For the local citizens the two brothers from Ohio were extremely hard to figure. One named John T. Daniels, known as “John T.” to distinguish him from his father, who was also John Daniels, said later, “We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts. They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, dipping.” Gannets, the giant seabirds with a wingspread of five to six feet, seemed their particular interest.
They would watch the gannets and imitate the movements of their wings with their arms and hands. They could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets; we thought they were crazy, but we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones up and down and which way, just like the gannets.
“Learning the secret of flight from a bird,” Orville would say, “was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.”
For Katharine’s benefit, he wrote also of a “very tame” mockingbird that lived in the one tree overhanging the tent and sang the whole day long. The sunsets, he told her, were the most beautiful he had ever seen, the clouds lighting up in all colors, the stars at night so bright he could read his watch by them.
They were now taking photographs of nearly everything—tent, views, sand, and water, even the mockingbird in the treetop, but primarily the glider in action.
Many nights the wind was such that they had to leap from bed to hold the tent down. “When we crawl out of the tent to fix things, the sand fairly blinds us,” Orville wrote. “It blows across the ground in clouds.” But they could not complain. “We came down here for wind and sand and we have got them.” The night when one of Kitty Hawk’s 45-mile-an-hour storms struck with a sound like thunder, there was no sleep. And the winds were cold. “We each have two blankets, but almost freeze every night,” Orville wrote. “The wind blows in on my head, and I pull the blankets up over my head, when my feet freeze and I reverse the process. I keep this up all night and in the morning am hardly able to tell ‘where I’m at.’?”
Their daily sustenance had reached a new low:
Well, part of the time we eat hot biscuits and eggs and tomatoes; part of the time eggs and part tomatoes. Just now we are out of gasoline and coffee. Therefore no hot drink or bread or crackers. The order sent off Tuesday has been delayed by the winds. Will is “most starved.”
Nonetheless, as Katharine knew, they were having a splendid time, especially because of their work, but also in good measure because of the “Kitty Hawkers,” whose consistent friendliness and desire to be of help, whose stories and ways of looking at life and expressing their opinions, made an enormous difference. The brothers were now hearing, as they had not before, words like “disremember” for “forget” and such expressions as “I’ll not be seeing you tomorrow,” or smooth water described being “slick calm.” “Hoi toide” was “high tide.”
A young Tommy Tate, the sixteen-year-old nephew of Bill Tate, informed Orville at one point that the richest man on Kitty Hawk was “Doc” Cogswell, a “druggist” by profession. Orville inquired how much money Doc had. “Why, his brother owes him fifteen thousand dollars!” Tommy said, as though that settled the question.
Bill Tate’s interest in what the Ohio men were trying to achieve and his eagerness to be of help seemed only to grow. Needing to provide for his family no less than ever, he put in two or three hours a day at his own work in order to give the rest of his time to the brothers.
Others as well had come to see them as more than mere eccentrics. Life on the Outer Banks was harsh. Making ends meet was a constant struggle. Hard workers were greatly admired and in the words of John T. Daniels, the Wrights were “two of the workingest boys” ever seen, “and when they worked, they worked. . . . They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”
By mid-October time was running short. Wilbur had been away from Dayton for nearly six weeks and word had come from Katharine that she had had to fire the young man Orville had left in charge of the bicycle shop in their absence. But the brothers still needed one sustained practice at manned flight.
With the help of Bill Tate, they dragged the glider four miles to Kill Devil Hills, a cluster of three prominent sand dunes that Tate, in his letter of August 18, had rightly described as having “not a tree or bush anywhere.” The three hills, known as Big Hill, Little Hill, and West Hill, had heights of approximately 100 feet, 30 feet, and 60 feet respectively, but were also being constantly changed in height and shape by the winds.
The view from the top of Big Hill was spectacular in all directions. Three quarters of a mile to the east, beyond the beach, was the great sweep of the blue-green Atlantic; to the north stood a series of immense sand hills; to the south, a long fresh pond and dark woods; and to the west, “the view of views,” with Roanoke Island and Roanoke Sound.