Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Today is the anniversary of the Wright brothers flight on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where we visited the newly renovated memorial a month ago. What a Flying Lesson it was.

We set off from our campground on a near-perfect fall morning toward Kitty Hawk where the Memorial has stood for over a century. A chunk of granite at top of Kill Devil Hill marks the marvelous December day that – after years of painstaking and obsessive efforts — Wilbur and Orville proved that people could fly.

The original photograph taken the day the Wright brothers proved they could fly.

Naturally birds were part of the brothers’ inspiration, and birds became their instructors as well. The brothers watched birds soaring directly into the wind and noticed that the air flowing over the curved surface of their wings created lift. Birds also change the shape of their wings to turn and maneuver, and the Wrights believed they could find a way to emulate this to block their plane’s tendency to roll in flight. So they warped, or twisted the shape of a portion of the wing. It’s the birds’ twist in their wings that helps them be more agile and aerodynamic.

The details of the quest to fly captivated Anders and me when we read David McCullough’s book “The Wright Brothers.” We’re basically obsessed with birds ourselves at this point, and so for me a trip to the place where humans took flight felt like a necessary pilgrimage.