Impressions of the Deep South from 3,000 feet up

It’s always wise to carry a bottle of champagne on you, especially if you’re 3,000 feet up in the air, looking for somewhere friendly to land.

For the first two men to ever fly in a hot air balloon, carrying a bottle aboard was a fortuitous coincidence that would dictate ballooning etiquette more than 150 years later in a small town in south Mississippi.

Having taken off from the center of Paris on Nov. 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes flew for 22 minutes before landing in a vineyard several miles outside the city. Country folk came rushing out into the field, ready to defend their land from the strange dragon that had descended upon it but were instead greeted with and placated by the offer of champagne.  

Last week, pilot Walt Rudy and his three passengers, including myself, found ourselves in much the same predicament. Only this time we’d forgotten the alcohol back in the van. As the wind picked up and powerlines loomed ahead, we scanned the ground 100 feet below us, looking for an ideal place to land.

We were just barely on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River, where, much like in the French countryside, crop fields stretch to the horizon. I could hear the squawks of chickens below, instinctively thrown into a tizzy by our looming presence. I reached out my fingers, nearly touching the needles atop a pine tree. I leaned out of the basket and waved down to two mesmerized little boys who chased us along in an old, repurposed wheelchair. I wondered what they were thinking. 

The relationship between those in the air and the earthbound is complex. There is separation but there is also connection. After all, the two must meet again, at least for the balloonist’s sake. It is a relationship that gets tested every October in Natchez, Mississippi, upon which, for the past 39 years, hundreds of hot air balloons have descended for the Natchez Balloon Festival.

Every year, dozens of my fellow Mississippians and I become their crew, spreading out the 200-lb. balloon “envelope,” using every muscle in our bodies to hold it open as large fans and propane tanks fill it with hot air, then chasing it in trucks across the landscape so we can be there to catch it when it lands. Sometimes, when there’s enough room in the basket, we even go up.

Last week, between all the literal ups and downs, I had the chance to talk to some of the 50 visiting pilots and local crew about their unique perspective on our region.

“It’s muddy,” said Jason Gaines, from St. Louis, Missouri, who has been coming to the Natchez Balloon Festival for 18 years. That morning, he had taken off near an elementary school and landed near a prison. Thankfully, his crew was able to quickly get to the balloon post-flight, as signs posted along the nearby highway admonish against any stopping except for emergencies and read, “Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.”

Gaines will never forget his first flight here, when he learned several lessons that he abides by to this day. After indulging in a hearty breakfast, he and the cute 22-year-old sponsor assigned to his balloon climbed inside his basket and took off. Pre-GPS, he would fly right across a road that a local had warned him to avoid and found himself in unlandable territory with a rumbling stomach.

Two and a half hours later, as they crossed the Mississippi River, Gaines, in desperation, landed the balloon in an alligator-infested swamp, handed the woman the balloon’s crown line and sprinted into the woods. Finally relieved, he and the woman then hiked through the swamp, where they were met by a man in a beat-up pickup truck, wearing no shirt, cutoff overalls and flip flops. Brandishing a gun and a hand radio, the man pressed his thumb to the latter and called off the search for Gaines’s red, white and blue balloon. He was the local sheriff. 

“Ever since then, I don’t cross that road, I take an extra fuel tank with me, and I don’t eat breakfast before morning flights,” says Gaines.

Bill Bussey, from Longview, Texas, is even more familiar with both the landscape and the people here. Bussey is a legend in the world of hot air balloons, having flown for more than 50 years and clinched 15 World Records and 30 U.S. National Records. He’s been competing in the Natchez race since its first year in 1986, and this is one of his favorite places to fly.

“When you’re flying a primitive aircraft that predates the Wright Brothers and looking down at this landscape with the old homes and the woods and nature, it’s unlike a modern city. It’s like time travel,” he says.   

As for the locals who get the chance to go up, the change in perspective is more than just visual. One of Katelee Laird’s favorite flights found her and her pilot, Walt Rudy, crossing the river and landing in an impoverished neighborhood in Ferriday, Louisiana.

“Before we knew it, the basket was surrounded by wide-eyed children who had never seen a balloon before,” she tells me. Instead of shooing the children away and packing up, Rudy and a local man, who had ridden up on a horse, tethered the balloon, picked up the children and placed them in the basket.

“Walt went up and down over and over to give each and every kid a glimpse of their home from above. Sharing that moment with people from such different backgrounds was simply magical.”

Unlike airplanes or cars, balloons cannot steer. They are at the mercy of wind currents, which do not discriminate between a trailer park, an antebellum mansion and a crop field… the latter of which is, incidentally, where we ended up last week.

Having flown over the two boys on the wheelchair-bicycle, our only safe landing spot left was the middle of a freshly worked cornfield. We bent our knees, hit the ground at 5 mph, and the wind dragged us 40 feet through the dirt before we hit a berm that finally put an end to the ride.

As we crawled sideways out of the tipped basket, a truck came barreling up a nearby road. Two bewildered men in overalls jumped out, and as the sun set, we worked together to haul the slain dragon out of the field.  

Riding back home, covered in dirt and sweat, I now knew that the best place to land is wherever you are welcomed with open terrain and open arms, both of which, thankfully, we have a lot of down here in the Deep South.

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Images: KateLee Laird (left) and the author, helping crew a balloon (courtesy Carol Anne Riley); drifting over Natchez (via the author); Monique Renee, flying low over Louisiana farmland (courtesy KateLee Laird); a not-so-graceful landing in a cornfield (author); evening on the Natchez Esplanade (KateLee Laird).