Watch worries disappear at the end of a kite string
When John Chilese's friends tell him to go fly a kite, he's more than happy to comply. Four or five days a week, the semiretired satellite design consultant can be found beneath a vertical string at Patriot Park in northwest Las Vegas, Paul Oakenfold on the iPod.
"My wife got me started about eight years ago," says Chilese, 59. "She told me I needed a way to relax."
He describes kiting as a Zen experience: "If I get a little upset at something during the day, I'll go out in the afternoon and I'm usually calmer after I've flown for a while."
Pre-monsoonal winds, mostly from the southwest, make kiting conditions ideal right now.
"Winds in the spring are typically a bit stronger than other times in the year," explains Faith Borden, meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Las Vegas.
There are windier cities, of course -- the Windy City being the most obvious. But Las Vegas' isolation makes it friendlier than Chicago and most other locales.
"Buildings and power lines are bad," says Chilese. "But you can set up pretty much anywhere here, or you can drive a couple of minutes and find an open space."
On most Friday evenings, about a dozen kiters gather in front of Sam Boyd Stadium, performing tricks with names such as Fruit Roll-Ups, Coin Tosses and Lazy Susans. (Lake Mead and Sunset Park also are popular kiting spots, although with no regularly scheduled gatherings.) No less than three valley stores support this addiction. About 60 kites fly out of A Wind of Change each week -- although half are mail and Internet orders headed elsewhere -- while Flights of Fancy at MonteLago Village reports weekly sales of about a dozen. (WindPower Sports would not provide a figure.) Kites cost from $10 for a single-line nylon no-name, to $2,300 for a quad-line Ozone surf model. Chilese favors his $300 Mojo, a two-line sport kite manufactured by a North Carolina company called Blue Moon. But 200 other choices populate his bedroom closet. (Folded up, they occupy 6 square feet.) The valley's most extreme kite enthusiasts gather -- as many as 20 at a time -- on weekend afternoons at Ivanpah Dry Lake near Primm. Silently, they race in buggies powered by foil kites that drag them as fast as 30 mph.
"We like to play outdoors, and we like to play with natural forces rather than motors," says Corey Jensen, 58, proprietor of WindPower Sports and a buggeying enthusiast who relocated from Monterey, Calif., in 2001 specifically to land surf.
"The wind is free," Jensen says, "and it's in a large sense reliable -- although in a particular sense, it's totally outside your control. And that's really nice, because we live in a man-made constructed world, that isn't real at all, and it's nice to get that reminder and go play with nature."
Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0456.
Spring into Action
