Travel by DAR

Newport: Up, Up and Away

(First published in Conde Nast Traveler)

Takeoff at 6 a.m. is the moment of truth. Shuffling sideways two inches in a creaking wicker basket, then up a foot, ten feet, the earth falls away and your mind is jarred not by how unnatural but how seamlessly perfect it feels. You are sure of it: Homo sapiens, or at least Weekend Adventurer, was meant to float as colorfully as possible beneath a hot-air balloon.

Partly it is the hour that makes it seem so right. Rising softly from the earth so soon after sleep seems a consequence of dreaming, part of your early-morning tossings and turns. Except this is a bed you don’t want to fall out of. Two hundred feet below is Rhode Island, filled with barking dogs, their heads comically upturned like lions with rickets. Three hundred feet: Golfers teeing off in the early morning fog wave their clubs in a predawn salute. Four hundred feet: Your ears pop as over the highway you float, summoning the traffic to honk and flash its lights. Are you awake now? Do you remember how you got here?

The wake-up call came at five. Lying half asleep in a Newport inn, you anticipated it with, if not dread, an over-appreciation of your warm bed. In various other inns, your fellow passengers lay awaiting their calls, thinking, Typhoon, typhoon . . . let it at least rain! No such luck. Clear, windless skies – ideal ballooning weather. (It’s for a logical reason, that ungodly hour: The sun hasn’t yet created thermals-rising currents of heated air that are tricky to navigate.).

Now Narragansett Bay beckons. From your rocking basket, padded with suede over the reinforced aluminum, you can see the sunlight glinting through the haze. It’s a fitting moment to meet your fellow aeronauts: Paul Stumpf, at thirty the wizard of Rhode Island ballooning, bearing a more than passing resemblance to magician Doug Henning; Halsey Herreshoff, scion of the Herreshoff yachting family, who confides that ‘this is a little like sailing – but better’; and the Brigidis, Stephen and Julie, who left their two-year-old back at the launching site with a memory he won’t forget. Julie is a bit afraid of heights, yet loving it. “My knuckles are white and I’m grinning from ear to ear,” she says.

It’s quiet up here, though not as quiet as you might have thought. Continually creating additional hot air a couple of times a minute, the propane burners roar above your head close enough to singe your hair. The air temperature is warmer than you expected, too: You’re moving with the wind, so there’s no cooling breeze. But by far the most surprising sensation is how much control your pilot has. Though there is almost a half-minute delay between the time he fires up the burners and when the balloon responds, Paul can anticipate its needs with a magician’s precision. He lowers the balloon to kiss the surface of the water (a maneuver known as a “splash and dash”) and does it so well that the soles of your shoes are barely moistened.

Then up, up you climb again to float over the land. Perched along the coastline below are the Newport mansions you visited yesterday, the first day of your weekend; dotting the landscape farther inland are the antiques shops you’ve slated for tomorrow. Now you’re above farms, and never has the geometry of agriculture looked so pretty: all planes and right angles, the land upholstered with rows of baby junipers, looking like the texture of a sisal rug. Suburbs are next, and Babbittland seems almost noble at this altitude. Flying over its skylights, the balloon rouses affluent America. Husbands and wives come sleepily out on decks with telephoto lenses; kids in red pj’s race across leaf-strewn lawns. The earth seems a pleasant place from three hundred feet. It’s easy to imagine it friendlier than it is: loving couples and movie-set kids, the foreshortened shadows of bicycles and basketball hoops, and those dogs again, as silly and harmless as windup toys.

You land in the proverbial ornery farmer’s field, but not to worry: Just as French balloonists did two hundred years ago to ward off the pitchforks of uncomprehending peasants, Paul has brought along an appeasing bottle of champagne. Soon the farmer is toasting everyone’s health and the balloon has deflated like a demigod cut down to size. Quiet cheer is the temper among the aeronauts, without even a touch of giddiness. Maybe it has to do with the memory of how trouble-free America looked from three hundred feet, how erased of pain, misfortune, divorce, child abuse – aloft on a vapor, you saw America airbrushed of distress.

Or maybe it’s the champagne. There are some balloonists, it is said, who offer Diet Coke at the end of a flight. Avoid them. Weekend Adventurer, after a jaunt like this, was meant to quaff none but Mumm’s at 9 a.m.