things out to me as I lay prone in a hang-gliding harness. She was talking about the various wires and bars that comprised the glider’s control frame.
The “especially that” was the primary release, a bicycle brake handle rigged to the frame and used to untether the glider from the tow plane. And I certainly wasn’t about to touch anything — I was petrified.
The glider’s pilot, Willie Vaughn, 24, lay directly below me in his harness.
“All right what’s happening everybody,” Vaughn said to one of the GoPro cameras mounted on the glider. “I got my man Lyle here in the top harness.” He then looked up at me. “How you feelin’, man?”
“Umm, excited. Scared. This is crazy,” I replied, smiling.
“All right, about right!” Vaughn said.
My smile hid my fear. I had never been hang gliding before and kept looking at the thin rope attached to the tow plane and could only think, that’s strong enough to take us up to 2,000 feet?
I was also so nervous and my mouth so dry I had to keep running my tongue over my gums to be able to talk.
