Good Excuse Filled With Hot Air

I may well have stumbled upon the perfect excuse for tardiness. If punctuality is the courtesy of kings, even a king couldn’t have made up this reason for being late to a dinner engagement. None of those cool-looking women with the cast-iron hair-do’s who write etiquette columns have ever heard this one.

The entire episode could only have happened in a place like the Coachella Valley, so it really isn’t an all-purpose excuse. This valley has more balloons than a 5-year-old’s birthday party. They are giant hot-air balloons covered from top to bottom in crayon-colored stripes.

Last Saturday, I had a dinner engagement with Clifford, Judith and Courtney Miller and was due at their house at 6 o’clock. Time with the Millers is a delight and I didn’t want to be late.

When I went out to get in the car about 20 minutes before the hour, I heard a great huffing and puffing and looked up. There almost directly above me was a great balloon, red and yellow and purple and green. Wanting to be an amiable new desert resident, I waved at the basketful of people. One of the men said in a normally pitched voice, “There’s a lady waving at us. Maybe she’d like to have us come to dinner.”

By then, the street was full of people, looking up at the ice cream cone-shaped balloon.

The first man in the gondola yelled, “What are we having for dinner?”

I couldn’t think of anything wonderfully gourmet so I said, “Pot roast, carrots and potatoes and onions and brown gravy.”

Then the second man said, “Wonderful. We’ll be right there.”

There were two women in the balloon who seemed to be the passengers. The men turned on the gas, which roared and glowed a devil’s orange inside the balloon. All the time, they were sinking slowly toward the ground.

Very soon, they settled to the earth and began clambering out of the balloon. Then a four-door pickup truck and a van came swooping down the street with the name of the balloon company on the side. They have chase cars that follow the balloons and pick up the passengers and the pilot.

By now, the balloon was slowly folding itself inward. The pilot and passengers got into the van and drove off, but not before the first man called, “We’ll be back for the pot roast.”

There are about a dozen hot-air balloon ride companies listed in the telephone book here. They specialize in champagne flights and venturesome names like Cloud Busters, Dream Flight Balloons, Fantasy Balloon Flights, Sunrise Balloons, Ballooning With Moon Shadows and Desert Air Charters.

The balloon that almost came to dinner is part of a fleet of five belonging to Desert Balloon Charters. The owner is John Zimmer who came to the desert in 1980 with a small balloon and $300. He had been ballooning as a hobby since 1977 in Illinois.

Zimmer says it is not because of the heat that balloons fill the sky here. He closes down his service from the end of May until the end of October. What makes the Coachella Valley attractive to the men in the wonderful balloons is the flat terrain and the beauty of the mountains bordering the Valley. And, what they really like best for their sport, are the cool light breezes.

John has four pilots and he pilots himself. There’s a crew that helps inflate the balloons and help them aloft. Then they follow in the four-door and pickup truck or one of two large vans.

The three-sided basket is called a gondola. The fuel is propane; there are tanks in all three corners of the triangle. There’s a small pilot light inside the balloon and the fliers add propane by turning valves on the tanks and in the balloon (envelopes is what the professionals call these big things).

The ride costs $125 for each person and there is a glamorous champagne toast at the end of the flight. Each passenger receives a certificate that commemorates his casting off the surly bonds of earth.

One woman said, “I really know how a sea bird feels when he spreads his wings and glides along. It’s so quiet and so free.”

John told me the champagne toast started in France where the French love the style and grace of ballooning. When Frenchmen landed in a farmer’s field they immediately offered him a glass of champagne to soothe his possible ill temper.

My friend Barbara Coulson had a balloon ride with John Zimmer in a desert charter balloon when she was given a ride for her birthday. The certificate reads, “The wind has welcomed you with softness. The sun has blessed you with warm hands. You have flown so high and so well that the gods join you in laughter and have sent you gently back again into the loving arms of mother earth.”

And it is inscribed with the day and time, Barbara’s name and the name of her pilot, John Zimmer.

I am planning a balloon ride with one of the desert balloon charter pilots if I ever have $125 and a hunger for pot roast at the same time.