As we find ourselves in the Covid Age searching for distractions
ranging from binge watching, baking and making babies, I would like to suggest a
reading option, Erik Kaye’s Eagles In The Flesh.

Published in 2012, the book is, as the sub-title has it, based on a true story,
that of Colorado’s legendary, and infamous hang gliding Green Team of the late
nineteen eighties and nineties. While not a literal retelling of the Green
Team’s adventures and misadventures, it is close enough in its broad outlines,
and perhaps closer in its evocation of a time when sex was safe and hang gliding
dangerous. Truth be told, hang gliding is still dangerous as hell, but in the
past it was that much more so, and Erik’s book evokes well the spirit of a team
whose motto was Fly or Die.

The novel is narrated by Erik in his capacity as an early member of the
pseudonymous Gang Green led by the team’s founder CG. The novel progresses in
episodic fashion, revolving around Erik’s personal adventures and those of the
Team’s two principal members, CG, a ‘results oriented” Colorado businessman who
is subsidizing the Gang, and their mutual best friend DogZ, an excellent,
somewhat mystical, part Cherokee pilot with a taste for recreational
pharmaceuticals. The book proceeds by telling a series of aerial and terrestrial
tales that begin dramatically during a mid-eighties Rocky Mountain Regional
Championship flown from Willow Creek in Gunnison, Colorado. There Erik and CG
find themselves being sucked into a springtime cunim from which only one of them
succeeds in flying free. In the end no one dies, but before the chapter
concludes we read of the sport’s most brutal radio transmission, “Shut up and
die like a man”. And that did truly happen.

Succeeding chapters take us across the United States to California, Telluride,
CO, back to Tennessee’s Sequatchie Valley, and overseas to Brazil and Australia.
Along the way, a Telluride mountain is set afire during aerial battles using
pop-flares, a pilot racing into goal in insane weather conditions finds himself
descending under canopy in 40mph winds attached only to the kingpost of his
exploded glider, narcotics are procured and consumed in bulk, post-Soviet pilots
are carried on shoulders on a redneck California dance floor precipitating a
drunken bar fight involving a knife, and other minor adventures. There is
limited gunfire, and only one fatality.

Erik’s narration is a breathless, adrenalized rush of colorful language that
evokes a time before political correctness. Gang Green was not composed of
saints, and many other pilots found them obnoxious louts, but they had a helluva
lot of fun along the way. Confined to our homes as many of us are, reading a
spirited account of their passionate mischief is a wonderful alternative to
watching another damn Netflix movie.

https://www.amazon.com/Eagles-flesh-wild-gliding-adventure/dp/0615674151