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.

SYNERGY BOUGHT HIS first serious kites—a pair of two-stringed high-performance stunt fliers—while visiting his sister Alice, a high school vice-principal in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, in 1986. They were beautiful, but he couldn¹t maneuver them; they dive-bombed and circled like manic terriers entangling a leash. "It was frustrating almost to the point of tears," he says.

Enthralled, despite these failures, he sought help from the Toronto Kite Fliers, a kindly group of about 150 enthusiasts who gather by Lake Ontario on weekends. The club became a kind of extended family for Synergy, and the activity absorbed all his restless energy. The first time he performed kite ballet—a repertoire of choreographed maneuvers set to music, in this case a Walkman blasting Dire Straits—he wept for two hours. He later rigged up a harness so the kite would lift him off the ground during the ballet. Once, when the line broke, he fell ten feet and landed hard on his backside. The resulting injury prevented him from walking normally, so for a couple of weeks he walked backward instead.

Eager to master the sport and plumb its principles, Synergy found, much to his chagrin, that even the most elegant fliers had no grasp of kite aeronautics. "They intuitively knew how to do it," he says,"but they couldn't explain it. What they said often didn't make rational sense. I needed to know why they went about it that way. I need to know how things work. I need to excel."

"Richard was clueless and fascinated and he wanted to know everything," remembers Merv Cooper, a kiter who drove Synergy to festivals in the mid-nineties, before he owned a car. "He was obsessed. The more he learned, the more intense he became. A lot of people think he's crazy. But they don't know him. He's a one-man NASA."

Synergy became so engrossed in his subject that he turned 100 pages of personal thoughts on learning how to fly a kite into a book, which he wrote in installments during the 15-minute commute to and from his job at a tulip warehouse. Stunt Kite Basics was published in 1987 and became one of the most successful kite instruction books ever, selling 14,000 copies and, more significantly, making him an autograph-worthy figure in the kite world. Synergy became something of a proselytizer. In 1994 he published a second book, Kiting to Record Altitudes. "Kites are a technology whose time has come again!" he'd announce to anyone willing to listen. Unfortunately, hardly anyone did.

Or does. A month before the Kincardine flight, Synergy was busy buying 100 feet of bungee cord in a Toronto climbing store when the cashier returned his credit card with an apologetic smile. A second card was also rejected. Synergy sheepishly fished from his pocket a suspiciously worn scrap of paper bearing an 800 number. "If you turn it back on," he pleaded with the Visa operator, "I'll spend more money."

In the end, he got his bungee cord, but his credit rating may have been damaged beyond repair. Near-poverty was forcing Synergy to mount his assault on the record books with a heap of jury-rigged tools. So far, he estimated he'd spent almost $70,000 in pursuit of the single-kite altitude record, aided only by about $4,000 worth of donated gear. But the money was almost immaterial. For him, it has always been about the company he wishes to keep—men like Bell and the Blue Hill meteorologists. And so he has spent every spare hour scrounging parts and scouring the Internet for cheap mechanical paraphernalia. "I've been so deprived of time and money," he said, the frustration rising in his voice. "How crudely can you put something together and still make it work?" He'd soon have his answer.

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