For my wife's birthday last week, I took her up in a hot-air balloon. This was her idea, not mine.

Would you like to fly...?
I guess it's a bit ingenuous to say that "I took her up" as though I was manning the balloon. But I did pay for the tickets, and I went along for the ride, so it wasn't like I was incidental to the whole business.

"Are you frightened?" asked a friend the day before the flight.

"Not until you brought it up," I said.

I never really equated ballooning with life-threatening activities such as sky diving, ice climbing, and wearing a Yankees cap at Fenway. But when we got to 3,000 feet and I realized there was nothing between me and the ground but a wicker basket and a few metal clips, I can truly say that I grasped the gravity of the situation. I could have dropped my camera or my baseball cap and they would have been gone. No question about it. No chance for recovery. Just gone. At one point, I leaned over to try to get a good look at the trees, but I felt the basket leaning, so I straightened up and concentrated on the distant mountains instead. My momma didn't raise no fool.

I casually asked the 55-year-old balloon captain with whom I'd entrusted my life for an hour, "So I guess you get people losing water bottles and watches over the side on occasion, eh?"

He looked at me like I was from outer space. "No, never," he said.

Hey, it wasn't like it was a bad question. It could happen. Not that there was any safety lesson to begin with either. You'd think that before you take off, they'd go over a few rules like:

  • Don't throw anything overboard or you could hurt someone on the ground and we could get sued
  • Don't lean too far over the basket or you could fall out and that tends to smart
  • Don't stand too close to the propane tank because when we turn it on every 30 seconds or so, it's DANG HOT!

Nope. No safety lesson. I guess that would tend to detract from the romantic notion of floating off into the blue. It just seems a bit odd to me that in America you can drive down the road in a car surrounded by 2,000 lbs. of corrugated metal and a half-dozen air bags for protection, but if you aren't wearing your canvas seat belt, it's a $118 fine. But go ahead and float half a mile above the world in a balloon with nothing to hold you in but your sense of balance, and that's just fine. No problem at all. Take the kids, why don't you? Go have a great time!

Knots in our landing
About 45 minutes into our flight, I asked the "driver" where we'd be landing. "Looks like...Maltby," he said.

Looks like Maltby? Doesn't he know? Then it struck me just how little control you have over these things. It's just a balloon, man. You ever let a helium-filled balloon go off into the air? It just goes where the wind takes it. And that's what we did.

Still, I knew that the guy was controlling our vertical movement. And it was a really nice day, so I assumed he had a few spots in mind to land. Bad assumption.

We started to descend, but I couldn't see any landing spot and the balloon guy wasn't talking. He was just looking down. For what, I'm still not sure. Long story short, we ended up clipping the top of a 60-foot Evergreen and landing on someone's front lawn. Here's how dumb I am: even after we were down, I figured that the guy knew these people and that they'd had a long-standing agreement that he could land on their lawn if he ever needed to.

Nope. Don't know these people. Never been here before.

I have to say, though, that the natives were friendly. In fact, it was a real novelty for the whole neighborhood. They were racing across their driveways, taking pictures of us with their camera-phones like modern-day Lilliputians. Once we were out of the basket, the balloon ground crew found us and folded up the massive balloon in less time than it takes me to get the air out of my queen-sized air mattress. I saw the driver slip the property owner a bottle of champagne for his trouble, and we climbed into a van and were on our way.

Well...my wife had a good time.

Cup o' Joe
Today's coffee flavor: Cape Foulweather Organic Sumatra
Result: Strong. Smells suspiciously like classic Maxwell House, but the flavor is exquisite, and the aftertaste, amusing.