Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit


July 29 [Cloud-Rope]

July 29

Me and Meghan had kind of a rushed morning, 'cause as soon as I woke up I could feel the incoming storm in the air. I got out of bed and checked my portable telephone, and I hadn't gotten a call from Mel yet, so they weren't right on top of us, but I knew that they were going to be.

Meghan got out of bed right after I did—I guess she doesn't like sleeping past her alarm as much when I'm not in bed with her—and she looked at her telephone and then showed me a picture of Michigan with stormclouds off to the west, but they were still a ways out so we had some time at least.

She looked at it again while I was brushing her hair after her shower, and said it was getting closer and just then my portable telephone chirped at me, and it was Mel, who said that he would be at my apartment to pick me up in fifteen minutes.

So I had to send him a message back that I wasn't at my apartment but I was at Meghan's, which was where he'd taken me last night.

Well, we had enough time to eat breakfast, and then I heard Mel's truck come into her driveway, and I kissed her and said that I'd see her tonight.

The thunderclouds were still a little ways off in the distance when we got to our spot, and I had plenty of time to fly up and test the radio.

The first couple that came through weren't anything too dangerous, and I'd been up in the air for almost an hour before things started to get interesting. We'd passed the time by me trying to teach him the names of clouds in Equestrian, and even though it was hard to get the pronunciation right over the radio, I think we both learned some stuff from it. I know it helped me remember what humans called certain cloud formations.

The next storm front led with a heavy downpour, but it tapered off right as it passed, into a moderate rain, and it kept up like that—mostly moderate but occasionally heavy—for the next hour. The lightning rate stayed about the same through most of it. I couldn't tell for sure when it was really heavy, because it was hard to hear and hard to see, so I had to assume that it was keeping to the pattern.

It tapered off to almost nothing and I had a little break before the next set of clouds came over, and I'd had my eye on them because even with the limited vision I had below the cloud deck, this was darker and there was a lot more rain coming out of it.

It was a lot nicer to be watching storms during the day, because I didn't get caught out by sudden gusts or downpours. So I was ready for it when it hit, and for a couple of minutes it was really intense, then it tapered back off to a moderate rainfall.

When it had finally tapered off and I couldn't see any more stormclouds off to the west, I curved around and landed, and when I got in Mel's truck I was surprised to see that it was almost noon. Time flies by really quick when you're doing something.

He dropped me off at my apartment, and I hung up my vest so that it could dry off a little and then took a nice shower and had lunch, then sat out on the balcony so I could preen my wings. The clouds had broken up a little so that there was some sun, although it wasn't enough to get me all the way dry.

After relaxing in the papasan for a little bit, I put all my flight gear back on and put my GoPro on my head so that I would have it with me, and then I took off again, this time heading to the maker's building.

There were more cars in the parking lot than there had been last time, which made me think that they were all busy with something.

When I got inside, there was a group of them clustered around a computer, and I could see that they were either watching a movie or playing a game. I was kind of curious what they were doing, but then Karen called me over and said that she wanted me to try my harness on.

She said that it was kind of like a breastcollar harness, but the normal human style wouldn't work on me because I had to be able to put it on and take it off by myself. So what she'd done that I thought was really clever was make it so that it attached to my camelback straps, and then there was another cross-strap which was held in place by a long velcro strip that kept it all stable and in place.

I could pull the strip tight with my teeth, and then hold it in place with a hoof and it would stick, just like those little burr-balls that stick in your coat. And even if it came unfastened in flight, I wouldn't lose the GoPro, it would just move around more than it should.

Well, they wanted me to test it out, and they also wanted me to test the rope, too, since there were some scattered clouds that were following after the storm.

So I asked the airplane directors for permission, since I was going to have to fly up pretty high to get it. It was the grumpy man, and I had to explain to him twice that I was going to go up and try and get a cloud and then tie it to a tree.

Finally, he said that it was okay, but I needed to keep listening to my radio and be sure not to drift closer to them, which I said I wouldn't—the wind was going the other way anyhow. So I looped the rope around me and then Karen said that I ought to have my GoPro on, because that way we could look at the movie it made and if my harness needed to be adjusted, she could do that.

She attached it to my breastcollar, and I flew up and looked around for a suitable cloud that was drifting away from the airport.

I found one that looked about the right size, and flew up to it and circled it to get a good sense of it, and then I started working the edges in and compacting it down some.

It took me a little while to get it shaped up, especially since I had to keep moving it back against the wind, so I didn't drift off too far. And then came the next tricky part, which was tying a loop in the rope while I was in the air.

I'd learned a fair bit of ropework from sailorponies, and while I'd never be as good at it as they were, I finally got it tied and then I draped the rope over the cloud so that it was about centered, and let the free ends of the rope hang.

I hadn't wanted to tie the knot while I was on the ground, because I knew I'd have to drape the rope and then bring the ends together. In hindsight, though, I could have.

I was glad that I'd gotten lots of rope, because the cloud had a pretty respectable girth.

I took the free end and flew over to the loop-knot, then slipped it through and pulled it tight. And just like that, I had a cloud on a rope.

The other thing I hadn't thought about that I probably should have was how I was going to tow the cloud. I could hold the rope in my teeth and pull the cloud backwards like that, but it wasn’t that easy to fly backwards.

There was a really clever knot that sailorponies used when they were tying up their ships: it was a couple of loops of rope and if you made it right, you could toss it over the end of a piling, and it would pull itself tight and not let go, and I could have done that around a hoof. I didn't, because I knew if a sudden wind came up, the cloud had a lot of sail area, and I'd be going wherever it went, whether I wanted to or not.

So what I did instead was to tie a slip-knot around my hind hoof, and I left the free end of the rope long enough that I could untie it by just pulling with my mouth if I had to.

That made for a really weird flight back, 'cause I had the cloud tugging against one hind leg, and it put me really off-balance, and my tail kept hitting the rope, too.

I don't really think about my tail all that much when I'm flying, but now I couldn't help but think of it every time it hit the rope.

I needed to be careful coming into the parking lot, because the cloud was hard to control, and I knew that if it touched any of the electrical wires around that would be bad, and then I also had to warn everyone not to touch the cloud or the rope.

There was a dead tree next to the parking lot that looked pretty sturdy, so I flew over to it and wrapped the rope around a branch, then unhooked it from my leg and wrapped it more securely around the branch, so it wouldn't go anywhere, and flew up to my cloud and landed on top.

I knocked out a little hollow on the top of the cloud and lay down in that, and that was nice. If I put my head down right on the cloudstuff, the little ridge blocked my view of the ground and I could imagine that I was floating freely in the sky.

The rope felt kind of funny against my belly—it was almost like sitting on a cold piece of metal, but my body heat didn't warm it up at all; it stayed cold. I hadn't noticed that when it was tied to my leg, but then that had been such a strange position to be in that I probably wouldn't have noticed.

It would have been nice to spend the rest of the afternoon up there, but I knew that the people on the ground were probably still watching, and Karen was waiting to find out if my GoPro mount worked, so I got up off my cloud and landed.

Well, they had a lot of questions about the cloud and how it worked and how I could bring it down like that and I couldn't answer all their questions as well as they wanted me to, but there was some stuff that I just know but can't explain. It would be like me asking how to walk on two legs—someone could tell me the principle of it, but I wouldn't know how to do it from that.

They also wanted to know how long the cloud would stay up there and I said that I didn't know and we'd go inside and see how the GoPro worked and then when we came back out we'd find out if the cloud was still there.

So Karen put a cable in my GoPro and got the video on her folding computer, and we all watched it, and she thought it looked pretty good. It wasn't quite a pegasus-eye view, but it was close.

The part where I shaped the cloud didn't come out well at all, 'cause mostly all you could see was the cloud. But everyone was satisfied with the mount, and I said that it hadn't been in the way at all, and then Karen had me take it off and put it back on again, just to show that I could, and we were all satisfied with how it worked.

When we went out into the parking lot, the cloud was still there but it was looking kind of raggedy. I got up on it, and I could feel that it had lost a lot of its moisture while I was inside, 'cause I hadn't been around to keep it under control. It sort of firmed up again under me, but it wasn't the cloud it had been anymore.

So I thought that it would work okay if I was lying on the cloud, but it wasn't going to keep a cloud tethered outside my room for any length of time unless I was holding on to the end of the rope.

I hadn't really thought of a good way to get the cloud back off the rope, either, so I wound up just going up there and breaking it up, which turned into a mini-rainstorm in the parking lot before it was gone. Then I just untied the rope from the tree and picked it up off the ground.

Well, before I left, Conner suggested one more improvement, and that was instead of my loop-knot that I'd made, he tied on a clip called a carabiner which was a clever little aluminum clip that easily snapped over the rope and came off pretty easily, too. There was a spring on it so that it wanted to go closed, and then a separate little security sleeve to make sure that it wouldn't open when you didn't want it to.

I was really happy with what they'd made for me, and I thought that their price was very good. They said that if I thought I needed anything adjusted, to just come back and they'd fix it, and then they helped coil up my rope and put it on my back. That was another thing that the carabiner turned out to be useful for—it clipped onto the strap of my camelback, and held the rope in place.

Meghan was already at my apartment when I got home, and after I got out of my flight gear we went over next door to have barbeque with Jeff. We brought the rest of the beers I had left to share with everyone, and Meghan had brought six of her own also.

When I was telling Meghan about my rope, a couple of neighbors overheard us and after the second time I'd told the same story I was thinking about bringing down another cloud to hang over the party, but with all the wires around I thought maybe it would be too dangerous. What I needed to do was practice over a lake until I got a really good feeling for how the cloud was going to behave, before I tried it somewhere as confined as Jeff's backyard.

I also got to race across the backyard a couple of times carrying Trinity, which was lots of fun for both of us.

Both Meghan and I were a bit tired out by the time we finally left Jeff's barbeque, but not quite tired enough to go to bed, so we sat on the futon and talked and snuggled a little bit—I rested my head on Meghan's lap, and she pet my mane and scratched my back. I burrowed my head under her shirt and kissed her stomach and pressed my head up against her chest and then I got kind of tangled up under her shirt and she thought that was really funny.

We didn't fold down the futon until after, and that was only because we both had to use the bathroom before we fell asleep.