Lift-Off

Lift-off. Last time it had been at Canaveral. Apollo XVII—and last-shuddering breakers of sound, night turned into day, sheets of orange flame engulfing the gantry, the rocket, the spacecraft, an instant in time caught forever in the shutter of the mind. Today it’s six people, their feet wet from the morning dew, in a tiny private airfield in central New Jersey, while the world sleeps. Somewhere nearby a cock crows. Around us everywhere the twitter of the birds, a few commands. “Hang on. Give us some body weight.” And whish-whish as the propane flame sears the flapping edges of the blue and white funnel above our heads. “All right. Hurry. Hurry now. Get in, Priscilla.” An ungainly scramble. “Now you, Jane.” My sister is only slightly more gainly. “Good.” Whish-whish-whooosh. “OK. You can let us go.” The three on the ground step away from the basket and it’s lift-off. Silent. Almost motionless. Noticed not by any sensation of life or speed, only because the people have receded, sunk away, and the low hangar—out of which a half hour earlier had come the two bundles that are now our balloon and the wicker basket in which we are riding—is now below us.

“Uh-uh, ladies, I have bad news,” says Rick Behr, our balloon pilot, his bronze face serious under his red crash helmet. Not, may I interject, a particularly comforting opening remark to a neophyte balloonist now hanging a casual 150 feet up in the sky. But the bad news Rick has to convey is not that the balloon is about to vaporize, nor yet that Jane has dropped a cigarette on the four containers of propane that take up inordinate room in our five-foot-square basket—a brochure had warned against smoking (“the ash you drop may be yourself”)—no, it is that the wind has shifted 180 degrees and instead of flying over picturesque and spring-beautiful Princeton we are headed toward unpicturesque and multihighwayed Somerville, N.J.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Lift-off. Last time it had been at Canaveral. Apollo XVII—and last-shuddering breakers of sound, night turned into day, sheets of orange flame engulfing the gantry, the rocket, the spacecraft, an instant in time caught forever in the shutter of the mind. Today it’s six people, their feet wet from the morning dew, in a tiny private airfield in central New Jersey, while the world sleeps. Somewhere nearby a cock crows. Around us everywhere the twitter of the birds, a few commands. “Hang on. Give us some body weight.” And whish-whish as the propane flame sears the flapping edges of the blue and white funnel above our heads. “All right. Hurry. Hurry now. Get in, Priscilla.” An ungainly scramble. “Now you, Jane.” My sister is only slightly more gainly. “Good.” Whish-whish-whooosh. “OK. You can let us go.” The three on the ground step away from the basket and it’s lift-off. Silent. Almost motionless. Noticed not by any sensation of life or speed, only because the people have receded, sunk away, and the low hangar—out of which a half hour earlier had come the two bundles that are now our balloon and the wicker basket in which we are riding—is now below us.

“Uh-uh, ladies, I have bad news,” says Rick Behr, our balloon pilot, his bronze face serious under his red crash helmet. Not, may I interject, a particularly comforting opening remark to a neophyte balloonist now hanging a casual 150 feet up in the sky. But the bad news Rick has to convey is not that the balloon is about to vaporize, nor yet that Jane has dropped a cigarette on the four containers of propane that take up inordinate room in our five-foot-square basket—a brochure had warned against smoking (“the ash you drop may be yourself”)—no, it is that the wind has shifted 180 degrees and instead of flying over picturesque and spring-beautiful Princeton we are headed toward unpicturesque and multihighwayed Somerville, N.J.