You were flying your drone at the park

Portland OR

Description

Sewallcrest Park. May 10. ~3:30pm It felt like everything fell silent when you switched it on. Everything other than the whining of the propellers that is. It’s possible that this immediate silence was a result of the birds being startled by your drone. Either way, it was a special moment for me. After zipping around for a bit you utilized the automatic hover in place feature to look around to see if anyone else was interested in your drone. You flew the drone over the play ground presumably thinking that maybe the children would be interested in the drone. I wished you had flown the drone above me. It’s funny to this that until recently many people wouldn’t have thought such miracle of flight and surveillance would be possible or permissible. Well not impossible because we’ve had a lot of the basic technology for a while but it is definitely more accessible than a lot of people would have expected. Batteries and electric motors have really come a long way in the past 10-15 years. You nodded, stepping away slightly. I had approached you rapidly and was now offering this perspective as a fellow drone enthusiast. “Well its not exactly cheap as a hobby” you said. “Oh really? How much was your drone?” I asked inching towards you again. Again you kept your distance. “It’s still covid” “Yeah but we’re outside” I said. I decided not to press the issue further. You never answered my question about the price of your drone but I suspect it was somewhere in the ballpark of $1,200. I tried again to strike up a conversation. “Have you been flying drones for a long time?” You barely responded, instead focusing on not hitting a tree that you were flying too close to just for the thrill of it. When you inevitably hit the tree, as most people in the park suspected would happen, you rushed over as if you were running to a child that had just been injured. I wondered if this was how you would run over to our children when they were injured. Anyways, we never got a chance to exchange contact info. I’d love to meet up sometime and chat about drones or life or whatever. You left pretty quickly, possibly because I had said out loud what I was thinking about children.