LOVE SOARS
ON THE WINGS OF A KITE
THE SALESMAN thought he had them figured out when Lucy Jonkman and Kerry St. Dennis walked into the department store where sewing machines were sold.
“He asked me if I needed help. I said, ‘no, he does,’ ” Jonkman says, pointing to her husband.
St. Dennis was looking for a machine with a special stitch that would allow him to sew the kites that are his passion.
Jonkman wanted a power tool. “I took sewing in school and I never really liked it,” she says. “My father was a carpenter so I like to do woodworking.
“So that one year for Christmas, he got a sewing machine and I got a power tool.” >>
>> Over the winter, Jonkman, 55, and St. Dennis, 52, could be found working side-by-side in two rooms off the kitchen of their Guelph home.
In the dining room, the sewing machine shared space with strong, lightweight ripstop nylon, flying line, scissors and a blower from their outdoor Christmas inflatable decorations that they used to test the kite’s movement. In a corner, a pet rabbit eyed the activity from its cage.
The couple sketched their newest kite design – a three-dimensional bear almost two metres high, with a honey pot. They traced the pattern on the nylon sheet laid out on the floor of a second room and cut out the pieces that they placed in bags under a table.
The couple was making 21 individual kits
for an upcoming kite-making workshop held by the Kitchener-Waterloo Wind Climbers Kite Club. Members toting their own sewing machines will sew the pieces together with their help.
“This used to be our daughter’s playroom,” says Jonkman, fingering the nylon sheet as their 14-year-old daughter, Jessica, just home from school, gives her a hug.
Jessica was a toddler when she surprised everyone by picking up a dual-line kite and flying it. The little girl held on to the handles attached to two lines leading to the triangle-shaped stunt kite as it launched into the sky.
“I grabbed her because of the pull,” Jonkman says. “I hung on to the back of her sweater and that kite was up in the air.”
Jonkman and St. Dennis have led other workshops, including a session in which members made dramatic, closed-end tube tails known as “line laundry,” a term for the multi-coloured tails and streamers and other attachments to a kite’s flying line.
They’ve made a 2.3-metre, threedimensional inflatable chicken that stays aloft when the wind whistles through the chicken’s beak and sides.
They design or re-engineer other designs to fit their ideas.
Their friend, Carlos Simoes, past president of the Wind Climbers club, often works with them. One of the trio’s designs, a seahorse kite, was bought by an American company, Gomberg Kite Productions International, which produces and sells it.
When the couple’s creative juices get going, things can get lively.
“I’ve been in the middle of that and I just laugh,” Simoes says.
“Kerry and Lucy get along so well, but sometimes they can raise their voices while working through the creative process. . . .They don’t realize that they are talking about the same solution but from different angles,” Simoes says.
“We’re both stubborn,” Jonkman says with a laugh.
St. Dennis works two jobs – full-time nights at a Guelph manufacturer of dry-type transformers, and early morning newspaper delivery seven days a week. But there’s always time for kites. Jonkman is happy to sew now. “Clothes have to fit but with kites, you don’t have to be totally precise,” she says.
The couple, described by friends as
>> generous and fun-loving, volunteers their time and skills to make the kits. Workshop participants pay for materials only. They’ve spent months on this bear.
“They made several adjustments to the plan of that kite to get it right before they started cutting out pieces for everybody in the workshop,” Simoes says. Their reward is in the sky.
“The ultimate thing is seeing these creations fly. They get a kick out of it just like I do.”
This is the couple’s hobby – flying kites and making kites – but more importantly, it’s what they love to do together. “It keeps us communicating. It doesn’t matter what type of day we had, we do it together,” St. Dennis says.
Kites have helped them make lifelong friends in the kite-flying community in Canada, the U.S. and even in Europe.
On most summer weekends, St. Dennis, Jonkman and Jessica load up their van and trailer to go to one festival or another. The trailer is packed with any number of skydwellers that they’ve made or purchased already constructed.
There are steerable dual-line kites that flip, zip, dip and stop short of knocking a spectator’s hat off. Some of the kites stack four or eight high on a line in the sky. There are stunning wind-inflated kites, “inflatables,” and “ground bouncers,” a kite that doesn’t fly. It’s a big, round kite anchored to the ground that children like to touch.
The couple is moved by people’s reaction to the big, red-and-white “Canadian Heroes” kite that they designed and made to honour veterans, soldiers and first responders. Veterans and others are invited to sign their names on its long tail before the kite is set loose in the breeze.
They love that spectators will gaze for hours at their huge favourites - a 27-metre octopus kite with streaming tentacles; two blue whale “inflatables” which are 18 metres and nine metres long; and a “monster” kite featuring images of Sylvester and Tweety bird.
You can hardly see the strings that tether the inflatable creatures to a stake in the ground while they fly. (The octopus kite, which flies above the whales, is the “lifter kite.” Attached to the whale’s line, it lifts the whale’s nose so the wind can inflate it.)
The couple enjoys chatting with passersby who are intrigued by the flying sea kingdom.
And when they’re holding a kite, well, just about every kite flyer will tell you it’s almost impossible to describe the feeling to someone else.
“Let’s put a kite in your hand and see how you feel,” St. Dennis says. “It’s the blue skies and wind in the back of your hair.
“It’s one big family. If you go out and fly
a kite by yourself, there will be others who come over.” St. Dennis calls the look on his face, a “perma-grin.”
“It’s calming, very peaceful,” Jonkman says.
Jonkman surprised her husband last year with the gift of the nine-metre nylon blue whale.
It arrived in the mail from New Zealand where it was made.
When the smaller whale inflatable flew with the larger one, they seemed to swallow the sky.
It wasn’t Jonkman’s first surprise gift to St. Dennis.
They met when they were in their 20s, working at a Guelph bowling centre owned by St. Dennis’ parents. St. Dennis was a maintenance mechanic; Jonkman looked after children while their parents bowled. The two barely knew each other. He worked mostly at night; she worked in the day.
One day, a dozen red roses arrived anonymously for St. Dennis on his birthday.
“I said, ‘lucky you. Where did you get those from?’” Jonkman says. He was perplexed and a little embarrassed.
Later, Jonkman and St. Dennis started going to the race track together where he would take photographs of winning cars.
“She asked if she could help me sort pictures,” St. Dennis says. “We’ve been together ever since” - 26 years this year. They said their own vows together, without ceremony, and bought rings.
“A couple of years later, I found out who sent the flowers,” St. Dennis says.
Jonkman, previously divorced, had two little girls, Amanda and Brenda, who are now grown. Their third daughter, Jessica, came along in 2000. They also have five grandchildren.
At the beginning of their relationship, kite-flying wasn’t in the cards.
St. Dennis, who had dropped out of high school, decided to go back and earn his Grade 12 diploma. He worked at night at an appliance manufacturing company and attended continuing education classes during the day. It took four years of hard work, and Jonkman, who did lawn maintenance for a builder, urged him on when he felt like quitting.
When St. Dennis graduated in a ceremony at the University of Guelph, family and friends threw him a party and gave him money to buy a kite.
He’d been bitten by the kite-flying bug the summer before when longtime friend Bill Peart showed him how to fly a two-line stunt kite at a Guelph park.
“He said, ‘hon, you’ve got to try this. We had a blast,’” Jonkman says.
“When he gets into something, he gets
>> into it all the way,” says Peart, who flies kites and goes to kite-making workshops with his wife, Kathy. “This is the longest he has been into anything and I don’t see it ending because kites are ever-changing.”
It meant goodbye fishing – St. Dennis’ passion then - hello blue skies. “If you get the kiting bug, you’re hooked,” Jonkman agrees. They bought a couple of two-line stunt kites and discovered they needed “gale-force winds” to fly a small kite. So he bought three or four bigger kites and experimented with doing figure eights and other tricks.
St. Dennis entered his first dual-line competition in 1996 at the Four Winds Kite Festival at the Kortright Centre near Kleinberg. He came third out of three contestants in his stunt kite category. “I was tickled pink,” he says, laughing.
They joined the kite club in Kitchener and began travelling to kite festivals – in New Brunswick and Quebec and in Michigan where the sky was dotted with kites of every size and description. Some were flying to music, resembling a ballet in the sky.
In 2002, they reignited the Royal City Fun Flyers in Guelph with Peart. But they still loved to travel to see what else the skies had to offer.
“In the U.S., there are huge festivals,” Jonkman says. “There were 100-foot octopuses and other kites that were stacked all together flying upside down and sideways.”
They were inspired by the local and international flyers they met.
“I think meeting the international people really motivated them to start creating their own kites because they saw what the others were doing,” Simoes says. “Europe has always been a hub for creativity.”
At one festival, St. Dennis was impressed with a demonstration field showing off “revolutions” known as “revs,” a four-line kite shaped like a bow tie. He saw the kites hover, dip and speed forward, backward, sideways and upside down. He had to have one.
“You can stop it in mid-air and land it on someone’s shoulder or you can bump someone’s hat off,” St. Dennis says. “There’s a lot of control. I put on headphones and listen to music” like Elton John’s “Sail Me Away.” “I get mesmerized.” The couple became friends with champion kite flyer Lam Hoac who showed St. Dennis how to do seemingly impossible stunts.
The revolution was St. Dennis’ favourite kite; that is until he met Gary Mark, a world-renowned flyer of large show kites. He helped Mark anchor the huge kites to the ground with stakes, like a circus tent. They held on to them while they filled with wind.
It’s no small feat to keep a monster on a leash. “You can burn your hands on the ropes,” he says.
St. Dennis dreamed of owning a huge octopus, but it cost thousands of dollars to buy. But an entrepreneur, whom he’d helped with computer work and building maintenance, overheard him talking about it. (St. Dennis was known as “MacGyver” for his ingenious fix-it skills).
The man, now deceased, surprised him with the huge octopus, created by the well-known New Zealand kite-maker Peter Lynn.
The large inflatables became the couple’s passion. They built big seals to swim in the sky with the octopus and whales.
“You get a lot of reaction from the crowd,” Jonkman says. “They’re all excited about how big they are. It makes you feel so good.”
After attending the funeral of 26-year-old Guelph Const. Jennifer Kovach, St. Dennis and Jonkman wondered how they might honour those who die in the service of others.
Kovach died in 2013 when her cruiser crashed while she was responding to a col-
league’s call for assistance. She had attended school with one of the couple’s daughters.
St. Dennis and Jonkman contacted the Canadian Heroes Foundation, talked to its representatives about their idea, and began planning their “Canadian Heroes” tribute kite.
It took a year to design and make the kite, which has a long tail that people can sign.
“Words can’t describe how proud we are when we fly it,” says Jonkman, whose parents were Dutch and lived in Holland during the Second World War. “They were thankful for the Canadians who saved them,” she says.
The first time the couple flew the big kite, a man, in tears, stopped his car. He was a war veteran. “We pulled the kite down and he was first to sign it,” Jonkman says.
They flew the heroes kite last year in Hamilton after the slaying of reservist Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent.
“The reaction was incredible,” Simoes says.
In May, the couple and Jessica are headed to a fundraiser to help people with posttraumatic stress disorder. Jessica, who has two inflatables of her own, a big owl and horse, is glad to accompany them.
Jessica hears the stories of people who sign the “Canadian Heroes” kite. She jokes with those who climb inside her parents’ sports car inflatable before it cruises the sky.
“It’s fun. I meet new people,” says Jessica, stroking the ears of one of their two dogs, named Rev. “Jessica is in her element,” St. Dennis says. They’re kite ambassadors. “They love talking to people,” Simoes says. “People just walk up to you, all walks of life, all types of people, doctors, homeless people ask questions. It’s just really interesting how deeply it affects people.
“Kerry and Lucy are so laid-back and so much fun to be around. They work hard. It’s always a positive feeling being around them.”