More hot air - ballooning - How To Forget The Election - Cover Story

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by Priscilla L. Buckley

IF THE empty rhetoric that has assaulted the nation in the past three months could be bottled, happy balloonists might have gained a free ride or two. My prescription for getting away from the oratorical hot air is to blow your worries away in a hot-air balloon.

As a sport, hot-air ballooning has come of age. It is available everywhere. You can float over stampeding wildebeests in the Serengeti or get a bird's-eye view of Kenya's elephants, zebras, giraffes, and impalas. There are balloons that fly over the impressive ruins of Ephesus in modern Turkey, soar above the Swiss Alps, and cast their shadows on the umber and ocher hill cities of Tuscany. With Buddy Bombard's Great Balloon Adventures (headquarters: Alexandria, Virginia) you can soar over Austria's lush Alpine meadows, float over vineyards and castles in Burgundy, and visit the famed ch"teaux of the Loire from a height no French monarch, no matter how mighty, could attain.

Not so long ago a skillful balloonist settled his craft gently in the now-dry moat around the graceful Ch"teau de Chenonceau, which Catherine de Medici wrested from her husband's mistress, Diane de Poitiers, at Henry's death. I once flew over the many-turreted Ch"teau d'Usse, which inspired Charles Perrault's tale of the Sleeping Beauty, over the ruins of Chinon, where the young Joan picked out her dauphin from a crowd of jeering courtiers, and saw from a distance the misty outlines of Loches, where Louis XI once imprisoned a cardinal in a cage he had painted scarlet so the prelate would feel at home. Louis's humor was under-appreciated in fifteenth-century France -- and in Rome.

There is a magic to hot-air ballooning, from the instant the brightly decorated sheath, into which hot air is blown, stirs restively, billows up in undulating waves, and tries to pull free of the men holding it down. Once enough hot air has been blown into its open mouth to give it the lift it needs to clear buildings or trees, there is a scramble to climb into the tall, sturdy wicker basket that will carry the balloonists, and it's lift-off. In seconds the earth has slipped away beneath you. The chase car that will try to keep up with your unpredictable flight pattern has shrunk. Far below, it is one toy car amid other toy cars.

The beauty of ballooning lies in great part in the tingle of not knowing where you'll come down. The pilot can control his elevation. If he needs a lift he fires spurts of flame from the propane tanks stowed in the corners of the basket into the open mouth of the balloon. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, and, imperceptibly but surely, the colorful seven-, nine-, or twelve-story-tall balloon starts to rise. A skilled balloonist who sees a stand of trees at the top of a hill 200 yards ahead knows exactly when to start heating up the air. But he has no control over the direction of his craft. That depends on the ever-capricious wind.

Once when we were flying in Austria, the wind veered sharply as we descended for our landing. The field the pilot had picked out was suddenly an irretrievable thirty yards to our left, and before we knew it we were headed along the main railway line into Salzburg. And there we sat, over that enchanting city, drinking in its beauties as they are seldom seen, but unable, totally unable to find our way to safety. We bounced up and down like a yo-yo in the hope of finding a breeze, but the wind eluded us: it wasn't at two thousand feet, at one thousand feet, at two hundred feet. Ultimately, we had to put down in a handkerchief-sized park, to the enchantment of the tourists leaning on the balustrades of the Mirabell gardens. It was a perfect landing, helped as always by passersby, who obediently grabbed the rope we threw them and guided the balloon down. A motorcycle policeman, siren blasting, pulled up beside our balloon and its somewhat discombobulated passengers and asked for our flight plan. Flight plans are not what ballooning is about, unless of course you are crossing the Atlantic in the highly sophisticated Double Eagle Two.

The exquisite pleasure of ballooning comes in those moments when the pilot has reached the elevation he wants and the burners are turned off. Then you float in silence. The balloon seems to be stationary; it is the world below that is unrolling before you. This October afternoon in the Berkshire hills, the forests look like the shaggy underside of a hooked rug, great tufts of rust, red, gold, brown, ocher, purple, crimson, orange, yellow, punctuated here and there --a puritan guard against nature gone wild -- by stands of sober dark green pines or blue spruce.

Below, spanning the sparkling Housatonic River, is an old covered bridge which to us, up here with only a half-hour or so of fuel remaining in the propane tanks, is not a bridge to the past, and surely not a bridge to the twenty-first century, but a bridge over which the chase crew, who have been on the wrong side of the river, can cross, and help pull us down to safety. Then we will pop the cork on the bottle of champagne with which, by tradition, every balloon flight is crowned. We shall toast each other, toast flights yet to come, and reflect that hot air, judiciously applied, can lift rather than depress the spirit.