Yeah, but were there peanuts?

It's funny the way history has to be written so that it gives you no real perspective on the immediate and personal impact that certain events made on the world. Since most history is presented as simply a matter of dates, census figures and longitude and latitude coordinates, it's nearly impossible to truly understand why a particular battle, bill or discovery was important, not just to the world, but to the individuals living in that world. And you certainly can't get any kind of feel for the social, political and historical backdrop against which these events took place.

You only know that in such and such a year, Lincoln made his emancipation proclamation and then in such and such a year the war ended and then in such and such a year this bill was introduced giving blacks the right to vote. But you have no idea that Lincoln was one of the most hated men in the country and considered one of the worst and most divisive presidents ever. And that was by the people in the NORTH. I mean, the things they're saying about George Bush would probably seem tame compared to the things they were saying about Lincoln at the time. But history doesn't express that. They just give the stats that show it was Lincoln who freed the slaves. It makes you wonder how history will paint George Bush in the future once all the current and petty political squabblings have died away.

Another event that you don't get to fully appreciate in history class is the Wright Brother's historic first flight. We have dates and we have distances but the history books don't do much in the way of conveying what it must have been like that day at Kittyhawk. It's not until you actually visit the site of the first flight that you begin to understand what the feel of that day must have been. The Wright's needed a lot of wind for their experiment to work. Anybody who's ever spent time on North Carolina's Outerbanks has already begun to understand just why they chose this particular area. The wind never seems to stop around here. Even on a warm day it can make the temperature seem twenty degrees cooler. The Outerbanks wasn't the populated vacation spot, peppered with beach houses and crab shacks that it is today. In fact, it was a pretty remote, desolate location at the time, populated more by sand dunes than anything else. That was good for the Wright's who were secretive to the point of paranoia with their flyer that they didn't want to risk the press stopping on on their experiments.

The Wright's made their historic first flight on December 17, 1903. That's a long way from Ohio, their home, just over a week until Christmas. I remember coming down here for work as part of the TV crew covering the First Flight Centennial in December of 2003. I remember how much it sucked leaving home for just a week so close to Christmas. But neither of the Wright's were ever married, so they didn't have any familial ties keeping them from getting down here when the wind was at its best. Kind of makes you wonder if the Wright's just weren't able to find women who would put up with their all-consuming passion for flight - which undoubtedly would have kept them from their familial duties... or if the Wright's were just so into their passion that they never had the time to meet, much less court any women. Either way, it was probably because they didn't have the distractions of family that they were able to be the firsts in the history books.

We took a morning to check out the Wright Brother's National Memorial at Kittyhawk while we were on vacation in the Outerbanks. The park is fairly minimalist which I think serves it well. There are two visitor centers with artifacts and murals explaining the history surrounding the first flight. But other than that, most of the park's 430 acres is just wide open grassland which can kind of give you an idea of the isolation the Wright's experienced in their stay here.

The historical stats tell you that the Wrights conducted four flight tests on that historic day. The first three went anywhere from 120-200 feet and lasted less than 20 seconds. Orville is always credited with the first official flight, having won the famous coin toss between he and his brother. But it was Wilbur who truly flew that day, going over 800 feet in a flight that lasted nearly an entire minute. On paper, even at the Kitthawk visitor center itself, those numbers don't mean a whole lot. But then you go outside to that wide open field and stand in the very spot where the first flight took off and you begin to understand what it must have felt like that day. There are four concrete blocks marking the landing point of each flight. From the starting point, the first three markers seem almost embarrassingly close. The famous first flight went a mere 120 feet. From the point of liftoff, it really seems as thought the plane must have gone up and crashed right back down again. The next two flights look equally abrupt.

But then you look down the field, 800 feet away to the fourth marker and even in our modern world where everything is just supposed to work, and where we take airplanes for granted, you say "Wow, now THAT was a flight." I can only imagine Orville's reaction upon watching his brother go and go and go after three modest attempts. It probably went something like:

"Wow....... holy shit......... holy shit..... HO-LY SHIT!"

Orville may have been the one to go in the history books as "the first" but it was Wilbur who actually gave them something to write home about that day.

One other thing I found interesting being at Kitthawk is the photograph of the first flight. This is truly a unique picture. This picture was obviously taken before the days of digital cameras, before every schmuck with ten dollars could walk down to the CVS and buy a disposable point-and-shoot. The world didn't yet have the fanatical need to capture everything on film or tape that we have today. On the whole, important historical moments weren't photographed. Unless somebody in the press had a big heads up that something big was about to happen, nobody on the scene generally had a camera with them. But the Wright's did have the foresight. What's more they had the knowhow. The displays at Kitthawk say that Wilbur had a budding interest in photography and he meticulously documented their time at Kittyhawk. He likewise spent a lot of time taking artistic shots of the surrounding area and whatnot. He was exactly the kind of person you would have wanted around if you wanted a visual record of something as big as what they were about to attempt.

But when the moment came for the first flight, Wilbur couldn't be the one taking the picture. Even though Orville was the one actually flying, Wilbur had to run alongside the plane and steady the wing until it actually took off. He had to turn the camera over to somebody else. He had to trust somebody else to take perhaps the most important picture of his (Wilbur's) life. Other than the Wrights, there were only five other men present to witness the first flight. Local guys. None of them reporters. Wilbur had to turn control of his camera over to an amateur, a guy who likely had never even seen a camera, much less operated one. I'm sure Wilbur set the thing up on a tripod and took great pains to focus it exactly as it needed to be, but still, he had to express in no uncertain terms to this guy,

"Okay, now wait until the plane is off the ground before you press the button. As soon as you see it lift off, press the button. Now repeat back what I just said."

Can you imagine the pressure that guy must have felt - both Wilbur AND the photographer? It's hard enough to get a tourist at Disney World to take your picture without cutting your head off. Yet somehow he got the shot perfectly. The whole plane is visible. Orville and Wilbur are visible. It is the perfect shot to capture this historic event.



I thoroughly enjoyed Kittyhawk. It's not the kind of national park that you can spend more than a couple hours in, and honestly isn't one you go back to again and again. But it is definitely worth a single trip, if for no other reason than it's minimalist nature truly let's you experience history firsthand.