After landing the wicker and leather gondola
As gently as an old father settling his sleeping
Infant to bed—after a slow, methodical, ritual
Folding of the deflated tent of the balloon—
After recruiting the daughter to help pack it in—
The pilot took both father and daughter out
To a massive brunch of plate-sized pancakes
And three-egg omelettes at the local diner.
There, he told this story, by way of explaining
Why balloonists traditionally celebrate flights
With champagne. Two hundred and some
Years ago, two brothers, paper makers
To the French king, were crossing a stream
Filled with moss-covered rocks when
The woman crossing with them slipped
And fell in, soaking her voluminous petticoats.
The brothers built a fire to warm her legs
And to dry her skirts. The wood was damp,
The fire was smoky, and the skirts billowed.
They weighted the hems with small stones
And noted how the petticoats expanded.
They had a notion that it was the smoke
That caused the the fabric to float, wrong,
But it gave them a good idea. Could you sail
A hollow shell of some kind, if it were light
Enough and filled with enough smoke?
Smoke always seeks to go up, after all.
Look at chimneys. Could it lift anything stuck
Over it, trapping it, up along with it? Hmm.
When they got back to Paris, they tinkered.
They made bigger and bigger bells of linen
And papier-mâché that they held up over
The smokiest fires they could create, until
The bells floated their own weight, and then
The weight of small objects attached. Next,
In a barn, they built a huge contraption
With a sort of walkway around the base.
They hauled it into the city and built a filthy fire
Below it, keeping it tied down with ropes.
They intended to stand on the walkway
Themselves and rise up into the air, but
The king forbade them. What if flying killed
Animals God had meant for the land? They were
Too valuable to him, his royal paper makers.
So, the brothers suggested recruiting a convict instead,
Someone no one, least of all a king, could miss.
But the king’s nobles objected that, if
The convict managed to survive the first flight,
The success would make the convict famous
And that was not a good idea. In the end,
They all settled on sending up a lamb, a being
Of the ground, a rooster, a being of feathers
But flightless, and a goose, who could fly.
Would ascent into the sky kill the land beasts?
They cut the ropes that their paper and cloth shell
Was tugging against and watched it soar
Straight up until a wind caught it away. Then
They chased it on horseback, out of the city
And over fields and rivers, across the woods,
Until they caught up with it, crash-landed
In a meadow, where it had already been torn
To pieces by frightened peasants with hoes
And pitchforks. The lamb had stepped
On the goose’s neck and broken it, but
That flightless lamb itself, and the rooster, lived.
The king gave permission for the brothers
To lift themselves up on the next flight.
Wary of terrified peasants, however,
The brothers hatched a plan to reassure
Anyone who saw them floating overhead,
Enough they weren’t murdered as demons
When they came back to ground. They painted
Their next hollow, cloth-and-paper dome
With the royal insignia, and they gilded
The fenced walkway around the base. They
Debated printing leaflets to throw down, but
Peasants tended to be illiterate, so they
Decided on bottles of local wines with visibly
Familiar labels, even to the dimmest rustics,
Instead. On the day of the great adventure,
One of the brothers brought a bottle of good
Champagne. This extravagance proved
Fortunate, when, as they rose, they realized
An edge of their “balloon” had caught fire.
Shaking the champagne bottle really hard,
They popped the cork and doused the flames.
For many years after that, champagne
Was brought along to extinguish embers
On almost all the early hot-air flights, see?
And to this day, balloonists toast successful
Flights with glasses of champagne. The pilot
Smiled at the seven-year-old daughter eating
An egg, sunny-side up on her pancakes.
There had been no champagne this time,
This flight with a child over a countryside
So dense with Mormon wards that every
Subdivision under construction had at least
One white spire already up and another
Half-built, a few blocks away from the first.
Success had been measured in fine weather,
Visibility from Brian Head under early snow,
To the north, all the way to Mt. Trumbull,
Arizona, seventy miles straight to the south.
Celebrations were the sudden ascensions
From a marsh along the Virgin waterway, just
Beneath the floating, cloud-like shadow
Of the sunrise-colored balloon, of first a blue
Heron and then a great horned owl. Pilot,
Father, and daughter had cheered the owl,
Which nearly grazed their placid basket. Now,
Daughter, mouth full, eyes dancing, wanted
To know more from the narrative pilot, “Okay,
I get it, I get it. But what’s champagne?”
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