The Trailing Edge
End of days.
There’s a summer sunset ritual on the Oregon Coast — and undoubtedly on western coasts around the globe, although we have no first-hand knowledge of those. For those still out on Highway 101, it’s time to find one of the many waysides or turnouts on the west side of the road and watch the last few minutes of the day drain away into an amber-gold pool of at first spectacular, and then quickly fading light.
The standard to which all sunsets aspire is a full, round disk which first kisses the razor-sharp Pacific horizon. It then evolves into varying degrees of semi-circle which propagate a great, fiery hug that stretches north and south. That recedes and finally there’s a tiny sliver of light clinging to what remains of the day and injects what’s left of it with a little pathos. Then the sun is quickly gone. There’s supposed to be a flash of green just after sunset, but we’ve never seen it. Sunset worshippers then get back into their cars and finish their journey in the dark, which arrives quickly once the summer sun has coursed westward to light up someone else’s day.
We don’t think about it, usually, but sunsets would be unbearably sad if there was the slightest possibility the sun would not swing around to the eastern horizon and fill us with a sense of wonder about the day ahead. The sun also rises, as Hemingway wrote.
There has been a veritable torrent of horrific news of late — all of which fill us with a combination of emotions ranging from white hot outrage at one end of the spectrum all the way into the gaping jaws of the black dog at the other. Sometimes it seems too much to bear. It serves no useful purpose for us to enumerate and comment on these events here, but you don’t have to go far to be bombarded with coverage of these seemingly terrible times in which we live.
We take consolation from the sunset. While it’s easy to be sad that another day has come and gone and there is seemingly only night ahead, we know it’s just a matter of time before that big, beautiful sun soars overhead once more. And with it, we’re filled with the endless possibilities of what might be, in the better days ahead.
Our Feature Photo
We were inspired to soliloquise about sunsets — whether they be nearby or far away—by Sunset at the Great Orme, above, taken by Jonathan Demery. If that name sounds kind of familiar, Jonathan also provided the great picture featured in RCSD’s most recent Lift over Drag newsletter (see Resources). That picture featured Jonathan’s utterly charming curly-coated retriever Ollie ‘supervising’ some student glider buffs near St. David’s College at Llandudno, Wales. For Jonathan’s sunset photo, we’ll let him take it from here:
“The pilot in the picture is James Maidment (one of our senior students). He is carrying his Phoenix 1600 to the slope edge for a bit of sunset flying. Despite there being about eight of us flying, the image of a lonely soarer walking to the edge at sunset was quite powerful.”
We could not agree more. As it turns out, Jonathan is the program leader for the school’s Model Flying Club. In addition to their own flying site immediately adjacent to the school, St. David’s is a mere eleven minute drive from the Great Orme, which really needs no further introduction, given that it’s safe to say it’s on everybody’s bucket list of places to fly someday.
If we’d had a Model Flying Club and were spitting distance from a one-in-a-million slope, we might well have done better in school in our short time there — which didn’t do much for us except, perhaps, serve as a source of disappointment for our parents.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to share your great photos with our readers, Jonathan, and we hope there’s many more in the future.
What’s New in The RCSD Shop
While it is new to The RCSD Shop, we tend to run a few months behind with our Cover Photo T-Shirts: as such, back in the October 2021 issue we featured the always breathtaking photography of our friends at Speedamigo-Modellflugfilm. In this particular shot their FW-Models LS 6c is captured against that inimitable ‘cielo azzurro italiano’ near Cantiano, Italy. We love the light in this picture — summer with just a tinge of fall. Makes us wish we had it in the store much sooner! Get yours today.
Also, in honour of Part 7 of Norimichi Kawakami’s 1/3 スケール三田式 3 型改 1 製作記 (Mita 3 Production Notes) which appeared in the October issue, we are also providing a Japanese version — be the first kid on the slope to have one.
Make Sure You Don’t Miss the New Issue
You really don’t want to miss the July issue of RCSD when it’s out — we have some exciting things in the works. Make sure you connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn or subscribe to our Groups.io mailing list. Please share RCSD with your friends — we would love to have them as readers, too.
That’s it for this month…now get out there and fly!
©2022 The New RC Soaring Digest Staff
Resources
- Lift over Drag — The June edition of our newsletter featuring that wonderful photo of Ollie mentioned above. Lift over Drag is our more-or-less monthly newsletter which provides advanced email notice about the upcoming issue. And word to the wise: there’s quite often an exclusive, Lift over Drag-readers-only RCSD Shop discount contained therein. Lift over Drag is entirely free, but you do have to sign-up if you want it to arrive in your email inbox each month.
Read the previous article or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
