Three weeks later, the festival’s opening ceremony drew thousands of spectators. The announcer welcomed the crowd as I walked toward the launch field, and I was going to stand at the fence with everybody else, and then the announcer said a registration number instead of a name and forty balloons stopped inflating at once.
Pilots do a thing. When one of their own is honored, the whole field goes quiet and then every burner fires at the same time, and you feel it in your chest before you hear it.
The number he read was on a brand-new envelope, red and cream, sitting in the middle of the field where they put the special shapes. And under the mouth of that envelope, painted about four feet tall, was my name.
Balloon pilots register their aircraft with the FAA like anybody else, and an envelope gets a number and a name on the paperwork, and eleven pilots had gone in together over the winter and bought one and filed it. It is a real aircraft, not a gesture. It flies. My name is on a registration certificate in a folder in a hangar in Rio Rancho.
The reason they did it is not sentiment either, and this is the part I did not know.
Chase crews are the whole business of ballooning. You launch, you go where the wind says, and somebody in a truck has to find you in a field forty miles out and get permission from a rancher to drive across his land at seven in the morning. For twenty-five years I kept the landowner list. Not the festival’s list, mine, in a spiral book: which family owns what section, who says yes, who says yes only if you call first, who lost a calf to a chase truck in 1998 and will never say yes again and deserves not to be asked.
The new volunteer team had the map. Nobody had the book. Three weeks of retrieves had gone sideways and a rancher near Corrales had run two trucks off with a shotgun and a phone call to the county, which was entirely his right.
Tucked in the back of that book is a note from Delbert Ruiz, who taught me the job in 2001 and died in 2014.
The wind belongs to nobody and the ground belongs to somebody. Learn the somebodies. That is the whole job, hijo, the rest is just hot air.
The event director found me at the pancake breakfast. She is not a bad person and she was not smiling this time. She asked me, straight out, whether I would train the younger team, and she said the word train, not consult, and I appreciated the difference.
We spent the spring driving. Twenty-two ranches, and I introduced every one of those kids by hand, at a kitchen door, with my hat off.
The book has three names in it now besides mine. They write in pencil like I taught them.
My balloon flew the second Saturday of October with a nineteen-year-old girl from Belen at the burner and me in the basket doing nothing at all, which took some getting used to.