Fire in the Sky

Or, how to create a debacle with an 80-cent package of tissue paper.

I was just a kid. It was the perfect morning for it, totally windless, cool and clear. The stillness was striking, in fact, there just weren’t any days out on that hillside when there wasn’t at least a breeze. My father was about to leave for work, but it was about 6:00 AM, and we both had some time.

I’m sure he didn’t think the balloon would even fly. Tolerant but a skeptic, that was my dad.

In our valley and all adjacent valleys, weather almost always comes from the west. It just does. Once in a while an errant storm comes in from another direction, but usually not.

I’d put about a week of spare time into that tissue paper envelope, making a hot air balloon, and that was all it was. Tissue paper, a single layer, green and white, vertical stripes. The year was probably 1965. I’d happened onto the construction details in a school library book, and instantly glommed onto it. Why wouldn’t I? It was big, it was showy and best of all, it was cheap.

At that time, there were no middle schools. The grades were divided differently and I was a “junior” high schooler. Also at that time I walked to school about a half-mile to town and then across-town. Every day, twice a day I detoured through the local Murphys Five and Ten, formerly known as “the five and dime,” but it surely wasn’t the equivalent of a dollar store. Those are many and relatively very small. Murphys was a department store.

Also at that time, flat folded packs of tissue paper cost all of eighty cents, seven dollars now. Elmers Glue was maybe ten or fifteen cents for the small bottle. The entire balloon could be made from a single pack, but I splurged and bought a green and a white pack.

I wish I still had the plans. It was constructed of eight panels, each one twenty inches wide at the widest point, the vertical segments were about twenty-four, maybe twenty-eight inches, seamed together by folding and gluing. The total height of the finished balloon was about eight feet, or two and a half meters.

Dad wasn’t really interested in wasting any time.

“How ya gonna hold it up?”

“Whattaya mean?”

“I mean, you’ve got to hold it up till the hot air fills the balloon, right? I can’t hold it up for you, it’s taller than I am.”

I hadn’t actually considered that. Of course, there was more to it than that. The section of the book on making a hot air balloon didn’t include any launching instructions. Being that it was still fairly small, it wasn’t going to lift a basket with little steel propane tanks and a burner, no, I’d followed the instructions and had wired-together a square wooden frame out of kite spars. You were supposed to use balsa wood, but I didn’t have access to balsa. Two light steel wires were tied across the corners, forming an “x” in the center. On that “x” I’d hung a cotton ball, made of a roll of cotton. That was to be soaked with isopropyl rubbing alcohol and lit with a match, and there was your heat source.

I suppose when the book was written, isopropyl alcohol was pure. Since then, though, they had added water in varying concentrations, and the damned thing would barely stay lit.

By this time Dad had gone and gotten the pickup truck and was standing on the high tailgate, arm extended, holding the top of the balloon. And he’s impatient.

“Let’s scrap this idea, okay? I’ve gotta get to work!”

Scrap it? No way.

“Hang on, be right back!”

I ran and grabbed a quart can of denatured alcohol from Dad’s painting supplies. That would burn, at least. We’d already grabbed my mom’s Electrolux and reversed the hose so it blew air, and that helped to fill it. I brought Dad’s propane torch, too.

Dad stood there, holding the project up.

“If this thing catches fire, I’m droppin’ it.”

Unthinkable, but it almost did. I added just enough denatured to maintain a steady flame, but then it flared and I had a real fireball, licking its way up through the envelope.

“Ready? I’m gonna let go!”

I thought it was about to be dropped onto the ground, but instead, we had liftoff. Slowly at first, but the flaring stopped and it just kinda hung there for a few seconds. Then, it started to climb. I mean, really climb.

“Shouldn’t you have a tether on this thing?”

Well, yeah, the instructions did mention that, but I figured, how long can a li’l cotton ball burn? String just adds weight, more as it rises, and of course, I didn’t even know if it would fly. I figured it would go up and come right back down.

Physics has its own rules, however, as does weather. The cold morning air was like an ocean and my paper envelope, exactly like an air bubble. To me it was just a fairly quick rise. To some casual observer, the thing was getting away, fast. I guess it was.

Dad was already in the cab of the truck.

“I have to go. Don’t miss school! And put your mother’s vacuum back!”

Today, everybody’s got a cell phone. The lucky kids might have had a walky-talkie then, and you could carry on a conversation with, like, one kid. Walky-talkies hardly ever took good pictures. My only camera was a Brownie Starmite, the format was 127. I didn’t keep film in it, so I don’t have any pictures.

All I’ve got is an old man’s vivid recollection of my creation seemingly vanishing from sight, no doubt at least a thousand feet up, maybe two. You couldn’t see it at all after a while, and I would have lost sight of it altogether except for the bright twinkle of the fire. It had been burning and burning and burning, at least for a half an hour. Up there, the wind caught it, and it thankfully actually headed west. To the west lay the fields of the penitentiary farm. To get there, first the balloon had to cross a farm, and then a deep ravine that had a brass mill in it. And it had made it beyond that, no doubt about it.

And then, it happened. There was a fire onboard. I was of course powerless to do any more than watch, like a rocketeer. Probably one of the wires broke, the burning mass of cotton separated and flared, and it lit the paper envelope. From where I stood it was, just, a little fire, while up where it was, it was a total conflagration scenario. After watching it flare out on the way down, I gathered everything up and went inside.

My mom was waiting.

“Your brother is already on his way to school! Were you planning on going?”

Of course, my mom had questions, while I ate my cereal. I explained what happened to my hot air balloon.

To my mother, I had just admitted to dropping napalm on all of our innocent neighbors.

“What if it landed on somebody’s house? You’ll have burned them out! What if it landed on a car? They’ll have a wreck!”

I tried to explain, but to her, the balloon being harmlessly over the penitentiary farm was an impossibility.

The next morning I'm sitting with another bowl of cereal, and the radio news was on.

Announcer: “A fire of unexplained origin burned a garage in…”

My mother whirled and looked at me. “You see? Now what do we do?”

“Mom, that balloon wasn't anywhere near…”

And it wasn't. I can't deny, the balloon should have been on a tether. Mom would never even begin to believe me, though. Or so she said.

Needless to say, the event hamstrung my persistent experimentations. It was, however, a harbinger of my future. I would not become the scientist, but I would build things, for those who were.

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