Drink Sprite!

by Phil Broder

A co-worker recently informed me that a lot of citrus beverages, among them my beloved Mountain Dew, include something called "brominated vegetable oils." She further tells me that this ingredient serves no real purpose other than to make the drink look something other than transparent, has been banned in Europe, and in laboratory studies has been shown to cause shrunken testicles in rats.

Now, I don't know if any of this is true or not - and if you're in Pepsi's legal department, please remember how poor I am before you sue me - and I certainly have no intention of discussing the size of my testicles with you, dear readers. But my point is that image matters.

I bring this up because of something scary that happened earlier this month at Kites On Ice in Madison. I'm nominally in charge of safety at that event, and I gotta tell you, the location of the fireworks launcher for the night fly worried me a little. Too close to the kites, I thought. Gunpowder and ripstop don't mix well. But the pyrotechnic experts and fire marshal assured me that they were 350 feet from the edge of the flying area, as required by law, and that these fireworks wouldn't be going up very high anyways.

And true enough, when the fireworks started, they came nowhere near the kites. Except for the German kites. The No Limits group of Sven Weidhase, Andreas Schmeelke, and Frank Schwiemann had their ghostly white pyrodeltas - you've seen them, with their flowing tails - directly over the launcher. The rumor I'd heard was that they had a bet to see who could get a hole in their kite. Not long after, I physically assaulted Frank. Beneath the rocket's red glare, I yelled at Andreas and repeatedly shoved Frank, trying to move them out of what I considered the danger zone. They yelled back that the fire marshall had said it was OK for them to be there. Outnumbered 3 to 1, I quit. And then a firework shot upward, smacked directly into Frank's kite, fell back toward the ground and exploded about 10' over the heads of the fireworks team.

Now, I am not a professional firefighter, nor do I have much experience with fireworks. From my layman's viewpoint, I can only say that this looked dangerous. If that shell had detonated closer to the people, or landed back on the launcher, the potential for serious injury and/or a large explosion seems very real. So if the boys from No Limits are looking for an apology from me, they can keep waiting. I think their actions caused danger to others and were inherently dumb. Their excuse of "we do this all the time in Germany" doesn't wash with me, because in America our tort system doesn't have the same common sense that European jurisprudence uses. One accident, one lawsuit, and a perfectly good kite festival ceases to exist.

But this is not a discussion of kite safety. Jef Cleaves has forgotten more about that than I'll ever know, so I won't get into it here. This is about image. Because frankly, what the Germans were doing looked really cool.

I'll admit it, the big white deltas surrounded by smoke and flame looked fantastic. I can only assume that some of the thousands of spectators watching from shore thought so to. And that worries me. We're the pros, or at least that's what the public thinks. We're the guys out putting on the show, so in the eyes of the public we're supposed to know what we're doing. And if we do something dangerous in front of the public, how are they supposed to know that they shouldn't imitate us?

There's only one flyer who I trust absolutely to use his kites to play with people: Lee Sedgwick. You may have seen Sedge using his stack of Revs to toy with children, chasing them across fields or staying just out of their reach. At Ocean City a few years ago, I watched Lee hook his Leo toy onto the kites, then use one of Leo's other hooks to pick up an aluminum lawn chair, which he then deposited on the peak of a nearby tent. We're talking about a heavy metal piece of furniture, which, if it were properly assisted by gravity, could put a good-size dent in someone's brainpan. But Lee knew that there was nobody in the area near the chair, and because it was Lee, I never worried.

On the other hand, I've seen too many flyers - some of them experts, some of them novices - use their kites to buzz bystanders or otherwise mess with people. In some cases the risk was negligible, and I've never witnessed one of these incidences that ended in tragedy. Still, what's the image we're displaying?

In the case of Kites On Ice, the image that the spectators came away with is that it's OK to fly your kites near fireworks. Nobody got hurt, right? And those flyers knew what they're doing, because they're experts, right? Well, I refuse to rely on someone else's sense personal responsibility to keep our sport safe. If some idiot puts an M-80 on his kite, blows it up in mid-air, and sprays carbon fiber and flaming nylon on a crowd of people, I'm not going to say that he's a moron who should be held accountable for his own stupidity. (Well, actually, I will say that, but that's not the end of the discussion.) I'll look around at the sport, and ask where the moron got the idea to do such a dumb thing.

If the answer is "Madison," then I'll say that coolness is nothing, image is everything, and Sprite can be used to douse the flames. We live in a society where kids get hurt by imitating Beavis and Butthead. We invented the term "copycat killer." If someone does something phenomenally daring using the best safety precautions there are, it's a lock that someone else will imitate them with no safety considerations or training at all. Hell, I've got a relative who leapt from the garage roof wearing a red cape because he thought he could be like Superman.

The population of this planet is growing, but the sum of intelligence is a constant. Next time you're trying something dumb, even if it's just for laughs, think about who might be watching. The image we present as kiters affects everyone watching. The ass you save may not be your own, but it's just as important.