Many Happy Returns

It was our wedding day. Bliss was ours. And then we climbed into a balloon.

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Jai and I were married under a 100-year-old oak tree on the lawn of a famous Victorian mansion in Pittsburgh. It was a small wedding, but I was a 37-year-old bachelor when I first met this beautiful woman in the fall of 1998. She was 31 then and a grad student in comparative literature. I had waited a long time to find the right person, so I wanted a big romantic statement. Jai and I agreed to start our marriage in a very special way.
We did not leave the reception in a car with cans rattling from the rear bumper. We did not climb into a horse-drawn carriage. No, we got into a huge, multicolored hot-air balloon that whisked us off into the clouds as our friends and loved ones waved up to us, wishing us bon voyage. What a Kodak moment!

When we first stepped into the balloon, Jai was just beaming. “It's like a fairy-tale ending to a Disney movie,” she said to me.

Then the balloon smashed through tree branches on the way up. It didn't sound like the destruction of the Hindenburg, but it was a bit disconcerting. “No problem,” said the man flying the balloon. (He's called a ballooner.) “Usually we're okay going through branches.” Usually?

We had also taken off a little later than scheduled, and the ballooner said that could make things harder. And it was getting darker. And the winds had shifted. “I can't really control where we go. We're at the mercy of the winds,” he said. “But we should be okay.”

The balloon traveled over urban Pittsburgh, back and forth above the city's three rivers. This was not where the ballooner wanted us to be, and I could see he was worried. “There's no place to put this bird down,” he muttered almost to himself. Then, to us, “We've got to keep looking.”

The newlyweds were no longer enjoying the view. We were all looking for a large open space hidden in an urban landscape. Finally, we floated into the suburbs, and the ballooner spotted a big field off in the distance. He committed to putting the balloon down in it. “This should work,” he said. As he started descending fast, I looked down at the field. It appeared to be fairly large, but I noticed there was a train track at the edge of it. My eyes followed the track. A train was coming. At that moment, I was no longer a groom. I was an engineer. I said to the ballooner, “Sir, I think I see a variable here.”

“A variable?” he replied. “Is that what you computer guys call a problem?” “Well, yes. What if we hit the train?”

He answered honestly. We were in the basket of the balloon, and the odds of the basket hitting the train were small. But there was certainly a risk that the giant balloon itself (called the envelope) would fall onto the tracks when we hit the ground. If the speeding train got tangled in the falling envelope, we'd be at the wrong end of a rope, inside a basket getting dragged. In that case, great bodily harm was probable.

“When this thing hits the ground, run as fast as you can,” the ballooner said. These are not the words most brides dream about hearing on their wedding day. In short, Jai was no longer feeling like a Disney princess. And I was already seeing myself as a character in a disaster movie, thinking of how I'd save my new bride during the calamity apparently to come.

I looked into the eyes of the ballooner. I often rely on people with expertise I don't have, and I wanted to get a clear sense of where he was on this. In this man's face, I saw more than concern. I saw mild panic. I also saw fear. I looked at Jai. I'd enjoyed our marriage so far.

As the balloon kept descending, I tried to calculate how fast we'd need to jump out and run for our lives. I figured the ballooner could handle himself. If not, well, I was still grabbing Jai first. I loved her. Him, I'd just met.

The ballooner kept letting air out of the balloon. He pulled every lever he had. He just wanted to get down somewhere, quickly. At that point, he'd have been better off hitting a nearby house than that speeding train.

Boom! We crash-landed in the field. The basket took a hard hit, hopped a few times, bouncing us all around, and then tilted almost horizontally. Within seconds, the deflating envelope draped onto the ground. But luckily, it missed the moving train. Meanwhile, people on the nearby highway saw our landing, stopped their cars, and ran to help us. It was quite a scene: Jai in her wedding dress, me in my suit, the collapsed balloon, the relieved ballooner.

We were pretty rattled. My friend Jack had been in the chase car, tracking the balloon from the ground. When he got to us, he was happy to find us safe following our near-death experience.

We spent some time decompressing from our reminder that even fairy-tale moments have risks, while the collapsed balloon was loaded onto the ballooner's truck. Then, just as Jack was about to take us home, the ballooner trotted over. “Wait,” he said. “You ordered the wedding package. It comes with a bottle of Champagne!” He gave us a cheap bottle. “Congratulations.” We smiled weakly and thanked him. It was only dusk on our first day of marriage, but we'd made it so far.

From Reader's Digest - May 2008

 

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