Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
For four seasons, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio — Wilbur and Orville Wright — had camped on a windswept sand spit between Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic, testing gliders and, in 1903, a 605-pound machine of spruce, ash, muslin, bicycle chain, and a home-built 12-horsepower gasoline engine. Their nearest neighbors were the men of Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station No. 10, part of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, the federal outfit that patrolled these beaches on foot day and night to pull sailors out of the surf. Our subject is one of those surfmen, John Thomas Daniels, Jr., age 30, a big, broad-shouldered Outer Banks native who had never seen an automobile and never operated a camera.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 4:40 a.m. — the ocean beach two miles south of Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station No. 10, North Carolina
You are three hours into the south patrol and your face has stopped feeling like your face. The wind is out of the north, hard and steady, shoving at your back, and it carries sand that stings the skin behind your ears. Your lantern throws a weak yellow circle on wet sand. You count the surf by sound — long collapse, hiss, drag — and you watch the black water for a light that shouldn’t be there. At the halfway post you unlock the little clock box, take the brass check from the Nags Head man’s hand, drop yours in his, say two words, and turn around. Your boots are soaked through. Your trousers are frozen stiff below the knee. The ponds inland have iced over. There is nothing out there tonight but weather.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 6:30 a.m. — mess room, Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station No. 10
The stove has the room up to something like warm, and the air is thick with coffee, kerosene, wet wool, and frying salt pork. You eat standing at first because sitting hurts after the patrol. Cornbread, molasses, pork, coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in. The crew talks about the Dayton men down the beach — the two brothers in white collars who have been living in a shed all fall, hauling a big cloth-winged contraption up the hill and gliding it down. Somebody says they’ll break their necks. Somebody else says they’ve already flown farther on a glider than any man alive. The keeper says if the white flag goes up on their shed, whoever’s free walks down. You dunk your bread and say nothing.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 8:15 a.m. — lookout tower, Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station No. 10
You climb the ladder to the tower and the wind hits you like a shoulder. The glass is cold enough to sting your eye socket. Out east the ocean is running white to the horizon, spray tearing off the tops of the breakers. Inland, the sound is corrugated gray. The little freshwater ponds behind the dunes have skinned over with ice, and the sand between them is packed hard as a road. You sweep the spyglass south, past the scrub and the long slope of the big hill, to two low sheds standing alone in all that emptiness. No smoke yet. No flag. You mark the hour on the slate and blow into your hands.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 10:05 a.m. — station porch, Kill Devil Hills
The call comes down from the tower: the signal is up. You step out on the porch and look south and there it is, a white square snapping on the end of the shed, plain as a shout. Adam Etheridge is already pulling his coat on. Will Dough curses the cold and comes anyway. You’ve helped these Ohio men before — carried wings up the hill for them, eaten their canned beans, listened to them argue about air like preachers arguing scripture. Today the flag means they mean to try it with the engine. You button your coat, jam your cap down, and step off the porch into the wind.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 10:20 a.m. — the flats north of the Wright camp, Kill Devil Hills
A mile of sand takes longer than a mile of road. You walk with your head down and your shoulders squared into it, Etheridge on your left, Dough behind, and the wind comes over the dunes like water over a dam. Ice crunches at the edge of a pond. Ahead, the brothers are already at work on a level stretch of hard sand north of their sheds, laying four fifteen-foot lengths of two-by-four end to end and capping them with a strip of thin steel. Sixty feet of track. They set it running north, straight into the wind. They are dressed like men going to a bank — dark suits, stiff white collars, neckties, caps — and they are down on their knees in the sand with a spirit level.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 10:28 a.m. — inside the Wrights’ living shed, Kill Devil Hills
They send you inside to thaw. The shed smells like kerosene, coffee grounds, sawdust, glue, and old bacon. A stove made out of a carbide can with an oil-can chimney throws heat you can feel through your coat. Tin cans nailed to the studs hold nails and screws. Their beds are up in the rafters overhead. You hold your hands over the can until the feeling comes back and it hurts. Wilbur comes in, looks at the three of you standing there like mourners, and tells you not to look so glum — that you ought to laugh and holler and clap your hands, and do what you can to cheer the boys up. Nobody laughs. Then everybody does, a little.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 10:33 a.m. — beside the launching rail, north of the camp
The machine sits on the rail on a little wooden truck riding two bicycle hubs. It is bigger up close than it looks from the station — forty feet of wing, unbleached muslin drum-tight, spruce ribs, wires everywhere, a black iron engine bolted on the right of the wing and two big wooden propellers behind. The engine catches and the noise slaps you: unmuffled bangs, chains slapping in their tubes, the whole cloth machine trembling. Orville plants a wooden tripod camera in the sand pointed at the end of the rail, sets the focus, hands you the rubber bulb, and tells you plain: don’t watch the machine, watch the end of the rail, and when it gets there, squeeze. You have never touched a camera in your life. You nod.
Date/time and location: December 17, 1903 — 10:35 a.m. — the end of the launching rail
