The Flight That Failed

"Well," Sparks said later to Clint Laird, one of his crew, "I'm sorry. I let you down."

"Yeah, you really let me down. You just set a world record, man, flying in the eye of a storm for eight hours or something. That's not bad."

"Well, I'll tell you, there were a couple of times when I almost gave up. I couldn't go on. My energy was gone. I finally got so tired I couldn't lift a 25-pound bag of shot and throw it over. Also, I was cold. My wet suit saved me. Water was coming in three directions. There's not much left of the gondola."

"What about lightning?" Laird asked.

"Well, I thought I'd had it with that. When it sliced through, I just stood there, and it looked at me, and I looked at it and there were strange things, I'll tell you. My hair stood up."

"You mean the bolt was there for what seemed a long time?"

"Yeah, it was like everything slowed down. It just seemed to hold there, and I'll tell you what it looked like. You know the CBS eye. That's what it looked like. Then there was the funniest smell in the air. It was like electric, sort of magnetic. I could feel my hair and everything leaning toward it, sort of."

So Sparks survives—but not without abuse. He now must fend off the lances of critics within the balloon world, notable for its galaxy of rampant egos. The epithets are already cascading upon him from those who think for some odd reason that he has made "all balloonists look like a bunch of nuts." As for those people who are inclined to scoff at the futility, at the silliness of Sparks and his dream, they might look up these lines of the former pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry in Wind, Sand and Stars, written after listening to a conversation between two clerks on a bus.

"You have chosen," he wrote, "not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers.... Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."