The Wright Brothers’ field isn’t located in Kitty Hawk proper but in a neighboring North Carolina community called Kill Devil in Dare County not far from Nags Head.  The names conjure a landscape that is not a warm, bountiful refuge but a place to move away from.  The brothers relocated here, to the outer banks, from Dayton because the climate and wind speeds are optimal for test flights.  There is a flatness and lowness to the landscape, and a softness to the light too, that opens the landscape dramatically to the sky.

The brothers were bicycle repairmen, so their first machines look like bicycles with wings.  Their first motorized machines look like steampunk superhero fins strapped to a pilot.  The machine used to complete the first powered flight in 1903, a replica of which is on display at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, seems implausibly bulky, a structure arrived at after countless rounds of trial and error.  It’s the Wright Brothers’ earlier, unmanned test gliders, which in photographs appear as light as figures on a page, that capture most clearly the dream of moving away.

I have all the typical preconceptions about other parts of our country that a northener has.  Moving south by car, through Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas, I tried to pinpoint the moment when I knew I had entered The South.  Was it when I saw a recliner sitting in a family’s front yard?  A horse farm bound by a split rail fence?  A roadside stand selling boiled peanuts?

Somewhere in Delaware a new, more open landscape emerged.  And in every field there was a crop sprinkler, one of the long, low irrigation contraptions that roll and pivot to cover the ground.  When seen in motion, in action and up close these devices look like, well, sprinklers.  But when seen from a distance, at rest, spanning the width of a field, they have a delicate, spectral presence.  They’re terribly pragmatic things, but the gentle curve in their arms gives them the grace of flying machines.