Up, Up and Away

Chasing dreams across the sky

By Jenna Biter

There’s a staccato chhh, followed by a smell almost like sulfur. Both emanate from a wicker basket sitting on a driveway in suburban Vass. Inside the odd, oversized vessel crouches a man fiddling with the knob of a propane tank. Positioned just so, his polo shirt embroidered with the kaleidoscopic logo Balloons Over America, his shock of pepper-gray hair barely visible over the basket’s rim, it looks as if the man is the elusive first course of a giant’s picnic lunch. As it turns out, Mark Meyer isn’t the protagonist of Jack and the Beanstalk, though he, too, makes trips into the sky. No, Mark is an aeronaut, preparing to demonstrate just how he hornswoggles gravity so that his hot air balloon can fly.

“The reason that the baskets are still made out of wicker is, if you have a propane leak, it sinks to the bottom of the basket and wicks right out,” Mark says, running a hand over the caning, as gaps of light leak between the reeds. “If the basket was plastic, and there was ever a propane leak, it would all sit right here, and then the ignition source . . . it would go boom. Makes for a bad day.”

Lucky for Mark, not even his worst ballooning days have included explosions. Though incidents are rare, the man of the sky has been gored by a cactus; narrowly and simultaneously missed both a barbed wire fence and a nearby interstate; and scuffled with a mulberry tree while a good friend, Jon Hartway, was along for the flight.

  

“I look at Jon and say, ‘This ain’t going to be pretty,’” Mark tells the story with feigned sobriety. “So we gift-wrap this mulberry tree, and we’re stuck up against the trunk. Then the balloon comes down, and there are all these purple mulberries just falling all over us.

“Meanwhile, John is laying in the bottom of the basket about to piss himself, he’s laughing so hard. I ask, ‘What is so funny?’ He says, ‘Mark, we got 1,000 hours of combat. We’ve been shot up, aircraft tore up, and never once have you said, ‘This ain’t going to be pretty.’”

Mark belly laughs and catches his wife, Missy’s, eye as she joins in. Missy has been along for the ride since her aeronaut first took flight, either flying beside Mark in the basket or serving as crew chief in the ground-bound chase vehicle.

The fruit salvo from the mulberry tree left fuchsia welts on the balloon, but the story was worth a few stains. In 2014, Hartway died in an Apache helicopter crash while flying a training mission with the Idaho National Guard, making the memory of the mulberry incident all the more precious. The story — and all the others that the Meyers have collected on their adventures in the sky — have colored the couple’s life with the rosy hue of fond memories, nearly three decades’ worth. Mark first piloted a hot air balloon in the mid-’90s, when his daughters, now grown, were still in the house.

   

“We wanted to buy an aircraft of some sort, but with three daughters, we couldn’t afford a six-seater plane, like a Cherokee Six or something like that,” Mark says matter-of-factly. For nearly 40 years, he served as an Army aviator by day, piloting helicopters — Hueys and Black Hawks — and then fixed-wing turboprops later in his career. Why not share his passion for flight with his family?

“The first balloon, the girls got to pick the color,” Mark says of his daughters Amanda, Morgan and Madison. The Meyers bought their first used setup before their only son, Max, was born. “Never ask three little girls what color balloon they want — because it’s hot pink.”

“When we would go to festivals, little girls would scream, ‘It’s the Barbie balloon!’” Missy says, smiling. In much the same way a new mother insists her baby boy will only be called James but by middle school he’s inevitably Jimmy, the balloon’s official name was Pink Passion, but it was never called anything other than The Barbie Balloon. Though Barbie deflated long ago — for the time being On the Fly is the Meyers’ go-to passenger balloon — the hot pink original flies on in the family house, immortalized in album pages and picture frames on the walls.

   

At first glance, the Meyer house is a shrine to ballooning. In one side room sits a retired basket rimmed with a bar top and wrapped in twinkle lights. In the same room, a second basket, an antique from 1984, serves as top-shelf liquor storage. Together, the baskets make up something of a fantastical pedal pub that tourists might crowd around, exchanging small talk as they cycle through the clouds. Back in the foyer is a painting of Missy with the reflection of a purple balloon in her sunglasses. A game of “I Spy” the hot air balloon could entertain guests for hours, but the stories behind every photo, keepsake and figurine could occupy them for weeks, the odds and ends representing the memories that come with a full life.

Back outside — and still standing in the middle of his basket — Mark reaches for the double metal burner perched overhead. Click. Then he makes another motion. Vooooosh. A hungry flame climbs into the air, rising higher than the roofline. A passing van bucks to a stop. The driver, like most passersby on a regular Wednesday night, is startled by the biblical pillar of fire. Had the balloon been attached, the burner would have warmed the air and inflated the fabric sack until it stood upright. In the next instant, as quickly as the flame appeared, it disappears — perhaps the first genie to go willingly back into its bottle.

Though the fire has gone out, its warmth hasn’t. After an evening of picking through memories, the Meyers seem to be floating up among the clouds, though they hadn’t left the ground.  PS

You can book a hot air balloon ride with Mark and Missy Meyer at balloonsoveramerica.org.

Jenna Biter is a writer and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jennabiter@protonmail.com.