The Balloonist

If Runtz Cake is your strain, this is your sign: the Balloonist. A clover field below the terraces at ten to five, a striped envelope standing up on a roar of flame, and the whole valley still asleep under the basket.

If Runtz Cake is your strain

You are up before the farm is, and you like it that way. Your best hour is the cold one before sunrise, when the air lies still in layers and the valley has not decided what kind of day it will be. You do not try to steer it. You read it, rise or sink a little, and let the morning take you somewhere better than you planned.

You move in long, easy arcs. Nothing about you hurries, yet you are rarely late: before you decide anything you let a little pink balloon go and watch where it drifts, which looks like dawdling to anyone watching and is in fact the whole method. When you do commit, you commit with a roar, and you are laughing before your boots leave the ground.

At your best you bring people the view. You know which field is pink this week and which roof smells of breakfast, and you have a knack for coming back over everything twice, low and then from further up, so whoever is with you sees it both ways. People remember mornings with you as lighter than other mornings and cannot quite say why.

Your flaw is the landing. You never know exactly where you will come down, and you have stopped promising. Somebody always has to drive the truck and wait at the edge of a wet field, and you always arrive grinning, a field or a mile from where you said, with a story that makes it sound planned. The people who love you keep dry socks in the truck and have stopped asking where.

What you need is a calm morning, a valley with a few layers of wind in it, and one friend on the ground who will catch the line without getting up. Give you that and a little flame, and the whole day rises with you.

Your hour: Ten to five, before the sun clears the ridge
Your place: The basket, a few hundred feet over the terraces
Your object: A little pink balloon, let go first
Your tempo: Slow climb, quick laugh
Your weather: A still morning with three layers of wind
Your flaw: You never say where you’ll land

Your people

The Daydreamer (Blue Dream)The Daydreamer draws the sunrise from her bluff before it happens; you float through it while it does. She has put your stripes in the corner of page one more than once.
The Sprinter (Green Crack)The Sprinter races the sun along the ground and you rise with it. She has never once beaten you to the ridge, and you have never once mentioned the head start.
The Aurora Keeper (Northern Lights)The Aurora Keeper has the sky all night and hands it to you at ten to five. You compare notes at the changeover, mostly about clouds.

Things you say

Let the little one go first.
You can’t steer the sky. You can pick a layer.
Box morning. Don’t move the truck.
Every landing is a field you haven’t met yet.
Going up is the easy part. Coming down is where the story is.

A scene from your world

A box morning

At ten to five the Balloonist is in the clover field below the terraces with a cold nose and the envelope laid out in front of her like a long striped tablecloth: pink, green, cream, pink, green, cream, and a cream crown at the far end. The fan has it half full of cold air already, rippling. Benno, who drives the chase truck and has never once set foot in the basket, holds the crown line out there in the wet and says the dew is personal.

Before anything else she lets go of a little pink balloon, a rubber one the size of a melon, and watches it. It climbs straight, leans east over the mill road, and then, much further up, stops leaning and drifts back west over the bakery. She laughs out loud. Three layers: the ground air going nowhere, the river wind running east, and above it a wind coming home. “Box morning,” she calls. Benno sits down on the tailgate. He knows what that means. He will be waiting in the same field she leaves.

She pulls the blast valve. The flame goes up into the mouth of the envelope with a sound like a door opening onto summer, and the stripes stand up off the field, slowly and then all at once. When the basket goes light under her hands she gives one more long blast and the field lets go. The clover drops away, the truck shrinks to a green matchbox, and the terraces come up around her in steps: wheat, flax, the pink clover, the orchard at the top, laid up the valley side like shelves in a pantry.

In the low layer she drifts east over the mill road at a walking pace; the river wind is in no hurry, and neither is she. Then she climbs, counting, through the line where that wind gives out, and the basket turns the way baskets do when the morning changes its mind, and she is heading back west over everything she has already seen, from further up. The sun clears the ridge. The envelope lights stripe by stripe, pink first.

Over the bakery the warm air from the ovens rises with a smell of vanilla and the first tray of buns, and for a moment the balloon rides it with the burner quiet. She lets it. The baker is a white apron in a doorway, waving a tray. She waves a glove back.

Then down, letting the envelope cool and sink through the top wind and into the river wind, which carries her the last few hundred yards east again, back over the clover. Benno is exactly where she left him. She drops the line; he catches it without getting up. The basket touches the clover twice and settles a field’s length from where it started, which almost never happens, and which she will tell everyone about anyway.

The valley

The clover field: The launch field below the terraces, pink in early summer and soaking wet at ten to five. Balloons go up from here, and on a box morning they come back down in it.
The envelope: Six stripes of pink, green and cream from the mouth to a cream crown, patched in two places. It stands up off the field on a roar of flame and folds back into its bag damp with dew.
The little balloon: A pink rubber balloon let go before every flight. Where it drifts, low and then further up, is the only forecast the Balloonist trusts.
The terraces: Fields stepped up the valley side: wheat, flax, clover and the orchard at the top. From the basket they look like shelves someone stocked with care.
The bakery at the crossroads: The ovens are lit at four. On still mornings the warm air off the roof smells of vanilla and carries a balloon a little way with the burner quiet.
The chase truck: Green, dented and driven by Benno, who has never set foot in the basket and has never missed a landing.