Okay. This is why I haven’t been journaling: I don’t know when to stop. I am not moderate. I cannot help myself. So this is long. But it’s mostly pictures, so you don’t have to work too hard to get to the end. The story: every year our town—liking to think of itself as “Freedom City, USA,” mostly because we have a nice parade and an over-active events committee—has a balloon festival during the celebration period (here: about two weeks) of the 4th of July. (For those of you who are NOT American, the 4th is the day when our own government, hard won by the brave men and women of the time, was first launched and a new country was born.)
I’m not sure what liberty and balloons have in common; I rather think that balloons and horses and parakeets are better off NOT so free – well, sometimes. It depends. But for three days, the balloons rise from the ground and play games over the heads of people like me: full of wonder, amazement and total conviction that somebody, one of these years, is going to crash and put an eye out.
Cam was gone to California on a shoot and Lorri wanted to take the kids to the balloons, so I went, too. I always don’t want to go because they start so flipping early in the morning, but I always hate NOT to go because I feel like I’m missing something mighty and I’ll be sorry later. You can see how early it was when they were starting. Very, very early. Before seven in the morning. I do not function before seven in the morning. Which is why I hate the three-in-the-morning irrigation turn (that and the ne’re-do-well people who drive around the empty streets that time of night).
But I digress. Constantly. So that shot up there is what the camera saw. The one below is what I saw:
I have a friends who own a balloon. The good husband is my financial body guard and state senator. I stand with my feet on the earth and he is the one who rises.
He invited us to come to the launching early so the kids could see the balloon happen. Here they are, posed in front of a very large canvas bag with a balloon spilling out of it.
Here you see how a balloon launching begins, with the basket on its side.
That very large fan, run by a gas motor, is fired up to give the balloon it’s first bit of shape. See the girl in the green shirt? My friends’ daughter, part of the balloon crew. She’s holding open the mouth of the balloon (there’s probably a fancy name for it, but I’m not a member of the crew and will not be using balloon argot in this article).
Balloon, filling up.
The very top end of the balloon is open – a great big hole in the ozone layer of the balloon.
Big, fat balloon.
Another crew member. Two seconds after I shot this, he darted UNDERNEATH the balloon, walking along, working out the folds and wrinkles on the under side.
See how nice and flat it is now? And the hole at the top is now covered.
Here is my friend, captain of his soul and of a great big fat patriotic balloon.
Now that the fan has blown a bunch of air into the thing, the captain climbs into the capsized basket and fires up the burners. The burners are terrifying. Loud. Violent. Sudden. And the first time he started it, I was sure the balloon fabric was going to burn like flash paper. But he’s been flying this thing for twenty five years or more and he hasn’t set it on fire yet.
Notice the calf muscles on the crew member in front – the balloon is now alive and powerful – with a mind of its own.
Now the fire becomes even more intense – see the blue flame? And notice that the crew members holding the balloon have to turn their faces away from the heat of it?
Their hands shift on the lines because the air inside the balloon, now heating up, is causing the great globe to rise. The crew holds onto the lines with everything they have.
The balloon is now pulling itself upright, taking the basket with it. The captain plays a heat game with the air above him, keeping it just cool enough so that the pull on the lines is manageable, but warm enough to keep the balloon inflated.
The crew keeps the basket anchored.
Looking up into the thing, now fully upright. Can you see the air baffles inside of it? A balloon is not a simple construct.
Lorri brings Scoots up to the basket – “You wanna get in?”
“Yes ma’am. Yes sir.” And he joins a green shirted little girl in the basket.
Makin’ friends.
A few more children are gathered in, and G asks Andy if she wants to go.
Ummmm. That would be a resounding “No thanks.”
Not sure what he’s thinking here. The flamer is making tremendous noise, but Scooter seems very philosophical about it. He’d been sitting on the grass, watching this whole process carefully, not saying much. Then he turned to me and said solemnly, “The fire is its breakfast.” Meaning the balloon’s. Then, “And the air is the fire’s breakfast.” I am pretty sure Scoots is bound to be some kind of engineer.
Waiting patiently.
This sad face? He just found out he doesn’t get to actually go UP with the balloon.
My friend is the fox for the hounds, so they tie a great red ribbon to the basket. Not sure why. Maybe it’s for a game like flag football. The basket really wants to leap up.
Wants it badly.
Blue flame against the pre-dawn sky.
And thar she blows.
Up –
and higher –
And higher.
By now, the other balloons are growing. I have a hundred shots of this happening – I find the shapes and colors compelling. My favorite thing is the glow of the fire you can see at the base of a growing balloon. And I love to look closely at the crowd, all self-unaware, wandering in this forest of brilliant great rounds of powerful color.
The terrible pink pig is Scooter’s favorite.
Like a garden, growing double speed.
Benign behemoths, like so many air whales.
They glow in the low light.
I feel like an atom among molecules.
Or a bug in a bounce house.
Stars in the corner.
This one collapsed. It was burgeoning, then suddenly began to go limp.
The brown one is the head of Smokey the Bear.
Up into the light, just now breaking over the top ridge of the guardian hills.
I could feel the sun when it broke over – but it was far too bright to look at, so I held the camera over my shoulder and hoped for a good shot of it.
The last one to fill.
It rose to standing, but did not make it off the ground. In the end, they dropped it carefully and put it away. The smaller big balloons are targets for the reindeer games – I mean, the balloon games.
I think it all turned out very well. No eyes put out.
Andy, in the arms of grandfather – who had met us here after swimming miles of laps at the university pool. She thinks this is probably just a sort of bizarre dream she’s having.
We finally set off for home, heading down the road toward the lake side of the valley. We had stayed for almost an hour, watching the balloons play their ponderous, slow motion games (and growling at the people who rudely came and stood right in front of our sitting place so we couldn’t see a dang thing). The wind had carried some of the balloons far to the north or east. Some had already landed and were being packed away in parking lots or on tennis courts or park lawns. It’s not easy to find a place to land a balloon.
So off we went – home to breakfast. But then, as we were almost down to the freeway, Lorri saw this and exclaimed:
A PIG! Blown totally off course and now almost becalmed in a not so great part of town. So we forgot breakfast and became balloon chasers. By the time we’d reached him along this road, the pig had drifted way to the right – almost caught in those electrical lines. We thought he might be heading for a park near our neighborhoods, so we raced along to the bridge, then up over the freeway – and all the time, the pig was drifting diffidently toward the lake.
He was too far north of the park. “We’re PIG chasers,” Scooter announced at first. Then, many minutes and turns and small neighborhoods later, said, “I want to go home.”
We wound through obscure little streets, watched the pig detach itself from the tops of trees – the captain leaning out over his basket, pointing at possible places, then working as the pig caught errant breezes that blew it backwards, then toward the mountains again. We weren’t sure what we’d do when we actually caught up – then we passed his real chaser, a big truck hauling a trailer, and exchanged a word or two – then fell in line as he met up with the other real chaser, a truck with another basket in the back – and the three of us drove like crazy, trying to get ahead of the pig and the breeze.
Finally, we cut through another neighborhood into an awful bit of farmer’s field, and there was the pig, about twenty five feet off the ground, running out of propane – and caught by another breeze that would have blown it back toward the lake. But the captain threw out a thick red line – and we stopped the car, jumping out as the other chasers ran to catch it. Five of us, then, jumped for the line and hung on for dear life, pulling the pig away from the lake – two big men, a boy and Lorri and I, dragging the balloon to safety, back toward the mountains, over the rough field.
Then, as the pig came down to the earth, Lorri ran back to the car for the kids (who had been quite safe and in sight), and Scoots got to touch the hoof of a flying pig, which is not something many children in the history of the world have ever been able to do.
And that is the story of how we saved a pig’s life and watched a fantastical garden grow as the sun came up on a free world bursting with dreams.
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