A2 - Wednesday, July 28, 1982 - North Shore News

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I looked up.’ It was one
of those gaudy new flying
machines,
“ultralight,” which looks
like a plastic version of the
Kitty Hawk, the Wright
Brothers’ legendary
mechanical bird.

For a moment, I must
admit, I was awed.

It looked so damned
beautiful, drifting slowly
along, hardly 50 feet above
the highest nearby
hemlock. The _ colors!
Whew! It reminded me of
sailboats and parachutes
simultaneously.

It was both a poignant
evocation of the past and a
glimpse of the future.

While it seemed that
someone must surely be
filming a docu-drama about
the history of flight, there
was also a teasing sense of
having entered the pages of
the Authur C. Clarke sci-fi

novel, Rendezvous With
Rama, which depicts a
gossamer-winged sky
bicycle wafting along in
near Zero-G.

Finally, there was the
pilot.

I must confess to a
helpless admiration for

pilots. My Dad was in the
Royal Canadian Air Force.
While he never served
overseas, he was a Flying
Man as far as I was con-
cerned, and I = quickly
adopted the old RCAF

called) an_

, Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

Looking at tomorrow

THE OTHER DAY, as I was quietly taking care
of the chickens, I heard a horrible sound in the

motto, Per Ardua Ad Astra,
as some kind of personal
code.

(They probably don’t
teach Latin any more, so
for the benefit of the kids,
that means: Through ad-
versity to the stars. Sort of
a. Faustian. vision of the
destiny of the human race,
y know?)

As a youth, I had many
aerial adventures. I could
bore you all night. But let
me just reel a few off the
top:

Piloting a Tutor jet
trainer, being allowed to do
what I want with the joy-
stick, including tumbing
and loopity-looping and
barrel-rolling across the sky
north of Winnipeg;

Fighting an offshore head
wind across miles of broken
icepans near the coast of
Labrador in a Bell Jetranger
Il helicopter, running out
of fuel, darkness falling:

Being on a 747 bound for
Australia, having just
cleared Honolulu, being
told the landing gear won't
retract, “but we'll try for
Sydney anyway.” Free
drinks on the house!

Flying is great. I love it.

And | admire pilots. In
some ways, they have to be
the evolutionary cutting
edge of humanity. They're
crazy, many of them, but
that’s part of the old spirit,
for sure.

So as I watched this guy
put-put-putting across the
sky above my chicken coop
in his flashy ultralight flying

machine, I was _ initially
very sympathetic to his
cause.

Why wasn't / up there?
Why was I down here in my
chicken coop, | slippin’
around in gumboots, tossing
fresh straw to a bunch of
degenerate feathered egg-
layers that can scarcely get
12 feet off the ground to
save their lives?

Was this some kind of
cosmic message?

If so, it was too arcane. I
don’t get it. All I know for
sure is that the initial ex-
citement of seeing a real-
life flying machine passing
over my yard was quickly
followed by a headache.

It was herojc, that
ultralight flyer, to be sure.
The pilot was a paragon of
human courage. The
technology that went into
the machine’s construction
was a triumph of
engineering. By rights, I
should have thrown myself
on my knees and _ wor-
shipped it.

Instead, I started thinking
about buying a shotgun and
blowing the machine and its
rider out of the sky.

The NOISE, you see.
There's too much NOISE
already. Suddenly, there's
this motorcycle in the sky
.. . Help!

Isn't there some way to
make it illegal?

STANDING GUARD on the headland of rugged terrain in Lighthouse Park, the
Nashing lights warns ships of the rocky hazards off the West Van park.

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West Van
burning
dates
change
again ,

HALLOWEEN BONFIRES
will once more be allowed in
the backyards of West
Vancouver - if Halloween
falls on a weekend.

Council has decided to
modify its outdoor burning
regulations to allow garden
fires in all the weekends in
October, instead of four
weekends in November.

October is considered a
drier ‘month than November,
consequently the smoke
problem will likely be less
severe.

Confusion had _ also
resulted from the fact that
council had originally
Stipulated only the first four
weekends in April and
November would be burning
weekends.

But members decided to
give burners a break so that
if there are five weekends in
April or October, outdoor
burning will be allowed on
all Saturdays and Sundays in

the month.
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