In Flight

As we ascended, clearing the tree tops, a stand of elms at the edge of the green that I’d climbed halfway as a child, and never dreamed that I’d be higher, I looked down again to catch sight of Rachel, her pale face staring up at me, and I prayed that the two of us might one day be together. Tom had opened his sketch book, and was making a hurried drawing of the clouds above us, like purple and gauzelike, so that they looked as though they must be parted. When my gaze lifted from the village green I saw that the magistrate had turned white as a sheet, and was kneeling at the edge of the basket, causing it to list slightly as we bounced merrily through the sky.

“Would you mind standing, sir?” Davis asked

 And the magistrate shook his head, and lifted himself halfway up, keeping his trembling hand on the side of the basket to steady himself. This unmanliness surprised us all, who had known that we’d be in flight the night before, these sorts of terrors should have been restricted to dreams, or pillows, certainly not displayed in front of one’s friends. At that point the magistrate leaned over the side of the balloon and let out a voluminous amount of vomit, dishing back to the land below the breakfast of eggs and toast with wonderful marmalade that had  greeted us the morning before our journey. The loss of that small amount of weight caused the balloon to shift up rapidly, jolting us again and nearly sending the magistrate pitching out to his certain death.

“Steady yourself,” Davis admonished the magistrate, trying to use a series of thin strings to guide the balloon in some semblance of a direction. We were planning on flying up the coast, and landing some twenty or so miles away if it was at all possible. The wind was colder at our new altitude, and I found myself crowding closer to the flame at the center of the basket.

Davis, having steadied the balloon for a moment in a light breeze, opened up a bottle of wine and offered Tom and I cheese and crackers. The magistrate, poor fellow, was exempted from the offering. “The faster we drink it the higher we rise!” Davis said, with all the excitement of a man hell bent on discovery. Below us, the small white roofs of a village appeared, and, perhaps a horse and buggy moved down the street. It was difficult to tell. The perspectival change was either exhilarating or sad, depending on one’s mood I suppose. Tom described it as feeling a certain kinship, with the people below us, a connection that would have been impossible without this new mode of travel. He did not feel that it was spying, but that it was a new kind of perspective, an understanding an opening up of sorts. He thought that perhaps one day we’d travel in a day, by balloon, from one city to another, and trade goods and stories, and in this way perhaps we’d end all the years of fighting and squabbling that has plagued us since, it seems, the dawn of time. He saw in the village below him, an interconnected line of roads, a lace of connections, of meaning.

My brother and I are different, always have been. I saw from this new height that all of our striving was ant like. I saw what it must have appeared like to the eye of God. It was useless, or near useless. The only thing that divided us from the ants was our grand ambition, our pride in ourselves. I saw the pitiful nature of man when viewed from above, the uselessness of his striving. I saw in the long line of history that these new balloons would not serve some common good for bringing us together, but that the few, a power hungry nation or man, would find a way to turn them into weapons of war, dropping cannonballs or firing muskets at the unsuspecting populous below. I saw not the interconnection of man, but the divisiveness and baseness of him, and I was certain that I would remember this flight not as something beautiful as it should have been, but as something with the potential for horror.