The Flight of The Millibar Messenger -- cont.

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Outside Magazine June 2001

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The Flight of The Millibar Messenger -- cont.

TO SPEND TIME WITH Richard Synergy is to understand that his preoccupation with science exceeds garden-variety geekdom. Here is a man so enamored of science, so swept away by the old-fashioned romance of it all, that he actually changed his last name to Synergy from Accetta. He stutters when he talks about wind shear. He has addressed an American Kitefliers Association conference dressed as a woman—his way of dramatizing the principles of lift and drag.

In short, Synergy has an idiosyncratic streak that over the years has either derailed him or saved him, depending on your point of view. From 1956 to 1960 he served as a "mineman" in the U.S. Navy, learning a little bit about explosives and electronic circuitry. After the navy he attended Duquesne University in Pittsburgh where he was, by his own account, a brilliant physics student. However, he dropped out before getting his degree and moved to Canada in 1963 to hunt and fish. For the next 18 years he bummed around, doing everything from spending 120 days a year in a canoe as a summer-camp guide to working with emotionally troubled families at the Browndale Clinic, a residential treatment facility outside Toronto. In 1981, he landed a job as a lab technician researching fuel-cell technology at the University of Toronto. But by 1984, when the university scaled back funding on the research and Synergy lost his job, he'd soured on the tech world. Rather than look for another buttoned-down nine-to-five lab position, he left the straight life behind for a monkish existence devoted to the study of kites.

He explains his odd detour this way: Great scientific minds must nurture their genius away from the inhibiting, hidebound establishments that dole out tenure and government grants; to search for their breakthroughs, they must be free. Thus, by the early 1990s, Synergy had embarked on his solitary and penurious struggle to surpass the world kite-flying altitude record of 12,471 feet, which had stood unchallenged since it was set by Henry Helm Clayton and A. E. Sweetland at the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1896. He arranged his life around this pursuit, working a series of jobs—messenger, news photographer, computer programmer, movie-set carpenter—that allow him to skip out with a favorable wind.

If you want to fly kites high, really high, the town of Kincardine, northwest of Toronto, is the place to do it. During World War II, a zone of uncontrolled airspace was established over this stretch of Lake Huron shoreland as a practice area for the Royal Canadian Air Force. For reasons that remain obscure, aviation officials never changed the designation. This means that planes that fly over it are not subject to air traffic control. So, as long as he secures permission from the Canadian aviation authority, Synergy is free to loft his kites into "winds as smooth as combed hair," as he says. He has made the three-hour drive from his home in Toronto 30 times over the last decade to launch kites to mind-boggling heights. After each flight, he retreats to his garret to fiddle for months with coils and spars salvaged from surplus stores. It sounds lonely and hard, but Synergy is, in many ways, an artist, and the life of a dedicated artist is, after all, lonely and hard. "This way, I'm in control," he says. "No politician can pull the plug. If I stumble across something of world importance, I decide what happens to it, not some university."

For Synergy, the altitude record is just a stepping-stone. He dreams of the day when miniature, kite-borne laboratories will hover in the middle altitudes of the troposphere, collecting real-time data (on climate change, traffic patterns, insect migration). According to his master plan, once he breaks the world record he'll parlay the credibility and media exposure into wildly ambitious new projects already taking shape on the graph paper taped to his bedroom walls. Memo to self: Manipulate gravity; liquefy rock; accelerate electricity; harness the earth's electrostatic field. Et cetera. Synergy, thoroughly vindicated and handsomely rewarded by patents for his kite designs, will magnanimously invest his profits in a sanctuary for outsider thinkers like himself. "There are a lot of young geniuses out there who never get to test their crazy theories because they're oddballs like me," he says. "They don't fit in. Like Nikola Tesla, who created the common water fountain and the speedometer. I want to create a foundation where people like them are not burdened by convention."

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