Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- It has been a windy summer, hard on flowers but easy on kite surfers. From the waist up they look like skydivers attached to bright, parachute-like kites with harnesses and lines. From the waist down they look like surfers on stubby boards. They wear wet suits to take the sting out of the 40-degree water. But sometimes, when the kite twists the wrong way and deflates into a wet tangle and the riders slip into the inlet, I worry until they are safely -- or not so safely, it seems -- back up.

Once I watched a handful of them dragging kites and paddling in circles, and I trotted down to see if I should toss them a lifesaving ring or call the Coast Guard. Turned out one guy had lost his prosthetic foot. They found it floating, got it reattached, and everyone resumed surfing.

I was on the deck the other day, half watching as a wave rider skipped toward Pyramid Island while I read a verse by William Carlos Williams about the delight of doing useless things, like playing Little League baseball or writing a poem, when I thought, if the author had seen this he would have written about kite boarding. It is completely useless, and those doing it are the only ones taking any delight in these blustery days.

The most recent windstorm stranded five camping teens on Pyramid Island when the inlet changed so suddenly from calm to roiling that if this were Kansas I would have grabbed my little dog and hollered, "It's a twister, Dorothy."

Instead, I got out the binoculars and asked my husband, who was looking that way through his spotting scope, if the young campers had the sense to stay put for another night.

I knew them all and couldn't bear a tragedy. I looked at a boy who sang a medley of "What a Wonderful World" and "Over the Rainbow" at graduation with my daughters, standing on the point with another boy who had run so well on the cross-country team I coach.

The father of one of the boys approached them in a red skiff. The surf was rolling our way. The waves were too big for him to buck against after he no doubt realized they could swamp the boat. He had to keep going and hit the island or miss and land on our beach.

He spun into the lee of the island, bumped a sandbar about 20 feet out, and tilted the outboard up to protect the prop. He was drifting back and yelling into the wind when one of the boys waded in, caught the tossed line and pulled the skiff in with smiles all around.

We weren't the only ones watching. The other parents had gathered on a hill down the road, and up in their cliff-top home my kite-boarding neighbor James and his wife, Tigger, followed the midday drama.

James and Tigger are the kind of people small towns everywhere hope will sustain them. They are telecommuters who also volunteer for everything from the library to the swim team (their children are swimmers). James also has a great accent. He is from South Africa. He said he saw the dad, who is also a friend, "wallowing around in gigantic seas in his little skiff" but, like my husband, didn't worry once he landed.

That evening, the parents called James to borrow a wet suit as another dad was going to make a run for the island in a flotation-filled canoe, which didn't seem like a good idea. Tigger suggested the kite board. By then the gale had dropped to about 30 mph, the upper range for James and his kite, so he went down to the beach to rig it while Tigger and the parents organized supplies.

James said, "We heard they'd somehow spilled all their drinking water, had wet matches and no food, and had spent the day huddled in a single tent wearing their life jackets trying to stay warm; cell phone batteries and spirits were low." It wasn't an emergency yet, but it could become one.

Thinking of the rule of three -- a person can survive three hours in the cold, three days without water and three weeks without food -- Tigger packed the first load with lots of warm clothes, a jug of warm water and a few high-energy snacks.

James launched the kite and balanced on the board with the pack on his back. He got to the island in minutes, in just one tack. He was a man with a mission and a really cool entrance. It was "pure James Bond," he said, accent and all, as he stepped off the board and delivered his goods "suavely" to the "eager islanders." He had no trouble making the other run.

At 3 in the morning, the wind stopped and it was suddenly quiet enough to hear the tide fill the cove. I looked out the window in time to see them loading the skiff but was halfway to sleep again when I heard it running for home.

I said a few words of thanks, for their safety and for poets, ballplayers and all the crazies who practice a seemingly useless activity with delight, because you never know when it will come in handy, when what you do for love will prove both useful and courageous.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.

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