y quest to fly began on Lookout Mountain, where on a crisp blue morning I gazed across the rolling green heaven that is the northwestern corner of Georgia. I stood alone, transfixed, on a 15-foot slab of concrete that juts— mysteriously, invitingly, terrifyingly—into open air.

I stepped toward the bluff's edge and took in the expansive view: a sloping blanket of evergreens disappearing into a wide valley still shrouded in a spooky, soupy fog. The sun was already burning through the mist, and dark hilltops were beginning to emerge like islands rising up out of an ocean far below.

There’s something meditative about high places. The view from above seems to distill the chaos of the world below into something both simple and sublime. It’s a vista unfairly monopolized by the birds, and I am not the first human to be envious of that. Sure, many such panoramic scenes have sparked my imagination with dreams of flying. But because this concrete ramp is a part of Lookout Mountain Flight Park, home to the country’s largest hang-gliding school, the idea suddenly became more than a fantasy. This is a place where humans can actually learn to soar.

That first, mystical view from the mountaintop somehow convinced me that flying would be effortless. That conviction grew stronger later, as I stood down in the valley below and watched the hang gliders circle, their Crayola-colored wings at once bold and gentle against the big sky backdrop.

For $130 the flight park offers rides in two-person gliders piloted by pros, but these are suitable for pretty much anyone, and I wanted to be more than a passenger. So I contacted the school and was told that I’d need at least six to ten days of training to jump off the mountain. Emboldened beyond any rational expectation, I planned to spend exactly six days of instruction on my path to human flight.

When I showed up for lessons a few months later, I quickly realized that I’d grossly underestimated the sport of hang gliding—and I had completely overestimated my own abilities.

On my first day of training, in a grassy field below the mountain, I faced this fact as I stepped into the harness that connects pilot to glider. A glider is feather-light when correctly balanced on the pilot’s shoulders, but for me it was a big, unmanageable beast. The slightest cross-breeze could catch it like a sail and knock it from its delicate perch, and I felt in constant danger of toppling over. My greatest accomplishment of the day was establishing some heavy-duty bruises early on; the sore spots on my shoulders made perfect guides for correct glider positioning when preparing for a launch. While I wrestled to keep the aluminum and nylon in place, my teacher instructed me on the finer points of getting
airborne: Keep the wings level, keep the nose at the correct angle, and focus on where you want to fly. Do all of this as you walk, then jog, then run—the glider will pull you up by the harness above.

I ended those first few hours impressed with the quality of my instruction but with humbled expectations of myself. Seeking the inspiration of my first view from Lookout Mountain, I headed back up to the ramp. But this time, instead of a mystical scene, all I saw was a jaw-dropping descent of a couple-thousand feet. I saw gliders nearby, but now perceived them as much more than soaring Crayola colors. I could now appreciate the harnesses their pilots wore, and could almost imagine the techniques they required, but I surely couldn’t fathom being in their place.

Back in the valley, my lessons moved to a small grassy hill, with the goal of mastering launches, landings, turns, and speed control before progressing to a bigger hill and eventually to the giant step off the mountain.

Launching a glider, it turned out, is relatively easy. I learned to triple-check the harness and make sure the wings were level (I knew I had it right when the pain was equally distributed in both shoulders). I learned to pretend, for the sake of my instructor, to take serious stock of the breeze, although in reality the subtleties of air currents were lost on me.

And I learned to walk, jog, and run with my glider until the ground would drop out from under my feet, an astonishing feeling that reminded me of those old cartoons where Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and hangs stationary, legs still spinning, until the fateful moment when he notices he’s stopped in mid-air. As I first went aloft, I didn’t feel graceful or birdlike; instead, suspended by my fabric of wings, I felt surprisingly solid. But as I began to lift just a few feet above the tall grass, I was consumed with a single thought: Ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh, I’m flying! From the moment I started my run to the second I hit the ground, I loved being in the air.

As my training progressed, however, my skills stalled. I could get off the ground easily, but once airborne I found myself drifting wherever the wings wanted to take me. My instructor was amazingly patient. “You’re doing great on the launches,” he’d say encouragingly. “But then you are giving up and becoming a passenger.” His tone echoed my own belief that this was not a desirable thing.

Being a passenger was not what I wanted from my quest, but no matter what I tried, I was seized by the same thought whenever I managed to get airborne: Ohmygosh, I’m flying! My lack of control and finesse was completely at odds with the Zen-like grace I’d imagined up on Lookout Mountain. At one point, I drifted into a turn while trying to land, snagging the tip of my wing on the ground in a way that swung the rest of the glider into a forceful collision with the ground. The supple aluminum frame bent into a taco shape, absorbing the impact that may otherwise have broken my arms. On another botched flight, I lost focus while —Ohmygosh, I’m flying!—cruising about 10 feet off the ground. Drifting too slowly, I suddenly dropped out of the air, Wile E. Coyote–style.

What was going on? Was my glider misaligned? (The instructor tried to reassure me that this was possible, but it did not seem very likely.) Yes, I was making some progress, but I had to admit that I wouldn’t be flying off of Lookout Mountain before heading home. I wasn’t worried about never learning to fly—the school is flexible with students’ time, and I knew I’d be heading back to finish. My deepest fear was forgetting what my quest to fly was all about.

It was time to embrace the obvious: I may not be a decent pilot, but I have the makings of a great passenger. And there was no reason I couldn’t enjoy a bird’s view on one of the school’s tandem flights. So, I decided, passenger it is. All I had to do was strap in next to a pilot; a motorized aircraft did the hard work, towing us into the air from the grassy valley. The ground quickly grew distant, and when the plane released us, all but the breeze went silent.

It’s probably safe to say that you would find the experience of hang gliding nothing like you might imagine. During my lessons, I anticipated the terror of running toward a cliff’s edge; I wondered if I had the courage to make the leap; and I obsessed over the mechanics of pitch, air speed, and landing technique. But as a passenger, flight was so much simpler. It was like snorkeling in a calm, clear blue sea and just letting yourself float, face-down, to watch an amazing and unfamiliar world pass brilliantly beneath you.

Two thousand feet above a sea of pines, the current of air that rippled off of Lookout Mountain lifted our glider effortlessly. Then the pilot handed control over to me, and as I carved graceful avian arcs across the Georgia sky, flying seemed the most natural thing in the world. Finally, hang gliding was everything I had dreamed it would be. I could see the chaotic world below from the eyes of gods and eagles, and it was both simple and sublime.