The boys ran over the sand dune. They had walked the four miles from Kitty Hawk to see where the flying fellas had flown their airplane. Someone said that there were airplanes in the old shacks at the foot of the dunes. The wind was blowing, and it was still cold for April. The roof was gone and one wall had collapsed in. They had passed a wing sticking out of the sand, and they figured the plane was somewhere inside. Maybe they could go for a ride.

They had just reached the building when they saw a man walking briskly toward them and they ran off. The man did not look like anyone from the island. He wore a suit with a white shirt and a derby. He had on shiny leather shoes. He had just appeared like a god from another planet. He walked with a purpose, his eyes straight ahead, barely noticing the boys tearing across the dunes. He was already cataloging the damage.

The sand had invaded and claimed the floor and had come crashing through one wall. In a few more years, it would bury the shed and the building where he had lived and broken the code of flight. Wilbur Wright stared at the remnants of Octave Chanute's glider that had crashed from the rafters to the floor. The roof was open, and one wall was down. Even now the sand was blowing into the building. The new building they had built for the 1903 Flyer was simply gone. A nor'easter had carried it off, William Tate had told him upon his arrival.

Wilbur turned slowly. Here is where he had found the secret. Here is where he had been allowed to take to the air. Here he had been supremely happy in his pursuit of a singular dream to fly like the winged creatures of the earth. He had done it, and yet he had lost something that had been there in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This remote outpost, this shelf on the edge of the continent, had given him the moment “to lie motionless between a pair of seventeen-foot wings on a sea-scented updraft,” and now he wanted it back.1

Wilbur turned, stared out the window, and heard the wind whistling through the boards. Sand. Yes, the sands of time would cover it all. He turned and stared out to the dunes, where he saw a skeleton poking out of the sand. He walked outside and struggled over to the small dune. It was the wing of the 1902 flyer. They had flown it one last time and just left it there, and time had buried it until this one bit of wing was the only marker of all that effort. Wilbur touched the rotted fabric, the pine struts that he had cut and bent. This was one of his babies. Of course he would never have children and lately he couldn't escape the feeling that his time was limited. His health had not been good, with the stress of the patent wars and the impending suits with Glenn Curtiss.

Wilbur turned back to the building they had built in 1900. It was small against the giant dunes. A few cans were on the ground. A few boards of better times. The wind. It never stopped. It was always blowing. That's why he came here. This place, this magical outpost in the middle of nowhere, had wind for lift and sand for a soft landing. It had the isolation he craved. The great silence to think into. Like any artist, he needed solitude to create, and he had found it when he had arrived at Kitty Hawk.

He turned again and stared where it had happened. Yes, the first flight had happened in a 25 mph wind five years before. December. It was cold. There was ice on the dunes. Christmas was just eight days away, and it was now or never. If they didn't fly on that day, then who knows what would have happened. He had won the toss, and then it was Orville's turn. Wilbur felt his eyes water. It was 1903.