Making themselves reasonably comfortable when not working took considerable time and effort. They had moved from the Tate home to Wilbur’s good-sized tent with room enough for tools, supplies, and themselves. All was very different from back home, as Orville described for Katharine:
The site of our tent was formerly a fertile valley, cultivated by some ancient Kitty Hawker. Now only a few rotten limbs, the topmost branches of trees that then grew in this valley, protrude from the sand. The sea has washed and the wind blown millions and millions of loads of sand up in heaps along the coast, completely covering houses and forest.
Except for an occasional meal with the Tates, they got by on their own rations and their own cooking. The water around teemed with fish—“you see dozens of them whenever you look down into the water”—and Kitty Hawk fishermen shipped tons of fish to Baltimore and other cities. But the only way the brothers could get fish was to catch it themselves. “It’s just like in the north,” Orville explained, “where our carpenters never have their houses completed, nor the painters their houses painted, the fisherman never has any fish.”
Their self-reliance was put to the test. They lived mainly on local eggs, tomatoes, and hot biscuits, though these had to be made without milk, so “pitiable” were the local cows. The only things that thrived on the Outer Banks, Orville decided, were bedbugs, mosquitoes, and wood ticks. Wilbur longed especially for butter and coffee, corn bread and bacon.
On the other hand the scene from the tent door—the scene from almost any point—was spectacular, with great stretches of water and sand dunes and beach and a tremendous sky overhead, with cumulus clouds rising like castles, thrilling to behold against the blue. Long flat horizons reached far in the distance in every direction.
And then there was the wind, always the wind. It was not just that it blew nearly all the time, it was the same force that had sculpted the sand hills and great dunes of Kitty Hawk that shaped and kept shaping the whole surrounding landscape.
Far from home, on their own in a way they had never been, the brothers seemed to sense as they never had the adventure of life. Orville would later say that even with all the adversities they had to face, it was the happiest time they had ever known.
Birds on the wing, birds of every kind by the hundreds, filled the air—eagles, snow-white gannets, hawks, pigeons, turkey vultures, or buzzards as they were known on the Outer Banks, with wing spans of as much as six feet. Wilbur devoted hours to studying their movements in the wind, filling pages of his notebook, sometimes adding small drawings. The reality of what birds could do—the miracle of birds—remained a subject of continuing importance and fascination, and birdlife on the Outer Banks was beyond anything they had ever imagined, recalling lines from Mouillard’s Empire of the Air.
The vulture’s needs are few, and his strength is moderate. And so what does he know? He knows how to rise, how to float aloft, to sweep the field with keen vision, to sail upon the wind without effort . . . he sails and spends no force, he never hurries, he uses the wind.
But how did the soaring bird use the wind, and wind only, to sail aloft and bank and turn as it wished? Buzzards were masters of the art.
The dihedral angle, a shallow V-shape, of the wings was an advantage only in still air, Wilbur wrote in his notebook.
The buzzard which uses the dihedral angle finds greater difficulty to maintain equilibrium in strong winds than eagles and hawks which hold their wings level
The hen hawk can rise faster than the buzzard and its motion is steadier. It displays less effort in maintaining its balance.
Hawks are better soarers than buzzards but more often resort to flapping because they wish greater speed.
A damp day is favorable for soaring unless there is a high wind.
No bird soars in a calm.
“All soarers, but especially the buzzard, seem to keep their fore-and-aft balance more by shifting the center of resistance than by shifting the center of lift,” Wilbur wrote.
If a buzzard be soaring to leeward of the observer, at a distance of a thousand feet . . . the cross section of its wings will be a mere line when the bird is moving from the observer but when it moves toward him the wings appear broad. This would indicate that its wings are always inclined upward, which seems contrary to reason.
A bird when soaring does not seem to alternately rise and fall as some observers thought. Any rising or falling is irregular and seems to be disturbances of fore-and-aft equilibrium produced by gusts. In light winds the birds seem to rise constantly without any downward turns.