Joy Ride

“Thank the Lord for a good parking space,” sighed Al Muir. We had the entire lot behind the Benny’s Carwash on Hamilton Street in Gonzales to ourselves, and that was just enough for Muir’s hot air balloon to skid to a stop as I hopped out to guide the basket from the grass to the pavement. Dew was burning off quickly in the 9 am sun.

It took all my weight to anchor the pilot and his bouncing craft to the ground. “I’m keeping it light!” Muir warned. Then he tossed me a rope, opening the valve to let air hiss free while I tugged the wrinkling nylon down toward me. The balloon was streamlined, pushed flat, and furled up with the help of the ground crew, who had driven to the wrong field at first and missed our descent. “Just in time,” said Muir, pointing to an American flag that rippled in front of the car wash. “That’s when you know to come down.”

You don’t get in an open basket and shoot one thousand feet up in the air without more than a little confidence in your pilot. I’d just met Muir that morning, but his forty years of competition balloon racing and nine years on a nuclear submarine before that got me off the ground sure enough. Sea or sky, Muir’s a born navigator. The seventy-three-year-old has operated Bear Creek Balloons, an aerial advertising and hot air balloon ride firm based in west Houston, since 1976. He had been on the road (and in the sky) for three weeks when we met and professed relief that he’d be headed back to Houston after the Ascension Hot Air Balloon Festival concluded. But for that hour we sailed over Gonzales, the sun racing ahead of us, he looked at home to me.

There were just two of us in BOB (bought used from a friend, Muir dubbed his craft “Buoy’s Old Balloon”), but we weren’t alone in the air. On the second morning of the festival, before the Lamar Dixon Expo Center gates opened to the public for a day of live music, tethered rides, and balloon glows as the sun went down, Director of Hot Air Balloon Operations Robert Ambeau had convened the pilots and their volunteer crew members before sunrise. Joy rides were in order, but first, coffee, donuts, and an in-person weather report from WAFB 9 meteorologist Jay Grymes. “Robert invites me here so he has someone to blame,” joked Grymes to the crowd, before delivering welcome news: Sunrise at 6:52 am. Winds ENE at the surface. Above the boundary layer—that layer being the air near the ground affected by topography and the day’s impending heat—winds would shift to ESE, moving at a range of 7 to 10 knots. The pilots were pleased. With a directive to land before 10 am, Ambeau dismissed the group.

I’d just met Muir that morning, but his forty years of competition balloon racing and nine years on a nuclear submarine before that got me off the ground sure enough.

Liftoff in a balloon is really nothing like in a plane. There are no seatbelts, no tray tables. Muir did ask that I stay tucked into the basket and we had to yell over the roar of burning fuel, but moving with the wind, rather than slicing against it, eliminated the sense of struggle. In fact, we were well above the treetops before I took full stock of our new surroundings. I've never lived in Gonzales, and so overhead it was an unfamiliar collection of tiny houses and stores, roads dotted with morning traffic. As we floated southeast with the wind, morning fog receded to reveal more of the miniature town.

“Listen here,” said Muir. “I’ll give you the best description of flying in a balloon that I’ve ever heard. My wife said it.” Alice Muir passed away in 2009 following a battle with cancer. She’d been the third of three college roommates he’d dated while in naval bootcamp at Great Lakes outside of Chicago. Alice, he married. “She said it’s like the earth is moving gently away from you.”

Two incidents brought Muir to the world of ballooning. When he was 14, his uncle took him to the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles for a showing of Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956), starring David Niven and Mexican comedian Cantinflas. Filmed in the director’s Todd-AO widescreen format, Jules Verne’s famous story of balloon circumnavigation was shown to the audience as an immersive panorama. When Cantinflas, playing the valet Jean Passepartout to Niven’s Phileas Fogg, grabbed two fistfuls of snow from a passing Alp to cool a bottle of champagne, Muir turned to his uncle: “How can I do that?”

Then, in 1971: Muir was working at Digital Equipment Corporation in Boston when a balloon glided over Highway 495. “I pulled off the road and just stared up at it.”

When Cantinflas, playing the valet Jean Passepartout to Niven’s Phileas Fogg, grabbed two fistfuls of snow from a passing Alp to cool a bottle of champagne, Muir turned to his uncle: “How can I do that?”

Five years later, Muir was racing. His truck, trailer, and balloon all bear stickers from competitions. He emerged the champion of the Great Houston Balloon Race and The Valley Rally in Alamosa, Colorado, among others, and competed with the winning U.S. team at the 1985 World Championship in Battle Creek, Michigan. In 1983, he traveled with his wife and two daughters to Annonay, France, for the bicentennial of the first balloon flight, on November 21, 1783, which was based on the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers (they sent a duck, a chicken, and a goat up in one flight, two months before humans dared to try it out) but manned by Count Francois Pilater DeRozier and the Marquis D’Arlandes, Francois Laurent.

When Muir competes—as he’ll do next month in the Great Mississippi River Balloon Race over Natchez, Mississippi—the goal is often not a finish line but a target, onto which Muir and his fellow racers will drop a weighted marker. The closest to the bullseye wins. Muir’s most frequent task (as the various events are termed) is called a CRAT (Calculated Rate of Approach Task), where a target is open, or valid, for a set window of time.

Our ride that morning was pure leisure. Early in the flight, we approached a strip (from our perspective) of water, and Muir put my camera and me on guard. “This is the only time you see yourself while flying,” he said.

But I’m not sure that’s true. Yes, most clearly, I saw the balloon’s colorful, striped reflection in our quick pass over the water. I saw us too, in shadow along canopies of trees. There we were in our fellow aviators speckling the sky. And when we flew over those dollhouses, dollpeople wandered out to gape up at us, at the spectacle we made.

And in sharp detail, I could see my own expression; because five months ago, I had a baby. Each day my husband and I watch her face, and she shifts, sometimes by the minute, from his likeness to mine. The night before I climbed into Al Muir’s aircraft, my daughter laughed for the first time. An eruption to match her dancing eyes. Five months have led her from mere contentment to happiness and now glee. And as I moved through the air, in a world at once shocking and safe, I think I looked just like her.

For more on Bear Creek Balloons and Captain Allan Muir, visit bearcreekballoons.net. Muir will compete in the Great Mississippi River Balloon Race on October 20—22 in Natchez, Mississippi.