YACK on: Kites
Grant

Sanders

Kiteboarding is a sport where a person straps a small surfboard onto their feet and attaches themselves to a massive kite. Okay, it’s not so much a kite as it is a kind of wing, but they call it a kite, so who am I to argue?

Said kite is quite large. Maybe eight feet wide and shaped like a giant brightly colored reinforced nylon toenail clipping. It has a fat, rounded leading edge and a thin trailing edge, just like the wings on an airplane. This means when the kite itself is facing into the wind, and the wind is moving relatively briskly, there is significant lift. Under certain conditions, there is enough lift to raise a large man several feet off the ground. It’s a marvel of engineering, really.

When I was a kid, my two brothers and I used to build our own kites out of dowels and old bed sheets. We used to lash the pine dowels together with polyester thread covered with Elmer’s glue for strength (I believe that in doing so, we inadvertently invented composite materials). We would test various types of monofilament to use as kite string. We made all kinds of kites — box kites and bat wing kites and traditional diamond-shaped kites with tails that featured bows made out of old rags and t-shirts. We even made a couple secret experimental kites, the designs for which I’m certain the Air Force stole when they built the stealth bomber. We were cutting edge, man.

Still, had I ever suggested to my younger brother Mitchell, who now holds a PhD., and is really, really smart, that we should make a kite shaped like a giant toenail clipping, he would have looked at me funny. And had I told my brother Malcolm, who is today an anesthesiologist, that I was thinking of launching a giant toenail clipping onto the sky, he would have pounded me unconscious with his big, meaty fists (thankfully, these days he uses anesthesia to accomplish this task), and then he would have stolen my favorite comic books. Just for being a weirdo.

Happily, being a weirdo is not a crime. In fact, I have been able to make a pretty good living at it. Although something as utterly weird as the idea of riding around the harbor with a board strapped to my feet and a massive toenail clipping above my head never even dawned on me until just recently when I started to look into kiteboarding.

One of the things that I have learned was that kiteboarding is largely responsible for George Bush receiving enough votes to get into the White House in 2004. As you may recall last year, every time someone in the Republican Party wanted to get a solid jab in at the presidential challenger and junior senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, they only needed to mention that he liked to kiteboard on Nantucket Harbor, as if that was some kind of terrible crime against humanity. Call me crazy, but if you were to ask me who would make a better president, a guy with a giant nylon toenail clipping over his head, or a guy who lied about weapons of mass destruction, or invaded Iraq when he knew there were terrorists on the loose in Afghanistan, I’d say, “tell me more about this toenail clipping guy.” But that’s just me.

Perhaps this disdain for kiteboarding, fueled largely by Karl Rove’s irrational need to demonize the six-year-old sport, is what has caused the whole situation to go sour recently over at Pocomo. Maybe, subconsciously, Lawrence Mannix, the man at the center of the kiteboarding controversy, has been brainwashed, just like millions of normally fair-minded citizens, to hate kiteboarding.

And that’s why the Pocomo property owner is threatening legal action if the town does not ban the sport in front of his house.

This kind of thing saddens me. For one, I feel bad for the guys who love to kiteboard. Here are a bunch of fellow weirdoes, feeding their adrenalin habits in a healthy way, not hurting a soul, and now they have to hire lawyers and go to public hearings where they have to fight for their right to strap on the old toenail clipping, get wet and fly through the air.

Second, I see this situation as just another example of the death of being neighborly on Nantucket. I hear there was a time when rich folks and regular folks would all stand in line at the supermarket together, or hang out at the local drinking establishment together, or lie around on the same beach together. It didn’t matter how much money you had. But now it seems like the neighbors with the biggest piles of cash feel it’s their right to tell the neighbors with smaller piles of cash what to do and when to do it. It’s all about who can hire the best lawyers and make the biggest stink. There’s a nasty air of entitlement to it all.

And it’s not like I don’t see Mr. Mannix’s point. If I had sunk $15 million into a nice house overlooking the harbor, the last thing I would want to see through my giant HDCapproved windows would be brightly colored toenail clippings crisscrossing the skies all day. How relaxing is that?

I also feel bad for my pals on the Board of Selectmen. Here they are trying — nobly and valiantly, I might add — to breathe life into the One Big Beach program (an idea through which one previous BOS member had all but driven a giant stake) and if Mr. Mannix gets mad and fences off his beach claiming that the town did nothing to get rid of the "riff-raff" kiteboarders, this will set a bad precedent for the new One Big Beach. On the other hand, Mr. Mannix is a seasonal resident, and most of the kiteboarders are local guys who live here year-round. (Voters.) So what do you do if you’re the BOS? Tick off Mr. Mannix and send a message to other beachfront property owners that the town is not willing to deal? Or go against a small minority of voters who happen to have mounting support in the community?

I think a recent Supreme Court verdict has provided the answer. Under the 5-to-4 ruling, it is now perfectly legal for the town to take Mr. Mannix’s property by eminent domain, and give the land to a private organization as long as it’s “for the greater good.” And what could be greater or more good than giving the loveable kiteboarding weirdoes a larger, even more safe stretch of beach from which to fling themselves high into the air?

Best of all, Mr. Mannix will be duly compensated for his property and he will then have enough cash to buy a nice place on the water on a different part of the island. Or, maybe on a different island altogether. And, hopefully, someplace that is free from those giant airborne toenail clippings that haunt him so.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community where weirdoes are always welcome. Check it out at www.yackon.com

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