Except for an occasional meal with the Tates, they got by on their own rations and their own cooking. The water around teemed with fish—“you see dozens of them whenever you look down into the water”—and Kitty Hawk fishermen shipped tons of fish to Baltimore and other cities. But the only way the brothers could get fish was to catch it themselves. “It’s just like in the north,” Orville explained, “where our carpenters never have their houses completed, nor the painters their houses painted, the fisherman never has any fish.”
Their self-reliance was put to the test. They lived mainly on local eggs, tomatoes, and hot biscuits, though these had to be made without milk, so “pitiable” were the local cows. The only things that thrived on the Outer Banks, Orville decided, were bedbugs, mosquitoes, and wood ticks. Wilbur longed especially for butter and coffee, corn bread and bacon.
On the other hand the scene from the tent door—the scene from almost any point—was spectacular, with great stretches of water and sand dunes and beach and a tremendous sky overhead, with cumulus clouds rising like castles, thrilling to behold against the blue. Long flat horizons reached far in the distance in every direction.
And then there was the wind, always the wind. It was not just that it blew nearly all the time, it was the same force that had sculpted the sand hills and great dunes of Kitty Hawk that shaped and kept shaping the whole surrounding landscape.
Far from home, on their own in a way they had never been, the brothers seemed to sense as they never had the adventure of life. Orville would later say that even with all the adversities they had to face, it was the happiest time they had ever known.
Birds on the wing, birds of every kind by the hundreds, filled the air—eagles, snow-white gannets, hawks, pigeons, turkey vultures, or buzzards as they were known on the Outer Banks, with wing spans of as much as six feet. Wilbur devoted hours to studying their movements in the wind, filling pages of his notebook, sometimes adding small drawings. The reality of what birds could do—the miracle of birds—remained a subject of continuing importance and fascination, and birdlife on the Outer Banks was beyond anything they had ever imagined, recalling lines from Mouillard’s Empire of the Air.
The vulture’s needs are few, and his strength is moderate. And so what does he know? He knows how to rise, how to float aloft, to sweep the field with keen vision, to sail upon the wind without effort . . . he sails and spends no force, he never hurries, he uses the wind.
But how did the soaring bird use the wind, and wind only, to sail aloft and bank and turn as it wished? Buzzards were masters of the art.
The dihedral angle, a shallow V-shape, of the wings was an advantage only in still air, Wilbur wrote in his notebook.
The buzzard which uses the dihedral angle finds greater difficulty to maintain equilibrium in strong winds than eagles and hawks which hold their wings level
The hen hawk can rise faster than the buzzard and its motion is steadier. It displays less effort in maintaining its balance.
Hawks are better soarers than buzzards but more often resort to flapping because they wish greater speed.
A damp day is favorable for soaring unless there is a high wind.
No bird soars in a calm.
“All soarers, but especially the buzzard, seem to keep their fore-and-aft balance more by shifting the center of resistance than by shifting the center of lift,” Wilbur wrote.
If a buzzard be soaring to leeward of the observer, at a distance of a thousand feet . . . the cross section of its wings will be a mere line when the bird is moving from the observer but when it moves toward him the wings appear broad. This would indicate that its wings are always inclined upward, which seems contrary to reason.
A bird when soaring does not seem to alternately rise and fall as some observers thought. Any rising or falling is irregular and seems to be disturbances of fore-and-aft equilibrium produced by gusts. In light winds the birds seem to rise constantly without any downward turns.
For the local citizens the two brothers from Ohio were extremely hard to figure. One named John T. Daniels, known as “John T.” to distinguish him from his father, who was also John Daniels, said later, “We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts. They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, dipping.” Gannets, the giant seabirds with a wingspread of five to six feet, seemed their particular interest.
They would watch the gannets and imitate the movements of their wings with their arms and hands. They could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets; we thought they were crazy, but we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones up and down and which way, just like the gannets.
“Learning the secret of flight from a bird,” Orville would say, “was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.”
For Katharine’s benefit, he wrote also of a “very tame” mockingbird that lived in the one tree overhanging the tent and sang the whole day long. The sunsets, he told her, were the most beautiful he had ever seen, the clouds lighting up in all colors, the stars at night so bright he could read his watch by them.
They were now taking photographs of nearly everything—tent, views, sand, and water, even the mockingbird in the treetop, but primarily the glider in action.
Many nights the wind was such that they had to leap from bed to hold the tent down. “When we crawl out of the tent to fix things, the sand fairly blinds us,” Orville wrote. “It blows across the ground in clouds.” But they could not complain. “We came down here for wind and sand and we have got them.” The night when one of Kitty Hawk’s 45-mile-an-hour storms struck with a sound like thunder, there was no sleep. And the winds were cold. “We each have two blankets, but almost freeze every night,” Orville wrote. “The wind blows in on my head, and I pull the blankets up over my head, when my feet freeze and I reverse the process. I keep this up all night and in the morning am hardly able to tell ‘where I’m at.’ ”
Their daily sustenance had reached a new low:
Well, part of the time we eat hot biscuits and eggs and tomatoes; part of the time eggs and part tomatoes. Just now we are out of gasoline and coffee. Therefore no hot drink or bread or crackers. The order sent off Tuesday has been delayed by the winds. Will is “most starved.”
Nonetheless, as Katharine knew, they were having a splendid time, especially because of their work, but also in good measure because of the “Kitty Hawkers,” whose consistent friendliness and desire to be of help, whose stories and ways of looking at life and expressing their opinions, made an enormous difference. The brothers were now hearing, as they had not before, words like “disremember” for “forget” and such expressions as “I’ll not be seeing you tomorrow,” or smooth water described being “slick calm.” “Hoi toide” was “high tide.”