I can’t write about the balloon ride — that hot-air July morning when I floated like a murmuring dream over the planet’s baked surface in central Provence — without at least touching on certain accoutrements of the trip. I mean the lead-up, the whole earthy experience after bullet-training down on the glass-smooth, spanking new TGV line to the farmhouse. Day tours of Seguret, Orange, the Roman ruins, the castles and the drives over and through Provence’s mountains and valleys — it’s all cooked into that week with the fat, hot balloon in the middle…
I have to wade through sense memories of late-night dinners on your airy glassed-in porch: the cold celery root soup, the baked trout — tail, torso and eyeballs deftly prepared and presented by Victor — the steak, the tapenade, the girolle mushrooms , the fruity, juicy tomatoes, and inebriating liquid complement to it all, the vracs of Vaqueyras flowing from the surrounding vineyards themselves, your supply maintained like tap water. When the the counter jug emptied, you refilled at the local co-op.
The loquacious French southerner in the booth at the farmer’s market swirls into view too, the one selling nougat from the nougat capital of Montelimar across the valley. He tried a couple of languages on us until he found the right one, then persisted in bio-graphing us — our home city, our feelings toward Provence and all before we’d chewed up our sample nougat, thanked him and moved on. There were the idyllic back yard evenings, your and Victor’s place smack up against yet another orderly Provence vineyard, grapes bulging under green-leaf canopies to the constant chatter of the cigales, the mythic crickets of southern Provence, that can be had in replica form, their grasshopper likeness carved out bars of lavender soap. The hotter and sunnier the day, the louder this hot-climate-only creature bows its strings. In fact, I associate those turbo-crickets now with “Bedtime in Provence,” not to mention “Waking up in Provence” and the “Whole Day Through in Provence.” Their incessant rattle, evidently varied at times into courtship songs, buzz-sawed into my dozing psyche, raked against oncoming dreams. It’s a soundtrack so persistent and voluminous, it fostered a cinematic sense of anticipation that something big, or its exact and equally potent opposite — nothing at all — was about to happen.
The hills really do roll in Provence, and dales dip and the sun sprays gold dust over the denouement of every “Van Goghian” day. Those largish-BB-size grapes popping toward harvest day on perfect vines in perfect rows, the peaches, every last one of them white and yellow, drool sugar juice that slathers your tongue in a fruity honey-varnish. I just can’t help it then when I think of Provence now that I wrap it all into my “me-and-the-big-balloon-ride” memory crepe.
But yes, the balloon, it is inflating now.
It was mid-week, a Wednesday when you sent me off to Joucas for the main event — at five-freaking a.m. on this particular Wednesday morning in Provence — in this particular week in late July — in this perfect southern French fantasy land, and I drag my and Martine’s half-sleeping derrieres off the pillowy softness of your feather guest bed. Okay, so we’re groggy, the juice of the that grapey earth still negotiating with my head, but it’s a beautiful Provencal morning and in about half an hour I’ll be so happy to be awake and alive and mostly alone on the dawn road in a special exotic foreign yet so creamy-friendly a place as this, where the cartoon Provence farmland stretches to the horizon, a place I imagine is presumably where the fiction ends and the real world begins again in the golden-spray light.
The drive down in the bubbly Peugeot we borrowed from Suzy through that early morning hot-air scape, it was like swabbing honey with cotton. Not yet the scorching hot air that melts you and your bar of milk chocolate in the noonday sun; no this morning air is just right, soft and suspending time to hang it gently over the grapes and lavender, the mattresses of sunflowers, rolled hay bales before another day of hyper-growth begins from the dusty subterranean roots upward. And so we’re driving down in this perfect sunrise hour and the pain of peeling back our sleep-loving eyelids a half hour earlier is entirely forgotten and all I’m thinking about is the perfection of the place and the fact that I don’t have my driver’s license on me and where is the turn-off for Carpentras. We drive down the route and I like to think if I pretend I’m French I’ll be able to drive at the crazy impossible death-defying speeds they do love so.
Speed has been everywhere on this slow trip back to a place from the past. The train south was speed, the silent speed of glassy-smooth metal zinging over glassy-smooth metal, throttling us over a curve of earth carpeted with plowed dirt, then grass, then suddenly, trees — a drifting still life at 160 mph under a hot pale blue sky south of Paris and getting south-er. Hay bales rolled up in fairytale-ish gigantic cylinders. Sunflowers, lined up like marching soldiers in a drug fantasy, luring me southward still. Had the train suddenly produced giant cutting arms that could swing out over the landscape like a harvester in a wheat field, the earth would be shaven in seconds, bush, sunflower, electricity pole and tree arcing into the air like a rooster tail behind a speedboat. The speed is cartoon smooth and makes a kind of living slide show of the view through its TV screen windows, interrupted now and then by the three-second thunder of a TGV blasting by heading north. A sudden cluster of stone houses. Gone. Village. Gone. The cooling towers of a nuclear power station belching steam. Gone. Meanwhile, objects closer by can only present themselves as blurs of light, color-streaked in a blend of wheat-grass brown, utility-pole silver, and wiped smooth of…
I can’t write about the balloon ride — that hot-air July morning when I floated like a murmuring dream over the planet’s baked surface in central Provence — without at least touching on certain accoutrements of the trip. I mean the lead-up, the whole earthy experience after bullet-training down on the glass-smooth, spanking new TGV line to the farmhouse. Day tours of Seguret, Orange, the Roman ruins, the castles and the drives over and through Provence’s mountains and valleys — it’s all cooked into that week with the fat, hot balloon in the middle…
I have to wade through sense memories of late-night dinners on your airy glassed-in porch: the cold celery root soup, the baked trout — tail, torso and eyeballs deftly prepared and presented by Victor — the steak, the tapenade, the girolle mushrooms , the fruity, juicy tomatoes, and inebriating liquid complement to it all, the vracs of Vaqueyras flowing from the surrounding vineyards themselves, your supply maintained like tap water. When the the counter jug emptied, you refilled at the local co-op.
The loquacious French southerner in the booth at the farmer’s market swirls into view too, the one selling nougat from the nougat capital of Montelimar across the valley. He tried a couple of languages on us until he found the right one, then persisted in bio-graphing us — our home city, our feelings toward Provence and all before we’d chewed up our sample nougat, thanked him and moved on. There were the idyllic back yard evenings, your and Victor’s place smack up against yet another orderly Provence vineyard, grapes bulging under green-leaf canopies to the constant chatter of the cigales, the mythic crickets of southern Provence, that can be had in replica form, their grasshopper likeness carved out bars of lavender soap. The hotter and sunnier the day, the louder this hot-climate-only creature bows its strings. In fact, I associate those turbo-crickets now with “Bedtime in Provence,” not to mention “Waking up in Provence” and the “Whole Day Through in Provence.” Their incessant rattle, evidently varied at times into courtship songs, buzz-sawed into my dozing psyche, raked against oncoming dreams. It’s a soundtrack so persistent and voluminous, it fostered a cinematic sense of anticipation that something big, or its exact and equally potent opposite — nothing at all — was about to happen.
The hills really do roll in Provence, and dales dip and the sun sprays gold dust over the denouement of every “Van Goghian” day. Those largish-BB-size grapes popping toward harvest day on perfect vines in perfect rows, the peaches, every last one of them white and yellow, drool sugar juice that slathers your tongue in a fruity honey-varnish. I just can’t help it then when I think of Provence now that I wrap it all into my “me-and-the-big-balloon-ride” memory crepe.
But yes, the balloon, it is inflating now.
It was mid-week, a Wednesday when you sent me off to Joucas for the main event — at five-freaking a.m. on this particular Wednesday morning in Provence — in this particular week in late July — in this perfect southern French fantasy land, and I drag my and Martine’s half-sleeping derrieres off the pillowy softness of your feather guest bed. Okay, so we’re groggy, the juice of the that grapey earth still negotiating with my head, but it’s a beautiful Provencal morning and in about half an hour I’ll be so happy to be awake and alive and mostly alone on the dawn road in a special exotic foreign yet so creamy-friendly a place as this, where the cartoon Provence farmland stretches to the horizon, a place I imagine is presumably where the fiction ends and the real world begins again in the golden-spray light.
The drive down in the bubbly Peugeot we borrowed from Suzy through that early morning hot-air scape, it was like swabbing honey with cotton. Not yet the scorching hot air that melts you and your bar of milk chocolate in the noonday sun; no this morning air is just right, soft and suspending time to hang it gently over the grapes and lavender, the mattresses of sunflowers, rolled hay bales before another day of hyper-growth begins from the dusty subterranean roots upward. And so we’re driving down in this perfect sunrise hour and the pain of peeling back our sleep-loving eyelids a half hour earlier is entirely forgotten and all I’m thinking about is the perfection of the place and the fact that I don’t have my driver’s license on me and where is the turn-off for Carpentras. We drive down the route and I like to think if I pretend I’m French I’ll be able to drive at the crazy impossible death-defying speeds they do love so.
Speed has been everywhere on this slow trip back to a place from the past. The train south was speed, the silent speed of glassy-smooth metal zinging over glassy-smooth metal, throttling us over a curve of earth carpeted with plowed dirt, then grass, then suddenly, trees — a drifting still life at 160 mph under a hot pale blue sky south of Paris and getting south-er. Hay bales rolled up in fairytale-ish gigantic cylinders. Sunflowers, lined up like marching soldiers in a drug fantasy, luring me southward still. Had the train suddenly produced giant cutting arms that could swing out over the landscape like a harvester in a wheat field, the earth would be shaven in seconds, bush, sunflower, electricity pole and tree arcing into the air like a rooster tail behind a speedboat. The speed is cartoon smooth and makes a kind of living slide show of the view through its TV screen windows, interrupted now and then by the three-second thunder of a TGV blasting by heading north. A sudden cluster of stone houses. Gone. Village. Gone. The cooling towers of a nuclear power station belching steam. Gone. Meanwhile, objects closer by can only present themselves as blurs of light, color-streaked in a blend of wheat-grass brown, utility-pole silver, and wiped smooth of any identifying detail.
I’m thinking about some of this behind the wheel of the Peugeot, then Martine steers my reverie toward the strange black human profiles standing like dark sentries along the side of the road with red thunderbolts cutting across their skulls like death, which is exactly what the red thunderbolt represents. Because for each black profile which is outlined in white like most road symbols are outlined only this particular outline is circling the symbol of death because wherever one of these wordless signs stands a fatal accident has occurred. And let me tell you if they weren’t there and you’re driving at 6 a.m. through the cartoon perfect landscape of Provence you’re not thinking about death you’re thinking about the sweet juice of life, the stuff in the peaches and the grapes and the earth and the people and because you’re so filled with early-morning optimism there’s no reason for pessimism and the ultimate end-point of pessimistic logic, which is death and destruction. I slowed down.
Which brings us to Joucas and the balloon.
When you go up in a balloon, your expectations are so… expectant — in terms of that big moment of up, up, and, whoa — away. When Dutch pilot John Bolten blasted propane into fire and his basket of six up into a placid Provence sky there was only calm, ease, peace — and five tourists gently gripping the vinyl cushion running along the rim of the basket. But that first moment comes so effortlessly in the end, almost completely silently (between propane-blasts) and barely noticeable at first. You slip, against your everyday sense of physics, through something that feels like a friction-less universe. You look down and you see sneakers and boots and a floor that looks solid. That first moment upward was a mutation of the train’s speed rush, similarly fostering a sense an invincibility toward the physical laws and personal problems locked stationary to the ground below. This is a less intense, more civilized version of the speed rush. An “up rush,” you might call it. In any case, for the balloon full of newcomers, several days or more worth of anticipation has finally gone real-time.
In the minutes before then, the mind is certainly active, and the more experienced the mind, the more creative its capacity for conjuring the myriad possibilities for an untimely end. One of my traveling companions, Cathy, had told her daughter back home that she was nervous about the trip. Her daughter had been hang-gliding, and was thus convinced her mother could surely handle this relatively easy activity in comparison. “But you don’t understand,” Cathy told her. “I’m older than you are.” Cathy had come all the way from Grand Rapids, Michigan with her husband Kirk Agerson. The troop was rounded out by a young newlywed French couple from Strasbourg, Olivier and Anne-Laúre Braun. The trip was a generous family wedding gift. In the end, Cathy and everyone else agreed with John’s promise — five minutes up and any tension drops away.
As we stood staring at the basket before the flight, watching the collapsed balloon begin to take on its third dimension, my basket companions and I exchanged “nope, me neithers.” Everyone was outwardly calm, certainly; but also brightly curious about our immediate future. But it was hard to get very nervous amid the sweet dew of a Provence summer morning anyway. The physics of the world at that place and time is the physics of peace. It’s in the dry grass under your feet. It’s in the hazy air hanging over Gourdes, the tiny stone town on the hill just down the valley. But not impossible, like I said. Or in John’s words: “There is always a bit of tension in advance. But you are five minutes up, and it’s easy. It’s always calm.”
Martine wished she’d gone. I had almost convinced her of going. But like our tracking car, she still got to watch us the whole way, even while slipping into nearby Gourdes and other tiny surrounding towns to watch us float westward. Though the ground wind blew east, the shelf of air just above it blew us the opposite direction. It’s different up there.
As 5,000 cubic meters of air, heated to about 88 degrees centigrade, float up into the young day’s hazy ceiling, there’s a lot of history over us. Under us. Preserving us and our biology from gravity’s more violent tendencies. Much of this history is French. Reportedly it was a similarly sunny morning, this time in Annonay, France 1783, when two brothers (it’s always two brothers) Joseph and James Montgolfier managed, amazingly, to get a giant cloth bag filled with the hot air of a fire. The brothers didn’t yet know if it was the air or the smoke that lifted the bag, but must have been delighted with the results nonetheless. The following Spring they flew a bag in public. That is, they lit a straw fire, inflated a bag 33 and a half feet in diameter over the fire, and once it was sufficiently plump, let it go. Later the same year a Montgolfier balloon sailed over Paris in the first manned free balloon flight. Over time came methods of controlling the heated air, and attaching passengers, the first of which were a famed sheep, rooster, and a duck, all of whom were returned uninjured to earth, but for a bite administered by the rooster to the sheep, as some tellings have it.
Our pilot John, certified over a decade ago, got hooked on ballooning after his first trip in Kenya twelve years before. Abandoning a career in interior and furniture design, he took to the drifting winds, first in Holland, then five years ago re-located to France. He was looking for adventure and a better climatological situation. Provence gave him both, so he set up business based on a lovely stretch of Provence farmland. His $40,000 dollar rig is used up after 400 hours of flying time, at least as the safety regulators see it. The whole thing is junked and replaced with a new balloon, from wicker to spinnaker cloth after the 400 hours expire.
We’re at 285 meters, moving at a lazy 3 or 4 knots of ground speed over mother earth, who is so delightfully down there. You can hear dogs barking all over the valley, but it’s a pleasant and distant background sound, not intrusive. Like any other would-be intrusive thought, sensation, or problem. It’s all down there, and it just can’t quite get to you. A balloon ride though is like standing for an hour, on the porch of someone’s stunning home in the Alps — albeit which porch oddly decreases in altitude over time, until finally you have to stuff its deflated remains into a winch-equipped trailer hooked to the back of a mini-van, as you prepare to feast on a post-porch-ride champagne brunch.
As we approached, and our shadow on the ground drew closer to its bulbous, material counterpart, an explosion of running children sprayed from the front door of a sprawling country house, yelling and pointing and squawking. One of them, outside alone, had looked up to see us drifting his way and bee-lined inside to alert his kin. We were making their morning, judging by the intensity of the pointing and yelling. A balloon didn’t land there every day, and may not ever land there again. It’s part of the charm of the anyplace any time of balloon-landing roulette. “We can land anywhere,” John said. “It’s the wind always taking you to another situation.”
We packed the balloon and wicker of Oz basket into a trailer behind the mini-van and were back at the house in no time for the brunch. John’s wife Petra had spread a table with croissants, yellow sponge cake, melon, fruit juice, figs, apricots, plums, yogurt, coffee and a selection of bagged tea. We compared notes with full mouths. By the way, John built a nice guest extension to his home, which has the capacity for a family and is available for renting. John did an impressive job, building a place that beautifully complements the original structure in which he and his wife Petra and their children live. It’s complete with sheltered outdoor dining, a spacious living room and upstairs bedrooms.
How ridiculous to ever think it scary. As ridiculous, perhaps, as it would be to pretend there’s nothing but pleasure and fidelity all over Provence. Our last stop exploring on our last day before bulleting back to Paris, were sitting in a café in a dingy town north of Vaison la Romaine. I ordered an Orangina just so Martine could use the facilities. A gathering of old men were arguing the next table over. One wore a US flag on his blue ball cap. There was a stiff sewer smell. I moved my camera and bag off the table into a chair for no particular reason that somehow the circumstances recalled a recent restaurant purse-jacking story. It was a dirty town, not much magic, not much charm, slightly depressed. Just a moderately interesting cemetery and the view of mountains in the distance. The intensive public funding of Paris was a distant thought.
It would have been nice to be lifted back up into the sky at that moment. Sure, there are even moments when it’s a little dull up there. But a bird’s eye view is a good thing to get if you can, of this earth, especially around these parts. If you get the chance, don’t pass it up.
Chris Oakes is a freelance writer living in Paris. His work has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Wired, and Los Angeles Magazine.