Surely, the effortless hovering of giant gray gulls on the ocean breezes inspired two children while they played among the waves and sea oats. "How do they do that?" Orville pondered. "See how they hang there Wilbur; no strings, no flapping and so very free." An inspired spark, a dream and their genius minds hastened into one of mans' most incredible leaps into the inventor's world. Winds howled relentlessly and whipped the sandy dunes viciously along the Outer Banks of the North Carolina coast that fateful December day nearly a century ago as two brothers stood, battered in body, but never in spirit, and faced the insurmountable task before them. . . flight. Barely the weight of a man and naught but forty-foot wings of woven canvas, glue and nail, bent pine and rigging was what the two men staked so much on. This, and a faith beyond that of many dreamers, that one day they would fly. The first attempt of the day flew barely off the ground for a hundred feet or so; the second, for barely three hundred. Finally, with the failures and faults of the past attempts as their teachers, their first successful motorized flight lumbered some eight hundred feet before it touched down in a graceless albatross style. They had flown; with wings of men on the winds of god.

Flying machine theory spans centuries prior to the famed Wright brothers and their contemporaries in Europe. Few had more than intricate sketches of contraptions better suited for fantasy than flight. How nature did inspire them so completely, while an inner need to be free pulled at their souls. How genius, so ahead of their times, endured continuous failures with fire in their hearts and reached the goals they set. It shamed me when I realized I cannot keep even a simple new year's resolution to read a new book a month.

The pleasure (and breathless pain of screaming lungs) of scaling the memorial hill commemorating Orville and Wilbur Wright was part of my recent honeymoon. It was an amazing tribute to these two courageous men who hung tenaciously to a dream that seemed nearly blasphemous. The replicas of pieced canvas and wood to which these two men entrusted their lives to was a demonstration of incredible faith or sheer folly. I am sure there were those who swore by one side of the fence as well as the other. I was awe inspired as I entered the first "hangar", a wooden shed no larger than most of our two-car garages and imagined that here they built one of the first flying machines. Not just gliders, but an actual powered machine that would travel with a single man on board. The thrill of a flight less than a mile fueled the dream. My, how things have progressed beyond their imaginings.

Every two years, the air show comes to our sleepy East coast town and its spectacular fanfare stirs our overworked minds just a bit. My appreciation of the concept of flight was compounded by the visit to Kitty Hawk, N.C. just weeks before attending the show. Here, I strolled among fighter jets, helicopters, and prop planes that would have made Orville's eyes pop out. Mammoth machines of steel and engines of power beyond anything Wilbur could have ever conceived. Indeed, I had to wonder myself how some of these huge steely "birds" could ever hope to take off from the tarmac empty, much less loaded with tanks, jeeps and all the complimentary crew required to navigate them. I sat, eyes transfixed on the cloudless sky, as glints and flashes of winged light blazed across the blue expanse leaving trails of smoke that marked their unbelievable paths. Engines whined and roared as cannon-like reports resounded and permeated the crowd as the sound barrier was broken time and again by jets that threw G-force science to the wind. The methodical chop, chop, chop of helicopters as they defied gravity, hovered in mid air while they demonstrated rescue and battle tactics. Little boys in forty-year-old bodies launched rockets far more detailed than anything I had done as a child and the Golden Knights jumped out of a not-so-perfectly-good aircraft and drifted like autumn leaves to their targets below. Trackless roller coaster rides in formation set each of us free, even if it were just for a moment, and barn storming bi-planes ignited every child's heart with dreams of becoming a pilot.

In 2003 the world will celebrate 100 years of flight. Men have skimmed the heavens, flown around the world in hours, been launched into space and built machines of incredible speed and menacing power that have served us with a simplistic purpose; to set us free, keep us free, and allow young minds to dream free. I doubt that Orville and Wilbur realized what horrific beauty they unleashed on that sand dune back in 1903. All they wanted to do was soar.

Gail Boysen-Preset has made a bid for the new Boeing Headquarters to be put in her new front yard in Florida. She claims that Denver, Chicago and Dallas aren't as wild about aviation as she is, and that she would bring CEO Phil Condit Krispy Kreme donuts every Monday.