". . . someone called the all stop . . . and my last hope of getting off the ground was dashed."
Unassimilated Stories: "Try Again Next Year, Kid"
Dear Reader,
I thought this story was going to be one of triumph.
I thought I’d be able to regale you with the tales of my conquest of a demon that has haunted me for thirty years.
I thought I’d be able to tell tales of an otherworldly beauty that I had yet to witness.
Alas, this will not be that story. This will be the story of going right up to the edge, thinking that you’re going to get your shot at the big leagues, and then seemingly by chance alone, neither failing nor succeeding simply having the opportunity denied out of hand.
Perhaps we can find value in the telling nonetheless.
- Charles
Try Again Next Year, Kid
This is a story about something that didn’t happen.
When you hear the details of this moment of opportunity denied, you’re likely to see it as mundane, the sort of thing that happens to people all over the world, every day, and you’re going to be totally right to see it that way. In fact, I see it that way. The event itself was kinda no-big-deal, which makes the whole circumstance all the more grievous.
I had built it up.
I had thought about it for years.
I had finally pulled the trigger, bought the tickets, gone to the staging area, sat on the ground in the pre-dawn, ignoring the dew soaking my pants, content to practice mapping the constellations overhead while waiting for the event to begin, only to be told, “Hey, we are sorry, weather is a no-go, your choice of re-book or refund.”
Just like that, today isn’t the day after all. I don’t get my shot to challenge my demons, and I’m left thinking, “Now what?”
To understand why this run-of-the-mill cancellation was outsized in its significance, travel back to childhood with me.
I was exposed to what you might call existential trauma at an earlier age than many. For the sake of this story, let's distinguish existential trauma from normal trauma by saying that childhood is traumatic, no matter how charmed a child’s life may seem. Learning to be a functioning human requires effort, it requires course correction, it requires learning important the lessons the hard way. Growing is anything but smooth. Slowly, inevitably, becoming an adult is traumatic.
But what I’m talking about right now is a bit different. Its the difference between the kinds of things that are inevitable, progressive challenges of growing up versus the kinds of things that rip a person out of the timeline everyone thought they were destined to inhabit, the kinds of things that brand a child as forever “out of phase” with the world around him.
My story was so different from that normal childhood trauma that I had to learn to be careful who I confided-in. Too often, instead of yielding the desired support to buoy the limited strength of my youthful will, telling my story would result in my assuming the supporting role. My story shocked the listener such that I had to help manage their emotions, not the other way around.
Exasperate disbelief was the most common response. Not that people thought I was being deceptive, but more that they simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the severity of my circumstance, around its unlikeliness. My real, lived experience was more akin to the kind of thing a novelist or playwright would dream up to drive a plot twist, not the sort of thing that happens to an otherwise unremarkable six-year-old boy.
In August of 1993, my grandfather was a medical doctor and teacher with sufficient expertise in radiology to justify his speaking at a conference in Colorado. It proved to be a perfect opportunity for the family to tag along for some quality time, though my father, younger sister, and I stayed home in Tennessee. While my grandfather went about the daytime business of the conference, my mother, aunt, grandmother, great uncle, busied themselves to seeing the sights. And what better way than by a leisurely, lighter-than-air adventure.
But mountain weather is capricious. Ply any seasoned climber with his preferred social lubricant and you’re sure to hear many a harrowing tale of a time the weather almost killed him. And sadly, a few too many tales of people he knows who the weather did kill.
And so. On that day. The rapidly changing mountain weather got the best of the untethered hot air balloon and they were blown into a high tension powerline which severed the basket rigging, causing them all to fall to their deaths.
. . . I told you it was the kind of thing you read about in stories, not the kind of thing that happens to real people.
Ever since then, I’ve had a . . . complicated relationship with hot air balloons and with heights in general (my father still has to scold me to get down from things that I “shouldn’t” be climbing).
As a child, I was never quite able to get away from hot air balloons.
The lunchroom of my elementary school had a huge mural of hot air balloons on the wall. My childish memory insists as I write this that it must have been thirty feet tall and sixty feet long.
I remember wanting to ask someone to change it. I don’t think I ever did.
Probably, even back then, I figured it’d be inappropriate to go to all that trouble just to accommodate the discomfort of one student. I learned to choose seats that didn’t face it directly, and I learned to be less sensitive to it. In fact, I think this is where I learned to be fascinated by hot air balloons, not so much as to study their mechanics, or seek out an opportunity to learn to fly, but in a lower key way, where anytime I ever saw one, or an image of one, I simply couldn’t look away.
Then I read a book series when I was in middle school with a balloonist as one of the supporting characters. He was one of my most favorite characters in a series filled with great characters.
Some of that was probably because he was something of a rogue: a seasoned traveler with a mysterious yet somber past, a calloused body, and a sharp mind, the kind of man I’ve always admired, the kind of man I’ve always known I’d grow up to be. But another thing that drew me to him, another thing I found irresistible, fascinating, was his occupation as an aeronaut. The man owned and operated his own hot air balloon. He contracted as a scout when the circumstances called for it, or as a transporter when the need arose.
He lived and died by the whim of the winds that he rode.
He didn’t simply ride the winds with fingers crossed, hoping for safe passage.
He survived on his insight into the nature of the winds, an insight both intimate and expert.
He was everything that the little boy who lost his mother to the capriciousness of the wind could possibly hope to be, not a master of the winds, who have no master, but at least, a master of riding the winds, drifting free from the choking vines of fear grown up in the dark soil of the existential trauma of early childhood loss.
The mildly morbid fascination persisted as I grew older. So many times, in quaint seaside art galleries on vacation, I have almost bought various artworks of hot air balloons and I’ve always wanted to go up in one. I’ve never been afraid to get in one, not in any explicit sense, but I’ve always allowed excuses to easily sway me towards avoidance. Its always: too expensive, or doesn’t fit the day’s schedule, or the line is too long, or we’re about to leave the fair so maybe next year.
But every year in the fall when the cold stable air masses settle into the valleys of East Tennessee and the conditions are just right for flying, I see them floating on the horizon, tracking almost imperceptibly along the ridges. And I think, “One day I’ll ride in one. One day I’ll go see if my mother is up there waiting to meet me.” But then, the season passes with me having kept both feet planted firmly on the ground.
Until this year . . .
Or so I thought when I sat down to write the preface to this story the night before my big day.
The time rolled around for the pilots to come and break us up into groups for flight orientation, and then the time rolled right on by.
There was a crowd of people now. Far more than when I first arrived before the sun. Crowds are an ephemeral phenomena, they can only hold together for so long before the individuals that make them up start to feel the need to reassert themselves. This crowd looked to be feeling that need, offgassing that extra energy by being a bit louder than it had been just a few minutes earlier, more and more heads were popping up, looking around alert to danger, like meerkats on the savanna, where just minutes ago they were content to face down and in, toward their private conversations.
At last, the poor staffer who had drawn the short straw stumbles over. He had rehearsed how he was going to give the bad news, but then, under the weight of the crowd’s anticipation, he forgot his lines and lapsed into some esoteric explanation about how to gauge the wind and the weather. No one knew his point, he had forgotten to prefaced his speech with news good of bad. The crowd murmured and shuffled and wondered… Maybe this guy is just like this, maybe he delivers mundane news like it is bad news. Maybe he isn’t telling us we don’t get to fly today.
He slowly sputters to the end of his explanation and asks for questions. I felt it’d be rude to shout “What are you even on about?” so I waited, and a more diplomatic person than me asked whether we were going to get to fly. “Oh right, yes,” he replied, “I have a list right here of pilots who have already backed out, decided that the conditions aloft are outside their comfort level. If your pilot’s name isn’t called then you can wait and you may still get to fly.” What a weird, chance-y way to treat paying customers, I thought. Apparently that is what you get when you have multiple vendors operating under the umbrella (is this a good time to make a balloon pun?) of the primary festival vendor.
Suffice it to say, fifteen minutes further down the decision chain, someone called the all stop regardless of how gung-ho any individual pilots may have been, and my last hope of getting off the ground was dashed. The morning was a bust and I was left wondering what I was supposed to do with all the anticipation and willpower I’d mustered.
Seeking consolation, I wandered among the balloons that were being set up as grounded displays.
They were beautiful, each with it’s own unique character.
Their high saturation color schemes leapt out from their surroundings and seemed to do more than simply reflect the morning sun, but to glow with their own light, like LEDs woven into the skin of the balloon, neither shining from within nor reflecting from without, but something more magical, these bubbles of earth that float in the sky, these pockets of sky tethered to the earth, they glowed with the in-between-light from the other world, from the space in between space.
I let myself drift among them for a bit, my own little play at being the balloon that I wouldn’t get the chance to ride. Like the balloons, eventually I came back to ground. I still had a big day ahead of me, laundry to wash, floors to sweep, dinner to prepare for someone new. In fact, now I had a head start on the rest of that big day, what was I going to do with three extra hours!
I don’t have a moral lesson for today’s story.
If asked the question,
“What do you do when you come up against a challenge you’ve considered for your whole life and then are denied the opportunity to test yourself against it?”
I still don’t know the answer.
Going right up to the edge, being fully prepared, and through no fault or choice of your own, being made to step back down, it feels abrupt and unsettling but it leaves no marks upon my flesh, like a car wreck where everyone gets out, looks around, exchanges information, and then drives away.
If I have any takeaway, its this.
I didn’t have to screw up my courage too terribly much to go and do the thing. So I know that time and maturation have done the hard work for me. Thanks to my life experience, I simply am the person who can rise to meet that challenge.
Knowing that, I’m on the lookout for another balloon festival another day soon. I’m thinking Albuquerque in the fall of 2024.
Who’s with me?!
P.S.
I did some research in preparation for this story. Here are some interesting articles I found. I am sure there is even more info out there. I hope to do some more digging between now and next year’s re-attempt.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/08/08/Colorado-balloon-crashes-kill-6-injure-9/8283744782400/ A news article that includes their names. Their lack of anonymity in this article is weirdly significant to me. Though they misspell Pendergrass (my mother’s maiden name), but that is okay.
https://www.wtvr.com/2014/05/14/holmberg-causes-of-death-in-balloon-crash-typical-of-these-disasters About a third of the way into this article they share excerpts of a formal report describing the incident and the conditions surrounding it.
https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/fort-collins-widow-remembers-1993-aspen-balloon-tragedy/73-284636116 I don’t think I’ve ever met the wife of my uncle Spike. I don’t really remember him since I was only six when he died. Her account in this interview just goes to show how hard it is to reconcile such tragedies.
"They wanted to go up in a hot air balloon," Dodson said.
Two hours later, their balloon hit a power line severing the basket from the balloon and all six people onboard were killed. It was the deadliest hot air balloon tragedy in American history until 16 people were killed Saturday morning in central Texas.
"You don't believe it is the first thing," Dodson said.
She could not believe her husband whom she describes as athletic and adventurous was gone. For the next year, Dodson says she could not just set one place setting at the dinner table.
"I just set him a place because it was nighttime, I always did it," Dodson said. "It was a form of denial. I think that you hope that it was a bad dream."
Dodson says she relives her nightmare every time she sees a hot air balloon.
"If I see a hot air balloon, I put my head down," Dodson said. "If I'm driving, I stop."
For a time after Spike's death, she pushed for a change in legislation to require more training for hot air balloon pilots.
"And, they said there wasn't enough accidents to warrant having any more (training), I thought what an answer," Dodson said.
Thanks for writing this! So personal and brave in many ways. I continue to be amazed by our differences and love you so much for it. Also I hadn’t seen the 3rd article before with Spike’s wife’s comments. Heart wrenching. I hope that you will get to have your experience soon!