Robbins: In a hot air balloon, life looks different

On a September Sunday morning, earlier than I’ve been awake on purpose in a long time, I hoisted myself off the wet grass at Balloon Fiesta Park and into the basket of a hot air balloon.

I’m usually afraid of heights. Something about the top step on a ladder or the nosebleeds of a baseball park makes me queasy. But in a hot air balloon, it turns out, reality is a little bit altered.

Balloon travel is so smooth that Journal photojournalist Eddie Moore and I were already in the sky before I noticed we were off the ground. The whole thing was less turbulent than a jaunt down Central. That high in the sky, there is no wind and hardly any sound.

At 2,700 feet, life seems much simpler. People drive the highway and run along the North Diversion Channel trail. A cat crosses the road. The General Mills factory on Paseo del Norte makes the air smell like cornflakes.

Being in a balloon is what I’d imagine it would be like to be a bird, if a bird were 80 feet tall and aflame. You can see everything down below — cemeteries, golf courses, backyard swimming pools. Through windows, people take out their phones and wave.

When hot air balloons first floated across the sky in 18th-century France, the peasants in the village down below sometimes thought they were demons or fire-breathing dragons, our pilot, Anthony Lard, told us.

I had a similar experience the first time I saw a hot air balloon in the sky after I moved to Albuquerque from Tucson, Arizona, to cover business news for the Journal.

It was a little after 7 a.m., and I was on my way to Rio Rancho to cover an event at Presbyterian Rust Medical Center when I saw something big and yellow gliding along the horizon.

“They just fly around like that?” I remember thinking.

Well, yes.

I’ve learned quite a bit in the short time since New Mexico welcomed me into her strange and wonderful arms. “Christmas” is no longer just a day in December. The bus lane is on the left, for some reason.

I guess I thought there would be some kind of steering mechanism in a hot air balloon, but really, there’s not much control, Lard said. You can go up, or you can go down, but that’s pretty much it. The balloon goes largely in the direction of the wind, and a chase crew follows it in a truck from on land, ready to pick up passengers when and where the balloon lands.

Maybe we could all stand to adopt a little of the balloonist’s attitude. Control what you can, but mostly, go where the wind takes you. And cancel if it’s raining.

Our balloon did not land back at the field, or in a designated patch of grass, or a helipad, or whatever else I had expected — but in a vacant lot in the middle of the city, about five miles from where we started.

New Mexico, as I’m learning every day, seems to play by its own set of rules: Cars drive around without license plates; flying saucers crash in the desert; green chile goes on French fries; and hot air balloons touch down in an empty parking lot near Costco.

In the Land of Enchantment, anything is possible.