Kite Lines - Vol.3 No. 1 - KiteLife

Polaroid print . An equally sure touch wasevident in the way they judged the varyinglengths of bridle lines and knotted thebridle for a big rokkaku ; these men musthave been born making kites and neverstopped since .There was time for flying them, too .The team arrived on a Wednesday ; thatFriday we had a fine kitefly and picnic atGasworks Park, and another on thefollowing Tuesday . And time to talk aboutkites : Dave and Dorothea Checkley putthe whole crew up in their big house onQueen Anne Hill, and most of the Shironekitemen's free time was spent with WKAmembers . Saturday, the Checkleys hosteda reception and dinner for a houseful ofWKA members and guests . The big o'dakowas to be flown at Magnuson Park thenext day, and part of that evening wasspent stretching its new polypropyleneflying line between the trunks of two bigtrees in the parking strip beside theCheckley house .There'd been a good deal of correspondenceabout the flying line beforethe team ever left Shirone . Though not aswell known in the U .S . as Hamamatsu,Shirone, in the Niigata prefecture on thewest coast of Honshu, has been a kitefestival town for some 300 years . Itsteam's regular and traditional line is handmadeof hemp, a controlled substance inJapan and likely to run afoul of customsregulations . So for the trip to Seattle themen had decided on a polypro "un-Manila"flying line, with jute for the bridle . Workingwell past nightfall, they and severalenergetic local kiters pulled and tuggedand wrapped the line as tightly as theycould round and round the tree trunks,where it was left stretching overnight .Meanwhile, the big o'dako had beenposing problems of its own . The Bon hadexpected to have it built, with the others,in the workroom on the eighth floor .That was before store personnel actuallysaw the length of its bamboo poles andrealized the impossibility of moving thembetween floors . It ended up being constructedon the main floor . Then, like theproverbial boat built in the living room, itwouldn't fit through the store's five-footwide,seven-foot-high door openings . Fora while it seemed as though a set of doorswould have to be dismantled, but thenHiroi solved the problem of rolling thekite tighter and squeezing it through .Once out of the building, it was truckedto a large airplane hangar near the flyingsite . Magnuson Park, on the shore of LakeWashington, is still in the process of beingdeveloped as a park on land formerly partof a U .S . Navy air station .Sunday was the big day . The Bon,with co-sponsorship by Seattle's morningnewspaper The Post-Intelligencer, hadscheduled a day-long series of contests andsports events, including boat races in thesmooth water of the breezeless morning .In Seattle, when the wind blows, it'sraining . When the sun shines, there's nowind . Kiteflying contests were scheduledto begin about noon . Before then theShirone team, with the assistance ofspectators, managed to get their giant kitemore-or-less airborne, but could keep itup only until they ran out of runningspeed at a rise in the terrain . But the airdid begin moving a bit as the contestsstarted . The four events were open to allFrom left counterclockwise : "Orient Expressed"theme kite airborne ; preparations for launchof Shirone kite (and J .C . Young's half-visiblecentipede) ; working on one of the kites atThe Bon Marche store; braiding bridle lines;getting the big kite out the door at The Bon .