Anniversary mystery date
As a young boy I learned from William Pène du Bois’s fanciful adventure story The Twenty-One Balloons that a balloon flight on a fine day is a smooth experience with little sense of movement. Suz and I had gone parasailing in Turks and Caicos, where we went for our 25th anniversary, and it was like that: just hanging out about 300 feet above the water and the shore with a nice breeze in your face. It was a little like living for half an hour in a Hayao Miyazaki movie—soaring peacefully in a huge blue sky with white clouds above clear, emerald water with a coral reef below the surface alongside a coastline of pink sand and thick palm trees. A balloon flight is supposed to be similarly peaceful, without even the breeze, since you travel with the wind.
This smoothness was an important consideration, because Suz is prone to motion sickness. How prone, I hadn’t fully realized until our 20th anniversary back in 2011, when, after a fine Broadway production of Mary Poppins with Laura Michelle Kelly in the title role, I took Suz on a Manhattan helicopter tour. She wasn’t sick but she was queasy, and we skipped our dinner reservations at some downtown Italian restaurant, making do with some Cold Stone Creamery ice cream on 42nd Street. We may have stopped somewhere for food later in New Jersey. Still a nice time, but not the perfect evening I had tried to plan.
When the idea of a balloon flight came to me several months ago, I was pretty sure I had a perfect-evening idea for our 33rd anniversary that would work out. I also knew that I wanted it to be a surprise. Not that Suz is particularly big on surprises; she’s also less adventurous than I am, and we haven’t done a lot of adventurous things together. That 25th-anniversary trip to Turks and Caicos with the parasailing—all of which was her idea, like most of the good ideas in our relationship—is an outlier in our life together, the first and still the only time we’ve gone away as a couple since becoming parents. My hopes of taking Suz to Rome for our 30th were dashed by Covid, and, while we still hope to make that trip soon, I wanted to do something special for our 33rd.
The thing is, while I was pretty sure that a balloon flight was something she would enjoy and would be happy to have done after the fact, I also knew if I raised the topic beforehand, she probably wouldn’t want to do it. There was a bit of risk, then—the helicopter tour had also been a surprise—but I believed this one would work out. I called Balloons Over Clinton in Hunterdon County in western central New Jersey and talked to a very nice woman named Maria to get the process started.
The first thing was getting the right day. For a balloon flight, wind and weather have to line up with whatever other scheduling factors may be in play. On the wind and weather side, there can’t be any potential for rain and certainly for electrical activity, and, while too much wind is definitely a problem, so is not enough; you don’t want to just go up and come back down in more or less the same place! A clear blue sky is nicer, too, than an overcast one—not necessarily a dealbreaker, but I was hoping for a fine day.
The first two potential days I hoped to make it work, the week before our Ocean City family vacation, we had to cancel for personal reasons. The third possibility, in mid-August, was called off just before we were about to leave the house due to electrical storm potential. (Puzzled by this last-minute cancellation for factors I wasn’t willing to explain, our eldest said to me, “It’s like you’re planning a date on a mysterious floating island that appears and disappears”—another Miyazaki reference. “You are closer than you know,” I told her.)
Finally on August 23rd everything came together.
I was still a little concerned about the ascent. Even parasailing (which, again, was her idea), Suz was briefly sick during the ascent from the boat, though she was fine once we got in the air. In The Twenty-One Balloons, Professor Sherman reported a jarring ascent. However, he was in a hydrogen balloon with a fixed amount of lift. A hot-air balloon balloon, we discovered, is completely different; the lift changes constantly as heat is added, is released, or escapes by radiation and convection. (In another boyhood favorite of mine, Bertrand R. Brimley’s The Mad Scientists’ Club, the heroes achieve a similar effect in a helium balloon using pressure tanks and a compressor to pump helium into or out of the balloon at need.)
Anyway, the ascent was as smooth as the rest of the flight—“like going up in an elevator,” Suz said while we were still only a few feet off the ground. (She was actually a bit bothered by the brief van ride on bumpy rural roads to the launch site, but never during the flight.)
The balloon we flew in was brand-new—ours was only its second flight—and the pilot, Ken, told us it was called Midnight Rider (a name I heard in occasional radio communication between Ken and his ground crew). Their other balloon, with the same flame pattern and a yellow envelope, is Tequila Sunrise. I asked if Midnight Rider’s black envelope causes the balloon to retain heat longer, and Ken confirmed that there is a small effect in that direction.
Before our flight, once Suz discovered what the plan was, she texted the much-anticipated info to our children via our our family Message group chat (the Grey Council, we call our family chat—a Babylon 5 reference—because of course we do). “This seems like a bad idea,” she added, only semi-humorously, with a laugh emoji.
“I don’t know if this is the right time for you to learn this Mom,” one of our adult sons helpfully wrote, “but balloons can’t steer.” He also texted a photo of a hot air balloon that “almost crashed into the trees by the barn when I was living there”!
This isn’t entirely true, it turns out. While balloons can’t directly steer and can’t move in any direction the pilot wants, a pilot may be able to make some adjustment in the balloon’s direction simply by varying altitude to catch different layers of winds moving in different directions. Throughout our flight, when Ken wanted to bear more to the right, he let the balloon sink lower; to go more to the left, he increased our altitude. (From higher altitudes he gauged the differing directions in different layers of wind by spitting over the side.)
Hunterdon County is one of the least populous counties in New Jersey, and apparently “leads the State in farmland acreage, hay production value, and hay harvested acreage,” among other farming leading indicators. There’s also a lot of parkland.
Any way you look is beautiful and photogenic, is the point.
I have frequent, vivid flying dreams, and flight is a powerful thing for me. Whenever the balloon was rising, I wanted to go higher—to be able to see more over nearby hills and further to the horizon.
On the other hand, whenever the balloon sank, I found the nearness of trees and such exciting, and I wanted to go as low as possible!
A couple of times people on the ground waved from their backyards and shouted to ask how it was going. The answer, of course, was that it was wonderful.
It was interesting to see how our passage overhead affected animals below. I expected small animals like rabbits and such to be spooked by a dark shadow overhead, but I was surprised to see similar consternation from larger animal like deer, who scattered or took shelter under trees. Animals like that have no close evolutionary history of predators from above, and the balloon’s passage was absolutely silent—except when Ken hit the burner, which made a roaring sound that did nothing to calm the animals below. (Incidentally, firing the burner creates a lot of heat.)
As we came in for a landing in a yard where he has landed a number of times, the ground crew was there ahead of us. Ken pointed to a circular patch of grass in a circle driveway and said he aimed to drop the basket right there. He didn’t quite hit his target, but it was a very near thing.
In short order the balloon was packed away, and we returned to home base for hors d’oeuvres and champagne (with iced tea for Suz, who drinks neither alcoholic nor carbonated beverages).
I took some but obviously not all of the photos above; ground photos of the balloon in flight, and some of the photos from the air, were provided by Balloons Over Clinton and posted to their Facebook page. (There are a couple of lovely and dramatic photos not included here, for reasons I will not divulge.) I have good ideas sometimes.
It sounds very memorable. Tell me: did you watch Andrei Rublev the day before to prepare yourself? Ha ha ha. When I was a teenager, I was stupid enough to re-watch Unbreakable (a favorite of mine) the day before I went on a long train ride. I wasn't scared, but I was definitely more nervous during that trip.