Loose Goose Fly In

Saturday morning liftoff. Winds were light and variable. Many pilots were able to land back where they started after an hour criss crossing the skies over McMinnville airport.

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Heard in the field - poetic genius

"I Just don't use my words very well. I'm not the most articulated person in the world."

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Nylon Gulliver

I've been working the crown line a lot lately when we're crewing balloons. If you trace out the anatomy of a hot air balloon, it all starts at a single piece of milled metal - the load ring. About the same cross section as a man's thumb, and about 8 inches in diameter, the load ring is the key.

The balloon itself is constructed by attaching about two dozen pieces of heavy nylon load tape (think half-inch wide seatbelt fabric) to the load ring. These load tapes run all the way to the bottom of the balloon envelope and become the vertical load-bearing parts to the balloon. Horizontal load tapes maintain the shape, and the colorful nylon - which keeps the air inside, but doesn't carry the weight - is stretched to fill the gaps between the load tape network. When the balloon is in flight, everything ultimately dangles from the load ring; when on the ground, the position of the whole balloon is maintained through control of the load ring. That's where the crown line comes into play.

The crown line is a rope connected to the load ring. You maneuver the load ring from the ground with the crown line.

When we stand a balloon up, we first use a fan to cold pack the balloon with air. While cold-packing, the crown line is astonishingly boring. The balloon fills, and the crown line just dangles there. For the uninitiated, it would seem like crown line is the least interesting job at the launch site. That'll change, though.

Once nearly full of cold air, the balloon lies, sideways, on the ground like a sleeping giant - a sort of non-human gulliver. The pilot, once they deem it's time, ignites the propane burner and blasts the first wall of heat into the cold envelope. That first burn knifes a jet of heat into the mass of cool air. Finding itself confined by the balloon envelope, the warm air balls up like a fist and presses hard against the uppermost part of the envelope - a spot near the balloon's equator. As that first heat ball spurs the balloon, it looks for all the world like gulliver just quivered into life with a sudden heartbeat and a gasping intake of breath. The chest rises, the ribs and shoulders shudder and quake. Ripples run across the fabric, threatening motion like a stirring giant.

About this time, the pilot gives another jolt of heat. The fist of heat is enlarged to fill about half of the balloon envelope's volume. And with this, the balloon shudders more deeply, then rises to its feet, awakened and alive, towering above the lilliputians that are the ground crew, able - but for it's natural benevolence - to inflict great harm upon the small, frail beings who dare to believe they are the masters of the balloon.

And that's when the crown line becomes an interesting job!

A typical hot air balloon stands in excess of seventy feet from top to bottom. That's a seven story building. When it shifts from lying down to standing up, it takes about 10 seconds. The person holding the crown line must engage in a game they are destined to lose - applying pressure to the load ring so that the balloon does not wobble once upright. But not too much pull - because the balloon can and will lift you off your feet if you're not careful. Just prior to the balloon standing up, the balloon envelope and the crown line are stretched out in a straight line. Seventy feet of balloon to the load ring, then 100 feet of crown line rope extending beyond. When the balloon stands up, the person holding the end of the crown line moves from 170 feet away to about 90-100 feet away in about ten seconds. That's about 7mph or a healthy jogging pace. Except you have to have full body weight pulling back against the crown ring to avoid a wobbling balloon envelope once its upright. So in other words, the crown line attendant looses a tug of war in a controlled fashion, at a speed of a healthy run!

It's a balancing act, managing the crown line. But it's something most anyone can do. This morning, for example, my wife C handled Crown line masterfully. R weighs about 90 pounds: he's capable of crown line except on particularly breezy days. I like to run Crown Line because my personal favorite sight - that of the gulliver awakening - can only be fully appreciated from the Crown line's point of view.

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Willamette Aerostat Society

C and I attended our first meeting of the Willamette Aerostat Society tonight. It was a good time and a lot of fun. More details later.

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Inspections, Connections and Best of Intentions

It was a busy week. The calendar was full to the point of bursting. C spent most of the week jetting around with her afterburners on, so as to get two high school exchange students where they needed to be on time, a college-age exchange student on a slightly different schedule where HE needed to be on time, groceries, other shopping, household finances and banking, schedules for R and M (thankfully ballet was done by this week), fencing, and a couple days of early morning balloon crewing. There's no way around it, she was running HARD all week.

N's work was a busy schedule, too. With two parents and five 'kids' in the house, it took a lot of coordinating and schedule juggling to get everyone everywhere on a reasonable schedule.

So, as we rolled in to Friday night, we were both exhausted-type tired. But it wasn't over yet. Friday required the hand-off of R and M to the grandparents for the weekend, and a complicated coordination for the exchange students. See, the students were spending the weekend with the exchange program leaders in Seattle. Except the teenagers could not stay overnight in the house unchaperoned. A PIA adult needed to stay over Friday night with them all. That was fine, in that the PIA adult then just rendezvoused with the larger group for the Seattle trip. Still, we had to wait until the students were finished at 7PM, feed them, orient the adult, clean the kitchen, and all that. It was nearly 10pm before we were done,

Now we could get on with our PERSONAL agenda.

C and I were heading to Walla Walla to look at a hot air balloon, you see.

The balloon we were inspecting might be for sale. If it were for sale, it would be the perfect balloon to use for training some new pilots. Whether that balloon could ever be a part of the Johnson family is quite the stretch right now, but we had the chance to go through the inspection process, and learn what to look for in a balloon when considering a purchase, THAT was the big lesson from this process - C and I had a 'date' and learned more about ballooning by going through this exercise.

That date, however, came with some pretty hard-core scheduling. If we thought we were tired at 10pm on Friday night, that was nuthin'...

C and I poured ourselves into the car. With just the two of us, we had a great opportunity to just put our stuff in the trunk and drive the smooth rig. The Jaguar's odometer reads over 100,000 miles now (though few would know to look at it), so it's preferred to rack up the miles on the high-mileage, 30mpg Jag as opposed to the lower-mileage, still under warranty, 24mpg Odyssey. "Don't take the Odyssey if you'll fit in the Jag" is our new motto.

Anyway, we headed out Friday night with a few convenience items in the trunk:

• a small tent
• sleeping bags
• folding chairs
• overnight bags with clothes and toiletries
• balloon crewing gear
• camera gear

We were prepared for a number of options. We didn't know if we were staying over until Sunday, or exactly what. We didn't have a hotel reservation, but we knew of availability in a couple hotels in town, and a close-in RV park with tent spaces. So we had all our options covered.

The getting out of town was relatively easy. Traffic was light; the night was warm. We popped open the sunroof and motored out of town on I-84, headed down the scenic Columbia River Gorge for points east.

But we were tired. C fell asleep as we got out toward Troutdale, and mostly slept the whole trip. She assured me that she could drive if I needed her to, but I could tell from how heavily she was sleeping that I shouldn't ask her to drive.

So I set the cruise control and worked to bring the things on which I had to concentrate down to a minimum. I set cruise control so I only had to think about steering. I turned on some music to occupy my brain and help me measure the passage of time. And I tried to make a four hour drive seem like it was going fast.

It didn't.

We were about halfway (Arlington, OR), when I nodded a couple times, and slightly misjudged my line through a couple curves. That was it. I pulled over at the next exit, an overpass out in the middle of nowhere. I turned left, crossed over the interstate on the overpass, looking for a reasonable place to pull over and snooze safely. As I rolled slowly over the overpass my headlights picked up a long thin object splayed out across the still-warm asphalt. As i got closer, I could tell it was a rattlesnake, stretched out to its full five or six foot length, soaking up the heat still in the road. I straddled the rattler with my wheels, so as not to hurt it, and made a note not to step outside the car without a good look around first,

C slept through this whole thing. She roused enough to ask what we were doing. I told her I needed to nap a bit, and she muttered assent as she relaxed back into her own sleep. I shut down the engine and the lights, was pleasantly startled by the eruption of stars in the sky, and took a nap for about an hour.

When I awoke, I was better, though still tired (naturally). Good enough to drive, though. So I rustled around a little to get prepared -- a drink of water, stuff like that.

This woke C up. She checked in on my with loving concern, then she too noticed the stars, "oh wow! Look at all the stars. Can I just get out for a bit to enjoy them."

Remembering the rattler, I said "I really wouldn't recommend that.,"

"why not?"

"It's just not a good idea right now." I didn't elaborate. A big rattlesnake in the vicinity would be a major freakout for C. She doesn't like snakes. She heard the undertone of 'I say this for general safety reasons' and she decided not to press the issue.

"Oh. Okay, Can we take just a minute and enjoy the stars from in here?"

"Of course. Absolutely."

We did, and then C said "okay. We can go now."

I turned on the ignition and, when the headlights erupted with light, we caught a field mouse and a desert rabbit in our beams, just a handful of yards in front of us. They scampered. I was wondering if either had had a run-in with the snake yet.

I drove slowly back to the freeway on-ramp. The rattler was no longer where it had been before. I didn't have to say anything to C then. I think she was asleep again even before I got up to highway speed and set the cruise control.

Not quite two hours later, I was looking to take another survival nap, when I realized we were within 20 miles of Walla Walla. I just pushed on through, and just after 3am I found the hotel where we were to rendezvous at 5:30. We just pulled up next to the balloon trailer in the parking lot, rolled the seats back and settled in. I turned the key off, shut my eyes and -- what seemed like an instant later -- was awakened by a gentle tapping on the glass. There was our group -- glad to see us, even though we were still so dazed that it took us a good five minutes just to regain our command of the English language.

A potty break, a brush of the teeth, and a fresh cup of Joe from the continental breakfast, and by 6am we were enroute to run an inspection of the balloon.

We all rolled out to a farm outside town, where we met a well-regarded balloonist and Repair Station owner. This gentleman had the balloon system in his possession, while the current owners decide their go-forward plans, We helped him load the balloon into his truck and headed back into town to set up at the Walla Walla Fairgrounds.

The balloon is stunningly gorgeous, We've been accustomed to crewing on 100,000 CuFt sizes, so a nimble little 77,000 CuFt was like a sports car. As we walked through the inspection process with the agent, and handful of other pilots we knew, we learned so much about what to look for.

• How to assess the fabric for condition
• Spotting scorches and repairs
• evaluating the condition of the basket, burners, fuel lines and tanks.
• tons of details.

It was a delight. Its a beautiful balloon. Should it get a new owner, they'll be delighted with it.

So, by 9am, we were done. The balloon was packed up and hauled away, leaving the Portland pilots nothing more to do than get a coffee and debrief, then - as we learned at that moment - start the drive home.

Yep. Less than seven hours in Walla Walla start-to-finish, and we were done!

C had slept a lot more than me, though neither of us was truly rested. So, I took the opportunity to ride shotgun with another Pilot, Tom, and let C have four hours of blissful, leather-wrapped solitude in the car. After her busy week managing the lives of five youth from nine to twenty-three, she was delighted to drive the Jag solo, tucked in behind the Portland-bound balloon trailer and think about the beautiful balloon she'd just seen. I rode with Tom, and we talked balloons, events, books, music, family life, and all sorts of stuff. We also rode along in silence for quite some time -- like guys will so often do. It seemed that C was thankful for the quiet time. She called us a couple times during the second half of the trip, just to talk and ask questions about the morning inspection that came up as she replayed it in her mind. It was good.

We got home about 3pm to an empty house. C and I had a date night roughed out in our heads... some time to ourselves. AND, we were tired and in need of a shower and food. I sat down on the living room couch for a one hour nap while C headed for the shower first.

The next thing I knew, I woke up not in the afternoon light, but in the pre-dawn light of Sunday morning. I checked my watch and I'd slept 14 hours uninterrupted. On the couch, In my clothes. With my shoes still on. In fact, it was now Sunday morning and I was still wearing the identical clothes that'd I'd put on after work on Friday. This had absolutely turned into a rock-and-roll road trip. Three days in the same clothes; sleeping in cars and on couches. We hadn't used a single convenience item except our toothbrushes and the camera. Geez. At least I woke up at home on the third day!

There was evidence that C had slept on the loveseat as well, though she wasn't there when I awoke. I learned later that she'd gone up to bed.

I was disappointed that we'd missed a Saturday night opportunity (they're so rare) together, and so was she. But, she was very understanding of how hard I'd pushed to keep the schedule and get everything to fit. The balloon inspection was a great treat for us. So that became our date.

Sunday evening, the students all returned happy from their trip. Seattle was a lot of fun for them, what with Pike Street Market, the original Starbucks and a Mariners game. They liked their trip very much,

Monday morning? C got up at 5am and helped on a ground crew. Bless her.

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Live Like You're On A Cruise Ship

So the Typhoon house is in transition with international students. Jin, our Korean student who has lived with us for 5 months, is going home on Tuesday. We have two teenage Japanese high school students overlapping; here since Thursday and staying three weeks.

The result? We've been getting a lot of sight-seeing done. Jin and his friend Soo Jung, had a few things they wanted to see before they left; the Japanese boys were interested in a number of the the same things. So a number of big-group trips took place over the weekend - some planned, some serendipitous.

For me, though, involved in the execution and oversight of much of this agenda, I was exhausted at the end. Happy, but exhausted.

Friday Night:

Rose Garden at sunset.

Saturday:

4AM Wake up call

6AM Balloon crewing in Jefferson, OR.
M and C stay home so M can go to Ballet class

10AM Watch the Jefferson Mint Festival parade in downtown Jefferson.

11AM Stop at the State Capital for a picnic lunch, find a street basketball tournament. Stay to watch for a while.

M and C go to Portland Saturday Market

2PM Nap

Saturday night movie night

11PM lights out

Sunday:

4AM wakeup call.

5AM Balloon Crew in Woodburn. Take FIVE members of the household.

9AM Breakfast at home in Portland,

11AM Day trip to Mount St Helens with SEVEN in the car - three Johnsons and four exchange students.

8PM Dinner for seven at Sivalai Thai restaurant (our favorite Thai place) at 7PM on the return.

11PM lights out

This is the sort of non-stop, all-hours, high-energy, touristy activity that I remember from the cruise ship. Whew!

Moving Faster Than Light

Things are good. Just a quick post to register the fact that we currently have three Japanese exchange students living with us. They'll be here for the next three weeks or so. They're delightful and we're having a blast. R is running with a posse of boys, and M is the extra-special team mascot.

Some of our acquainted families have four or five children in the household...for us, it's a bit of a step up to manage that many sets of agendas simultaneously. But we're enjoying the energy and the attitudes.

The side-effect, however, is that I have much less time available for thoughtful introspection or blog updates. Don't be surprised if I'm a little quieter for a while here at typhoonjohnson.blogspot.com ... I'll be back shortly, to be sure.