Into the Wind
Every New Year’s Day, George Peters and Melanie Walker trek out into the cold Colorado winter to fly kites. It’s a good omen and brings good luck for the rest of the year. But they don’t fly just any kites – they fly giant, monster kites that they build themselves.
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to fly kites with them for the last two years. Boulder is seriously windy, and we’ve found a good plateau that really exacerbates those wind conditions. Many times, it will rip the kites out of your hand. It’s fun being with people outside in the cold when it’s the last thing on earth you want to be doing, and it’s always fun to see what kind of crazy kites they bring with them. They are known for their large-scale kinetic installations in buildings all over the world, and they don’t scale down just because they’re outside. They create interesting shapes put together in beautiful ways. One of my favorites is the “fishing pole” – It’s at least 20 feet long with a fish kite attached at the end, and it will fight you like a marlin in the wind.
The best kite I’ve ever been able to “fly” was a banner about 6 feet wide and 100 feet long. You need two people to fly it. It creates a giant arc in the sky that gets such lift underneath it, if you pull on one end you can literally lift whoever is holding the other end into the air.
If you’d like to learn more about George and Melanie, you can check out their website here. There is also a great New York Times article that features them as well as some other artists working with scientists to illustrate the consequences of climate change. In the interest of full disclosure, only the bottom 3 pictures are mine. :)
