When we were being strafed last night by the mosquito bomber I thought about a strange experience I had as a child. I have written about this in a column somewhere before though it was never widely distributed. If you are one of these hand-wringers who is ethically opposed to plagiarizing oneself, then, too bad.
I was a little cowlicked-headed small-town boy like Opie Taylor though never quite as insightful. Nonetheless, I learned one day about facing up to difficulties and then executing a course of action. It was the day the balloon fell from the sky.
My uncle was doing some kind of work on our henhouse one Sunday afternoon when we noticed what appeared to be a large weather balloon slowly descending toward relatively nearby ground. This had to be sometime in the mid-1960s and I can’t be certain that it really was a weather balloon. I say that because it was being chased by two large, twin-rotored Air Force helicopters and a rather large plane circling our little town. I don’t know if the Air Force would make such a fuss over a weather balloon. I always liked to think it was some kind of top secret experiment but it might just have been a weather balloon.
Being the town’s volunteer fire chief, my uncle told me he was going to go see where the balloon went down and asked me to come along. I am always glad that I went along that day. But I also kind of wished I had stuck around home.
We had a nice-sized pasture on our property. Kind of a large pasture for being in even a small town. My parents said that after my uncle and I left, the two helicopters landed in our pasture for a few minutes. It only took moments for townspeople to start lining the road around our pasture, my folks told me. It was if the aliens had set down and were about to invade the local Lion’s Club. To be fair, I would say most people back then had seen few if any helicopters. But it was definitely a sight to see that Sunday afternoon.
Meanwhile, my uncle and I had traced the massive balloon to a clearing for a high-voltage power line. Other officials and unofficials arrived on the scene as well. Shortly, some Air Force officers came out of the woods in their flight suits, having taken off in their choppers from our little spectacle of an air park back at the house.
The balloon rested among trees and brush for quite a ways. A box that was the balloon’s gondola hung precariously over the edge of the high-tension electric lines. This wasn’t going to be easy, the serious looks upon the military men seemed to indicate.
While the Air Force talked the situation over with the local yokels, a drunken but otherwise okay yahoo who had a missing hand on one arm quietly retrieved a shotgun from his pickup truck. He steadied the gun on top of his handless arm, which was in turn rested on the roof of the truck. Then he cut loose on the gondola/box which rapidly fell to the ground like heads in a French guillotine party.
Were this to happen today I’m sure the drunken, one-handed yahoo would probably have gone to jail. But I think everyone was too stunned to do anything that day.
Somehow, they got the remaining portion of the balloon off the highline and all those assembled including young Opie helped roll up what was left of the balloon for the Air Force.
Though that was a long time ago, I retained some very valuable lessons from that day. I learned that sometimes you’ve got to make tough decisions no matter how short-sighted, ignorant or liquor-addled they might be. I also learned that it pays to be a good shot.