THE FAITHFUL READER OF this column, hapless dupe though he be (be? is? were? am?)—hapless dupe though he am—will have noticed that I have not fulfilled my promise to write at frequent intervals on participant sports. I have not done it because—what are you going to say about them? “A large group of us went skiing in Vermont last weekend, including my friend Mayo Whitsett and his wife Amber and several other people you never heard of either, and the snow was good—well, it was pretty good—and we all went wiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, and it looks like more and more people are into these Montagnard X-2’s that will release your feet only when you scream but then will let go of them in two-tenths of a second, according to the specifications, but then there are a lot of pros and cons on that. …” It’s either that kind of thing or you have to get really serious, because spectator sports are fantasy but participant sports—let me put it this way: nobody is watching but God.
Well, anyway, I am up in a damn balloon. I’m skimming the top of a persimmon tree and pulling off a persimmon and biting it. There are only eight hot-air balloons in Tennessee and I am up in one of them, The Ubiquitous Serpent.
Voilà. The above is another first for this column. Last month we participated in a holdout, and this month we have blocked out our lead in a damn balloon. I didn’t have my typewriter up there, to be sure, but I did block out the above lead in my head while, yes, veritably brushing the crest of a hundred-foot Franklin, Tennessee, persimmon tree and looking straight down on the backs of startled rabbits, deer and cattle. And looking down on a man, standing next to his pickup, who hollered, “How y’all boys doin’?” and we hollered down, “Got three gret big persimmons.”
We were in Slick Lawson’s balloon—Slick, my sweet wife Joan and I. Slick, whose formal name is W. E., maintains that he was nicknamed Slick from birth because of his expeditious departure from the womb. He’s a Nashville photographer—shoots album covers, gubernatorial candidates, Tennessee-whiskey ads, beautiful bare-breasted women waving speared catfish and running from an inflated shark (to illustrate the invitations for his annual catfish fry). In his living room he has a picture of himself taken by Johnny Cash. That is the level of Music City photographer Slick is. Also he is the author of the song title “Last Night I Won the Dance Contest (But I Can’t Take the Trophy Home).”
That’s another thing about participant sports. I’m afraid I’ll lose my sense of sin in them. That’s why you didn’t catch Faulkner waterskiing or doing some other damn thing. He’d go out and chase animals and shoot at them, but that’s different—that’s at least about half wrong, and therefore pertinent. The only thing I can think of that is wrong about riding a balloon is that if the Devil had taken Jesus up in a balloon instead of onto a mountaintop—but no, the Devil don’t ride a damn balloon, I don’t believe. Even though Slick, with his frizzly greying hair and beard and nimble, chunky trunk-forward carriage and his face like a mobile bag of little apples, looks more like Pan than anybody else I have ever known personally. And even though the balloon’s burner is like a dragon’s mouth, puts out fifteen million BTU’s an hour, which is enough to heat a small building, and makes this raarrghph sound. Off to our right we could see the other two balloons of our party, Butch Stamps’s and Allen “Deux Rite” Sullivan’s. They were floating, looking prettier than lighter-than-air Easter eggs, and off and on roaring like hoarse lions.
Slick first went up in a balloon a few years ago, in the balloon of Eric Sosbe, who as a Vanderbilt football player distinguished himself by his response to a disparaging remark he heard while coming off the field against the University of Tennessee. His response was to go up into where the UT band was sitting and whip the piccolo player. (If that had happened at the time I was at Vanderbilt in the early sixties, it would have been the high-water mark of a whole era of VU football.)
Slick crewed on the balloon owned by Allen T. Sullivan, a stockbroker, and Franklin Jarman, a shoe magnate, until finally at his own insistence they certified him trained, and now he’s an FAA-licensed aeronaut and the owner of The Ubiquitous Serpent, which has huge serpents of Pueblo Indian design emblazoned around the surface of its envelope, the part of the balloon that inflates. The envelope, made of Dacron, is the size of a seven-story building.
The part you stand in is the basket, made of wicker and suede, about three feet deep and big enough around to hold three propane tanks and three people standing. The basket is tough; we dragged and jounced through the treetops in it, and Slick once entered the annual Atlanta raft race by landing the basket in the Chattahoochee River.
The part that makes the balloon go up, by converting the propane to hot air, is the burner, which is suspended over the basket and is about the size of a chain saw. Sometimes you “gimble the burner.” Or gimbel. I asked Slick’s ballooning confrere David Eastland how you spell gimbal and he said, “Hell, I don’t know. Why would a writer ask me how to spell something?”
Gimbal the burner is the only technical ballooning term I picked up. It sounds like the title of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story, but it means to rotate the burner at an angle, because the wind is pushing the envelope out at an angle and you have to direct the hot air into it.
There isn’t any part that steers the balloon. You can cause the balloon to soar by turning on the burner and to subside by turning it off, and you can make the balloon sink abruptly by pulling on a rope that opens up a big hole in the top of the envelope, and you can navigate by soaring or subsiding into the wind currents that ease and swoop and shift along valleys and up and over slopes, but you can’t sail into the wind. You usually don’t even feel the wind, because you’re not resisting it, you’re in and of it. There are “hound and hare” competitions that entail following the hare balloon’s course as closely as possible, but you don’t know where you’re going to wind up. You’ve got a chase car following you to pick you up, and you just aim not to come down on power lines or interstates or farm animals. Or barn roofs. Or bonfires. The best ballooning stories are about coming down.
When another Tennessee balloonist landed in a farmer’s field, the farmer got off his tractor and came up to him and said, “Where you headed?”
“Nowhere in particular,” said the balloonist.
“Well, you made it,” the farmer said. Then he went back to his tractor and resumed plowing.
Six people were killed ballooning in this country during the past year, Eastland told me before I went up, “but in every case it was pilot error.” He acted as though that point should reassure me. “But my pilot is going to be Slick,” I told him.
“That’s true,” said Eastland. After all, Slick is, by his own account, a man who once seized a fire extinguisher at a black-tie affair and covered two prominent Nashvillians with foam because they were taxing him for his informal dress and then on leaving the party went to a restaurant called The Gold Rush, did a backflip through the front door, whirled and exclaimed, “Who in here wants to fight or fuck? Either one, because I don’t get out much.”
Slick, however, gave us an orderly ride. Someone had stolen the stereo and headphones out of The Ubiquitous Serpent’s basket, so we weren’t listening to Mozart, but I didn’t need any Mozart, myself. I must have flown five hundred thousand miles in my life and that was the first time J ever felt like I was flying—and I mean really flying, like in a dream. We came over those hills easy and smooth as the moon.
The first man who ever achieved flight in anything, you know, was Jean Pilâtre de Rozier, in 1783, in a hot-air balloon whose paper-and-cloth envelope was made by the Montgolfier brothers, who burned wet straw and wool on a pan and thought it was the smoke that made the balloon rise. Ballooning moved from hot air to gas, and Pilâtre de Rozier was later killed when another Montgolfier balloon exploded while he attempted to cross the English Channel in it. It wasn’t until the 1960s that people started getting back into hot-air ballooning. Hot air is a lot cheaper than helium; you can have a nice hour-and-a-half flight for just eight dollars’ worth of propane.
“What’s yer initial cost getting into a balloon?” some curious old boys hollered up at us once when we swooped low. “About six or seven thousand,” Slick cried. For the price of a station wagon, you can move like the down of a thistle.
Another Tennessee balloonist once came down way out in the middle of nowhere, didn’t know where he was. His chase car didn’t show up. He waited and waited. It got dark. He saw two big headlights bearing down on him. Realized, then, he was standing in the dirt bed of an unfinished stretch of highway. Saw the headlights start to tumble. Saw them smash into a bank a few feet away.
Ran to the car and found the driver, who was of a race different from his own, badly hurt. Wondered whether he should do mouth-to-mouth. Resisted the notion. Saw the driver die.
Another car approached. The balloonist hollered at the driver to come help. The driver, who was of the victim’s race, got out of his car and saw a man in a fancy flight suit beckoning. “Come on, I need to show you something,” the balloonist said, casting about for the appropriate words.
The driver edged close. He finally peered into the car. There, where the balloonist was pointing, was a corpse. He ran back to his car and drove away.
And there was the balloonist, no more lights of any kind in sight, a downed balloon and a dead man on his hands.
Peasants, thinking they were seeing either a demon or the moon that had fallen because of something they had done, would set upon the early French balloons with pitchforks when they landed. But nothing like that happened to us in Slick’s balloon. Our chase Jeep showed up right away, and Slick went and introduced himself to the man in whose field we’d landed—a Mr. Frazier, who sociably opened his fence gates for us so we could get the Jeep and trailer in and load up the Serpent. Then we were off to a nearby restaurant for steak, eggs, grits, turnip greens, beer and, in my case at least, a sense of dissatisfaction over not still being afloat, not still looking intimately down into the trees the way I used to think only birds and angels could.