Strapped into a harness and lying only a couple of inches from the soft, dew-wet grass airstrip at Lookout Mountain Flight Park in Georgia, I close my eyes, swallow hard, and then say a little prayer. Okay. Scratch that. A big prayer.
I was about to hang-glide for the first time in my life, and I had changed my mind about going, oh, say, a hundred times in the last minute.
Petrified yet excited, I made the final decision to take the flight only at the very last moment. When the plane powered up, I knew there was no turning back. As the one-seater tow-plane roared down the airstrip, I finally snapped open my eyes as our kite-like contraption reached lift-off speed. As the ground grew farther and farther away, my tandem pilot, Eric Graper, and I swept skyward, my arms wrapped around him in a death grip that I wouldn’t release for all the mint juleps in Georgia.
“The tow-plane is going to let go now,” Eric said after we had been aloft for a few minutes. “Then we’re going to drop. Are you ready?”
Ready or not, the rope snapped away, the hang-glider did indeed drop a few tummy-churning feet as the plane sped away. Next I heard a loud screeching and then thumpity-thumpity-thumpity, which turned out to be my screaming like a schoolgirl and my heart pounding wildly with exhilaration mixed with numbing fear.
Soaring into the wind underneath a canopy of gray clouds on that blustery day, I peered 2,000 feet down at the honeycomb of ancient mountains and forests at the intersection where Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama meld together. My fear melted away at the incredible view.
“Do Wonder Woman!” Eric shouted above the wind. “Let go of that death grip you have on me and do a Wonder Woman!”
More thumpity-thump-thumps as I nervously let go. Tentatively raising my arms into the wind, for a few magical, incredible seconds I felt more like Nike, the winged goddess of victory, than Wonder Woman.
Back down on the grass airstrip, my knees still shaky and my head still light, I was surprised that I immediately wanted to go again. I had conquered my fear of hang gliding, but even better is that I’m now convinced I know how angels fly.
My husband and I were on a quick getaway to Chattanooga, Tenn., which is just a few miles from Lookout Mountain. While Chattanooga may have a funny name, it is a fantastic place to visit — and if you’re plucky enough, to hang glide.
The name Chattanooga emerged from a Creek Indian word meaning “rock coming to a point.” That, of course, would be Lookout Mountain, which meanders from Chattanooga to northwest Georgia and northeast Alabama.
Back in the early 1980s, I had first visited there to see Rock City (Yes, really! See Rock City!). At the time, Chattanooga was a dirty, smoky industrial city filled with pollution — so much so that drivers had to use their headlights during the daylight — and was going nowhere fast. Even the Environmental Protection Agency got into the act and proclaimed it “America’s Dirtiest City,” a fact that Walter Cronkite reported to the world.
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