A few weeks ago Kindra said she was going to sign up for a hot air balloon flight at the FireLake Fireflight Balloon Festival in August.
Would I want to go with her?
Man. What a tough question.
Of course I’d want to. Kindra and I have done many interesting things in the last year and I’d like to add to the list.
We hit the Scottish Highland Gathering last fall and Oklahoma Tulips in the spring.
We packed Moon Pies and Sunkist pop and drove to Antlers to take in the eclipse in April, and we did the Renassiance Faire in Muskogee a few weeks later.
My personal favorite was a flight in May on a 1929 Ford Tri-Motor airplane. On short notice, Kindra pulled together a Flapper outfit and looked very much like a 1920s vixen heading out on an adventure.
Itookphotoswithanalmostperiod-appropriate twin lens camera and framed a 16x20 of her with the plane to hang on my wall.
So, yes, of course, I would like to go ballooning with her.
Except for one thing: I would be terrified to sway in a large picnic basket several hundred feet above the ground in a flame-powered balloon.
Actually, terrified is not a strong enough word for how scared I would be.
Bear in mind that I used to be a bullrider back when the earth was young, I’ve been noodling and I’ve been whitewater rafting. Even ran four half-marathons and a 20K.
So, this isn’t a case of fearing the dangerous or the unfamiliar or even the merely stressful. It’s far more primal.
The idea of being that vulnerable that far above the ground makes my legs tingle, very much the way they do when I see that photo of the steelworkers with their lunchboxes sitting on a beam above New York City in the 1930s.
I recall being a frightened first-grader riding the school bus at Fitzhugh when it would go on the overpass by where Doris Chambers lived south of town. I would close my eyes until I felt the driver hit the brakes to turn left at the bottom of the overpass.
Heights still affect me that way unless I’m enclosed in a plane or helicopter So, of course I would like to go, but there’s no realistic way I could ever step into that basket knowing they were about to cast the line or release the tether or chop the rope or whatever it is they do.
So, I offered instead to be the Official Kindra Photographer and Support Crew.
I’ll load up a couple of my old film cameras and go all LIFE magazine, maybe even do a photo spread that we can frame and hang on the wall at home.
And I’ll pack some snacks and water bottles and take lots of pictures as they heat up the balloon, load the passengers and begin floating up over Pott County.
Later on, the chase crew will bring Kindra back to me and we’ll return home tired but happy, as they used to say.
And neither of us will be embarrassed because we cowered in the bottom of the basket and whimpered like a 2-year-old.