A String and a Prayer
For world-renowned kite builder Rick Miller of Silver City, the answer is blowin' in the wind.
By Donna Clayton Lawder
Most people wouldn't think of a kite-flying competition as a matter of life and death. But in Hamamatsu, Japan, where expert kite builders and flyers from more than 164 town blocks compete for their village's honor in the annual Hamamatsu Kite Festival, flying a kite can get deadly serious.
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A kite-festival crowd enjoys kites by Rick Miller and others. |
Silver City resident Rick Miller, an internationally renowned kite builder and champion flyer, levels a serious gaze and nods his head slowly, solemnly.
"Oh, people die," Miller says. "I mean it, people actually die."
More than two million people show up every year to watch the Hamamatsu spectacle of village pride and kite passion. Handed down from the Eiroku era (1558-1569), the festival was started in honor of a king's newborn heir. The kites are called machijirushi—machi meaning "town" and jirushi meaning "mark"—because each town block paints its kite with its identifying mark.
Up to 50 young men, expert flyers from each town block, come dressed in ceremonial Happi coats made especially for the occasion. They guide their huge fighting kites, trying to cut the others out of the sky by attacking their strings.
At the end, only one kite remains.
Certainly, one can understand the personal and civic pride. But dying?
"They call it 'the fever of Hamamatsu,'" Miller says. "Hamamatsu fever just takes over and people will do anything to have their kite be the last one in the sky."
Kites are quite a passion—albeit not to the death—for Miller.
Professionally, he's a surveyor. He's run his own Silver City-based company, Z3 Planners and Surveyors, for 37 years now. Add to that about a half-dozen hobbies—tennis, both playing and stringing racquets for his friends, playing and collecting guitars, indulging a "serious EBay addiction" through which he finds said guitars, some laughably ineffectual elk hunting, helping local kids prepare for the annual Science Olympiads—and you'd think Miller would be too busy to teach kite workshops at home and abroad.
But maybe he's just a little tako-kichi—that's Japanese for "kite crazy."
A Google search turns up nearly 1,000 references to Miller's kite building and flying expertise. He's a champion kite fighter, and travels up to six or seven times a year to teach workshops across the country and around the world. His expenses are paid by the prestigious Drachen Foundation, a Seattle-based educational organization dedicated to kite research and the dissemination of kite knowledge worldwide. Drachen takes its name from the German word for "kite" or "dragon." The organization flies Miller to traditional Japanese kite building workshops all over the US and the world, where he teaches the fine art and fundamentals of traditional kite building to dozens of participants at a time.
Miller flips through images on the screen of the laptop computer before him, pictures showing him teaching people all over the world how to build kites. "Yeah, that's me and Randy (Shannon) in Washington. I always try to go to that festival," he says. Miller and Arizonan Shannon, long-time friends and kite building partners, taught a workshop in building a traditional type of kite at the Washington State International Kite Festival in Long Beach, Wash., attended by thousands of kite enthusiasts each year.
Along with Long Beach, Wash., several trips to Portland, Ore., and Junction, Texas, where he's taught 17 workshops, Miller's more exotic workshop destinations include Italy and Denmark.
"I build traditional Japanese kites out of modern materials," he explains. The three main styles he builds are Edos, Shirones and Wan Wans. Both Edo kites and Shirones are large, rectangular kites with many string lines attached to them. Edos are named after Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, and Shirones—you guessed it—are named after another Japanese town. The completely different Wan Wans are large round kites.
"I'm also fascinated by miniatures," Miller says. "They're really neat!" Minis are, obviously, very small kites. They can be flown indoors on extremely short strings. Miller has taught workshops on making mini kites to troops of local Boy Scouts.
But most of the kites he makes are big—very big. Where your average store-bought bat-style kite might have a wingspan of several feet, Miller's average kites run about 11 feet wide and 16 feet high. Big kites, he says, helped him make his name in the kite world.
Miller and Shannon started building really big kites at festivals, earning them the attention—and subsequently, sponsorship—of the Drachen Foundation. Now it's something the two are known for.
"And it's just fun," Miller says. "Big kites generate a lot of excitement at the festivals."
He sets about explaining how a team builds a nearly 200-square-foot kite from scratch in just one day—and how they get it off the ground.
Go Fly a Kite Here are two area kite-flying events this month. Pack up the kids and a picnic lunch, gird your loins for kite battles and contests, and take advantage of New Mexico's blustery spring weather. Both events are as free as the wind! Silver City
Sunday, April 29, 1-4 p.m.
Glenwood
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The body of the kite, Miller explains, is called the sail. In many of his far-flung workshops, participants make the sail out of Tyvek cloth. The Tyvek name is familiar to many due to its prevalence at home construction sites. But in addition to the familiar water-resistant building materials, the lightweight protective material manufactured by DuPont is now incorporated in a wide variety of products, such as protective clothing and rip-resistant envelopes and medical packaging. Made from high-density polyethylene fibers, Tyvek creates a cloth that's great for making kites, as it turns out.
"It's more substantial than paper, and it's easy to work with," Miller says. "And it takes paint great!"
Taking paint is an important feature, as kite builders take great pride in their kites' distinctive and elaborate designs. Owing to Japan's influence on the kite building tradition, many kite builders decorate their kites with Japanese images—sumo wrestlers, koi, dragons and Japanese characters, spelling out their team's name or their own.
Miller paints his kites with fabric dye—it's non-toxic, dries fast and is permanent, he explains. He scrolls through more bright photos on the computer screen, pictures he's brought along on a file-storage "jump drive" of his many workshop kites. He takes particular delight in pointing out his "sponsor's logo," which he paints in the corner of his kites. No, not the Drachen logo.
"Duff Beer! It's what Homer Simpson drinks!" he says with an explosive laugh. "It's a total goof."
Turning scientific once more, he goes on to explain how the kites' sails are given rigid support from the numerous flexible yet stiff strips, called spars, affixed to their backs. Spars can be made from bamboo, rattan or other strong but flexible woods, but Miller tends to use fiberglass. He flips through more pictures of his kites, showing participants stepping around the huge sails, affixing the spars in a multi-square windowpane pattern.
The strings that come off the front of the kite are called bridles. Whereas your basic batwing or diamond-shaped kite has one, maybe two lines, the bigger kites have around 40 bridles, made of 200-pound strength fishing line, Miller says. He stops on an image of a kite he built at one of the Long Beach workshops.
"There are two miles of bridles on that kite," he points out.
A festival he's attended and taught workshops at in Italy, he says, is the farthest he's traveled in the name of kites. He pulls up an image. It's a huge rectangular Shirone he built—with the workshop group's help, of course—for the Italian festival.
The entire sail, 25 feet wide by a whopping 40 feet tall, is filled with a gigantic head. Flames dance from the forehead, out of which horns protrude on either side. A horn-shaped object takes the place of a human ear and one eye is cut out, replaced by a window shade of some sort. The other eye is half-closed, looking demonic or dazed. The nose, a dripping faucet, empties into the green pool of a mouth.
"It's Clive Barker-inspired," Miller explains, referring to the horror author and artist with a cult following. "As you can see, we've employed some pretty ridiculous modern art symbolism here. It's really over the top."
Some 50,000 visitors pass through the Italian event each day, observing the work of 125 invited flyers. In addition to kites, people fly "inflatables," huge, colorful blimp-like objects not unlike the balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.
The festival also features "wind gardens," areas where objects anchored to the ground float or sway in the breeze. One entry shows plastic, bag-like objects shaped like geese on short metal wires stuck in the ground. Another image shows a plot of dozens upon dozens of jewel-toned pinwheels. His son's favorite that year, Miller notes, was a display of black and white X-ray films on metal wires. Miller's face takes on a whimsical expression as he describes the trail of X-rays, arranged in a spiral path as if leading to some mysterious destination, gently wafting and bobbing in the breeze.
"The whole event is a total celebration of wind," he says happily. "It's also 10 days in Venice, and I get to fly every day."
The Drachen Foundation archives a good number of Miller's sails. He's also saved a few over the years. OK, more than a few.
"I've got, I don't know, some 400 to 500 in my garage," he confesses, then adds, "There are actually quite a few of them that I haven't even seen in, probably, 10 years."
And while Drachen saves some kites for posterity and educational purposes, and Miller's got his cache of memories as well, the kites are really only intended to last for one day, the day of their creation and flight.
"It may sound funny but, for me, it's not about the kite. It's about the process. It's that group process," Miller says. He gazes off into a corner of the room, his mind casting back to the workshop experience. "Together, we design, decorate and build that kite," he continues. "And then we fly it together. It's our kite. And once it flies, that's it. We've done it."
Miller says he especially loves the temporal quality of paper kites. Though the kites he builds for Drachen workshops are more substantial, thanks to the Tyvek cloth, he loves the tradition and impermanence of paper kite-making.
In fact, Drachen is sending him to Guatemala this year for a Nov. 1 "All Souls Celebration." Miller will teach a workshop in which the participants will make and decorate traditional tissue-paper kites in honor of their departed loved ones. The impermanence of the kites is a good metaphor for life, he says. The rising of kites in the wind could perhaps be seen as symbolic for the rising of departing souls.
Right here in Silver City, the kite tradition is strong and noteworthy—but not necessarily because of New Mexico's high seasonal winds, Miller says. In fact, almost in spite of them!
"Oh, it's hard to fly in our spring winds," he says with a laugh. "They're strong, and you could think, 'Oh, great kite flying weather!' But it's gusty. They'll rip a kite apart! And they'll change on you, just like that."
Miller says when he flies kites, especially here at home, he takes out several different kinds—some made for high winds, some for low—so he's prepared for whatever Old Man Wind throws his way.
But changeable winds aren't usually enough to dissuade avid kite flyers from their passion. In fact, the American Kitefliers Association (AKA) was founded by (now deceased) Silver City resident Bob Ingraham in 1964. The group, now headquartered in Walla Walla, Wash., bills itself as the largest association of "kiters" in the world, with more than 4,000 members in 35 countries.
Celebrating those New Mexico gusts, and looking to spread the love of kites and flying, Miller and Anthony Howell, another Silver City resident, started up an annual kite flying event right here at home.
"Anthony and I did that first back in the 1990s," Miller says. "It went on for a number of years, it had its ebbs and flows, and then it kind of died down."
But, like a changeable gust of New Mexico wind, a kite flying event will swoop back into Silver City this month, just in time to take advantage of the breezes and celebrate National Kite Month.
Kendra Milligan, assistant coordinator at the Grant County Health Council, says the two-day weekend event, April 28-29, which coincides with the National Week of the Young Child, will involve both building and flying kites, along with family picnics and outdoor fun. The council's first such kite festival was last year, also in April.
"It's such a natural thing. We have this wind, and it's better to celebrate it than complain about it, after all," Milligan says with a laugh. The event is part of the council's "Four Seasons of Fun" program. "The goal is to have something fun for families to do together each season of the year," she explains. "We already have the Red Hot Children's Fiesta in late summer to early fall, and there are other things coming into the picture. But what better thing to do in spring than fly kites?"
Having a kite tradition in Silver City, she notes, with Ingraham's founding of the AKA and world-renowned Rick Miller living right in town, seemed a natural.
"But then we realized that a lot of kids here don't have kites," she says, "so we thought about finding someone to do a workshop with them so they could build their own for free."
Enter Rick Miller.
"I can't believe our good fortune to have him here," Milligan says of Miller. "He's a world-renowned kite builder, you know." Far different from Miller's Drachen-sponsored international workshops, the Health Council's 2006 program allowed children to build and decorate simple kites one day, then fly them the next.
Milligan says that days after last year's workshop and kite flying day, she was driving through a Silver City neighborhood and saw a father flying a kite with his young son.
"I knew right away that it was one of the kites from the workshop. I could tell because it was hand decorated," she recalls. "There they were, a father and son, flying this kite. And that was when I knew we had been successful, because they were doing it together. I just started crying right there!"
Miller says he's seen other examples of kites serving a larger purpose. There's a village in Japan, he says, that times its kite festival to coincide with the May winds.
"It's the beginning of the irrigation season, and people come out to the dikes with their six-sided Rokkaku fighting kites," he says. In a Rokkaku battle, flyers deliberately tangle with an opponent's kite, the object being to pull, knock, or cut it from the sky.
"It turns into a sort of tug-of-war," Miller explains. "People are on opposing sides, each side on top of the dikes with the water below them. Each flyer is trying to get a piece of the other guy's kite."
The contest goes on for hours, he says. But for all the "fighting," the battle is a coming together, too.
"The whole time they are playing tug-of-war with the kites, they are also tamping down the dirt of the dikes, providing necessary maintenance for their irrigation system," he explains. A wistful smile comes over his face.
"They've come together as neighbors, across social lines, doing something together that benefits all of them. It's a fight, but they're doing something for their common good," Miller says. "The kites provide tradition, and just a fun way to get something done that needs to be done."
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure.