Salzburg, here we come

National Review, Dec 19, 1986 by Priscilla L. Buckley

SALZBURG, HERE WE COME

AT 7:10, when Buddy calls, it is light enough to see that the waters on the Fuschlsee, which fronts on our bungalow, are drak but still, not choppy as they were yesterday morning, the first of our three days on "Buddy Bombard's Great Balloon Adventures' in the Austrian Tyrol. It was too gusty yesterday to fly.

The winds are friendly when we set out in the chase van from the Hotel Schloss Fuschl--where the accommodations, food, and service are on a par with the lakeside setting--but the high meadows are still draped in mist, so we drive to a valley four or five miles away for take-off. Out from its sturdy navy canvas bag comes the balloon, which will carry Buddy Bombard and his six guests--my sister Jane and me, Stanley and Marlowe Jewell from Santa Barbara, California, and George and Marita Shreyer from Zurich--into the skies. While several of us hold wide the mouth of the balloon, two large gas-powered fans pump it full of air. It ripples and heaves and shakes itself free from the ground, stirs into life. The sturdy basket we will ride in is tilted up so that Buddy can direct the jets of propane gas into the balloon. As the air inside heats up, the balloon rises slowly, gracefully, humorously: Buddy's balloons are light blue, and ornamented with tulips and daffodils, Butterflies and grasshoppers.

Ready for take-off. The chase crew --tall, blonde Lena From Denmark; tall, dark, bearded Angus from Scotland --steps back from the basket. Buddy rings a cowbell. A grandmother standing nearby, with a baby in a perambulator, waves. George yodels-- a quite respectable yodel ("I've been practicing all year,' he says)--and then he moos. Cows in a field already quite far below us respond. A bus on the highway sounds a melodious horn salute. And we're on our way. Valleys all around us: long swooping swatches of green, dark green where the cut hay lies drying, bright green where it is uncut. Other fields are freshly plowed and earthy brown. It is still misty. We pass a copse of trees. Two deer dart out and hightail it for cover across an open field; a third bursts out of a patch of vines and races off, trailing green tendrils from its antlers. A dozen horses look up, take fright, and gallop away across a long field, manes streaming, tails high, flanks glistening as the sun breaks through the mist, and now, for the joy of it, they turn and neigh and canter back.

Behind us a mountain meadow spills down from the wooded hills in the special radiance that late summer lends to green lawn and field. It is down this slope, Buddy tells us, that Julie Andrews ran, singing, "The hills are alive with the sound of music,' in the opening sequence of the film. As we cross a small wood, Buddy lets the basket sink slowly, skillfully, into a tiny clearing, and we gather pine boughs from the surrounding trees. Up again, across another stretch of forest that conceals from all sides but above a tiny cottage, for all the world like the witch's gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel.

We pass over a neat cluster of farm houses, the balconies spilling over with white, red, and purple hanging geraniums. There are flowers everywhere. In Austria, this last week in September, summer still holds court; the Virginia creeper shows only the tiniest hint of scarlet. A young mother pops out a dormer window, baby in arms, and waves to us. Everyone waves to everyone else. Jane finds herself waving vigorously at a cat's tail that is to-ing and fro-ing, so startling the cat that it streaks across the yard for the shelter of an open barn door, anything to get away from that screeching monstrosity in the air, our beautiful cerulean balloon, and possibly from that crazy lady.

We float over a tiny white-spired church on a hillside, and the wind deserts us. We lie becalmed above the church. Buddy whooshes the burners, taking us up eight hundred, a thousand feet, in search of wind. But today's wind is chancy, coquettish, elusive. Twenty minutes later we find a breeze at about a hundred feet, but it is blowing in a new direction, away from the Alpine lake and the village we had been heading for; we drift now toward Salzburg. That's ballooning. The only control the pilot has is up and down; direction is wind-dependent, and the wind at one level may be going in a different direction from the wind at a lower or higher altitude. The experienced pilot watches for signs of these changes--the smoke from a chimney, for instance, that shifts direction at a certain height.

Buddy points to a ridge ahead. "If we can get to that ridge,' he says, "we could see Salzburg. I hope we can make it. It's a spectacular view.'

We're moving briskly now and cross low over a tiny village. Kindergartners spill out into the front yard of their school. They shout and wave and laugh, that wonderful high-pitched squeal of delight of the super-excited small child. Buddy rings the cowbell. Jane blows her whistle. George yodels. We swoop ever lower over the school, and the children sweep through it and out the other side into the play-yard. But the wind won't let us tarry, so it's a fast wave to the village postman on his bicycle, to the town policeman in front of the town hall, and off toward Salzburg we sail.