John Theoret loves playing “chess with the sky”
Photograph by: KarenKellerPhotography
John Theoret has arranged his entire life around – in his words – “playing chess with the sky.”
The Prince Albert hangglider pilot possesses a single-minded obsession for riding thermals and probing the firmament. He hit 14,500 feet while winning the recent Canadian Open championship in Golden, B.C., an impressive number when you consider his fear of heights. Put him on his roof, and his stomach turns flip-flops.
Put him on that roof with a hang glider, and he feels much, much better.
“I’m probably the most active and gung-ho pilot in
Saskatchewan,” says the 56-year-old Theoret, and after hearing his tale you don’t doubt that assertion one bit.
It all started with a voice in his head that told him, as he painted a fuel island one day for his employer, that he needed to learn to hang glide.
“It’s like a lightning bolt struck out of the blue,” says Theoret, who believes the voice stems from the example set by his father, who as a youth fashioned a hang glider out of poplar limbs and burlap and hurled himself off the family barn in Bellevue.
So in 1980, Theoret started hang gliding. He’s never stopped. Everything in his life revolves around hang gliding – he even got a job on the oilpatch so he can work in bursts, make some money, then head back on the road in search of thermals and jumping points.
The only injury in 34 years of hang gliding, says Theoret, is one broken arm. That’s a better safety record than people he knows who play hockey or football.
“It’s the attitude of the person participating (in hang gliding),” Theoret said. “If they’ve got a cowboy, don’tcare-what-happens attitude, then it’s like anything. If you walk across the street with that attitude, you’re going to get run over one day.”
Theoret talks rhapsodically about the miracle of self-powered flight, of connecting with nature during his lengthy periods aloft. He used to fly ultra-lights and airplanes, but he says he sold it all because it felt after a while like driving a car.
“When you fly a hang glider,” Theoret says, “you get that personal relationship with flight. You have to be in tune with the day and with
Mother Nature if you want to stay up. It connects you to Mother Nature in a way powered aircraft can’t.”
Theoret’s flown as far as 98 miles, and he says his goal is to hit 100 this year. He has spent as long as 6 1/2 hours in the air in a single shot.
He spends his airtime dancing with thermals, selecting and riding them up, exiting for a while, then finding another one when he needs to move higher.
It’s a game of calculation and observance, always trying to stay two steps ahead. Sometimes, Theoret has company. “Eagles,” he says. “Hawks. They’ll come right up close and really check you out. It makes you feel like you’re one of them. They’re not afraid of you; I don’t have a motor. They’ll come off the wing tip and you can see them raising their head over their wings, and under their wings, trying to figure out what you are.”
Theoret hasn’t flown in Saskatchewan for a few years, choosing instead to hit mountainous spots like B.C., Alberta and – earlier this year – Mexico, where he hang glided for three months.
But he plans to get his winch going again and hit the prairie skies, using a half-ton and 8,000 feet of line to get him up.
He wants to see how high and how far he can go. There’s plenty of space up there and he wants to fill it as much as he can.
In February, Theoret plans to fly at the world championship in Mexico.
He looks around him and can’t figure out why more people aren’t seized by the sport.
He wonders if it has something to do with society’s growing need for instant gratification, for the quick fix.
“Hang gliding,” he says, “doesn’t come fast. It takes dedication, it takes time, and the training process is maybe a lot slower than people want to commit to.”
Time to soar But what a wonderful time to be alive, he adds – a time when he can jump off a mountain and soar.
“Mankind has been wanting to fly with the birds since the beginning of time, and we’re finally the generation that’s realizing that dream,” Theoret said.
“We are that generation. I can carry my aircraft in my arms and you can’t do that with a Cessna 150. I can lift my aircraft, put it on my shoulder and walk around with it – it weighs, like, 70 pounds.
“Technology has brought us to this point and we can share that relationship with Mother Nature for hours. It fulfils something in me that’s hard to explain.”
kmitchell @thestarphoenix.com
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