FORD TIMES: GOING ALOFT AT SUNRISE
A Californian finds her first balloon flight to be surprisingly serene
You stand shivering in the predawn light, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts with your new friends, and you wonder how that wicker basket and the multicolored heap of material attached to it, now stretched out languidly on the ground before you, will ever carry you through the skies. But within 20 minutes the balloon is inflated and it towers over you seven stories high, ready for lift-off.
Suddenly you remember a time when you were very, very young and believed that people really could fly. And now it is happening. You are a child again!
Apparently the dozen or so on-lookers gathered around you remember, too. The exhilaration of seeing the balloon ready and waiting to take you and two other passengers soaring is contagious. A 2-year-old toddler stares open-mouthed in amazement, while his jump-suited 78-year-old grandpa bubbles with excitement. All sense of caution is ready to be thrown—literally—to the wind.
Ballooning is so simple now. What was once reserved for barnstorming or movie stunts is now available to people like me. All I had to do was to sign up for a charter flight I had nothing to learn and I didn’t need any special clothes, other than a warm jacket. The wind currents, the pilot (or aeronaut) and the balloon itself would do it all. So off I went in search of a hot-air balloon.
The price of balloons being what it is these days (upward of $7,000 each), the cost of sightseeing flights varies between $49 and $100 for 30 minutes – but that usually includes champagne and a certificate. Considering that the owner has to supply the chase vehicles to retrieve the balloon and its occupants, and pay for the tanks of propane used to heat the air that inflates the balloon, I call it a bargain.
My balloon, the Caliente out of Simi Valley, California, was a vertically striped mélange of rainbows There are only a handful of balloon-making companies in the United States and some of them make as few as two a year. Each balloon (known in the trade as an “envelope”) is customized with the owner’s choice of color and pattern.
Even when my feet were planted firmly in the sturdy wicker basket I could hardly imagine soaring through the heavens under this colorful envelope. Visions of tornadoes and expectations of a sea-sickening, Ferris-wheel rocking filled me with apprehension. But before I had a chance to change my mind and jump out, the basket began to lift off the earth ever so gently.
I had been dreading that knot that always forms in my stomach on airplane takeoffs, but there was no such sensation. I felt nothing of fear, but everything of pleasure. For the first time in my life I wasn’t conscious of how much I weighed.
Before me stretched a vista I had never seen. The sun was still hiding behind the mountains. Plowed fields and farmhouses were vying for my attention when I caught sight of a body of water I had never known existed. Before I knew it, we were 3,000 feet in the sky. “Why didn’t I do this before?” I asked myself.
Although the Caliente relied upon the air currents that traveled above and below us, I felt no breeze on my face. I luxuriated in the serenity of the atmosphere and was soothed by the soft hissing of the propane burner above us. Beneath us, tiny balls of cotton—which were, of course, woolly sheep—continued to graze without interruption. I supposed that we were part of the clouds to them, and they took our skyward presence for granted.
“Ski,” our pilot, continually kept a watchful eye on his meters. After all, our sunrise float was not some haphazard dash into the wind, but rather a controlled high-performance ride that used the air drifts to its advantage. I found out earlier that half the fun a ground crew has is predicting which way the balloon will go, but they are always wrong. I decided early in the flight not to agonize over our direction—or the lack of it—but instead to enjoy the scene.
Sheep may take a balloon for granted, but human observers do not. While we were virtually motionless over a road, I laughed as the cars slowed and even stopped. Looking down at the small squares that served as houses we saw men in pajamas rush out of their early morning beds with cameras poised.
But time was running out for our excursion into the heavens. Our propane tanks were emptying. Our descent began so slowly that I was unaware of the more vivid details that began to greet us. Then, suddenly looming before us were the crewmembers who were ready to grab our landing rope and guide us to a level spot. They maneuvered us away from the patch of grass the aeronaut had selected to land in, as it turned out to be cactus! I clung to a pole to brace myself for what I anticipated to be a rough landing. But we touched earth as easily as we had lifted off.
Reluctantly I clambered out of the wicker basket. The crew’s next chore was deflating and repacking the balloon. We’d looked forward to this—seeing the great balloon collapsed-but it was disappointingly simple. A red line within the envelope was pulled and the vertically striped colors blended together.
Our group stood around drinking champagne and relishing tales of each other’s flight—with no two alike. By now the sun was high in the sky, and the great adventure was over. But that wonderful remembered feeling of being a child again will stay with me always.