dance #299, a boy not quite adrift in a hot air balloon

Thursday October 15, 2009

A boy not quite adrift in a hot air balloon

3:00 p.m. I walk through the lobby of a building and a TV newsreel plays footage of a hot air balloon flying out of control through the skies of Colorado. Streaming through the wind. A silver flying saucer. Caught in air pockets. Tossed in the wind. There’s a boy inside. Six years old. The balloon, they fear, could float up 10,000 feet. Later the BBC posts video clips. First of the balloon coming down in a field. And then as the family is being interviewed. Turned out, the boy—named Falcon—wasn’t in the balloon. He’d hid himself in the attic in a box after his dad yelled at him for climbing into the craft. The dance is the floating balloon as the anchorperson narrates the event on TV. “He’s coming down. He’s just about touched down.” The dance is the balloon buoyed, aloft, and out of control, tossed around by fears that a small boy might perish inside. The day was cold, windy and grey. And I listened over and over to a audio-tuned remix of Carl Sagan singing the majesty of the cosmos. Beautiful! Alice wanders elsewhere. She’s agitated.

~ by nmyers on October 17, 2009.