Last night, all of us involved in the Green my Apple campaign had a victory dinner feast at the lovely Zeina’s house. Zeina is Lebanese, and put together an outstanding culinary adventure for us. There was baked Feta with chili pepper — my mouth waters as I type those words — tabouli on lettuce leaves, fava beans in lemon, cauliflower with sesame, savory vegetables rolled in a flat bread: outrageous, scrumptious, delicious.The company was as good as the food. Take eight story tellers and put them around a table and throw out a question like “What was your most embarassing moment” and you know you’re going to get good stuff.
Giona suggested I blog mine, a tale of pride taking a fall, from my first days as a Greenpeace activist.
In those days, if you were a door to door canvasser, as I was, you went out into your turf every night dreaming of being a campaigner. In these dreams, you were not in a mini-van heading into a suburban neighborhood with a clipboard. No, you were an eco-warrior in a survival suit, gunning the engine of your zodiac to cross the wake of a whaling ship. To make that dream happen in those days, you pretty much had to distinguish yourself as a volunteer.
Through a series of home-grown direct actions in Boston, I’d done that locally — and with one, a banner hanging off the roof of the Canadian Embassy in protest of the harp seal hunt, I’d managed to generate an image that got carried nationwide on Reuters. That caught the eye of Peter Dykstra and Mark Roberts at our national headquarters in Washington, who asked me to come down to DC to talk about a secret mission. Holy Hotcakes, Batman, a secret mission! My daydreams of heroism shot up, as did my cachet with the other canvassers.
The mission was this:
we were going to fly a hot air balloon into the Nevada nuclear weapons test site. No commercial pilot we could find would risk his license for such a flight, so two of us were to be trained. The countdown to the underground nuclear weapons test detonation would be entering the single digits when our balloon, sporting a giant peace dove and the Greenpeace logo, with myself and Gene Stilp at the burners, would cruise majestically across Yucca flat, directly over ground zero, forcing the Test Site personnel in the control tower to shout “Stop the test, it’s too risky, those damn Greenpeace activists have foiled our evil plans…”
So I was handed an airplane ticket to San Francisco. I had never been to the US west coast, never been on a plane that someone else had paid for, never been closer to my dream of heroism. I’d been sent off by the other canvassers with a mixture of envy and expectation, I’d called my mom to let her know that she might be seeing me in the news soon, and that I couldn’t talk about what I would be doing for the next couple months, or where I was going. I think her response was “Make sure you have a clean handkerchief.” It was her all-purpose advice. So, with friends and peers prepared to stay tuned for the story of a bold adventure to end the arms race, I set out to get trained.
Now what on Earth could be a better assignment for a twenty year old kid than to have to practice flying a hot air balloon at dawn over the hills of southern California? We soared over hawks in flight, practiced popping out of thermals, startled rabbits from their lairs, learned to navigate the wind sheers that pushed us in different directions at different altitudes, kicked up the scent of sagebrush as we tried to master flying as low to the
Earth as possible, firing the propane burners in tiny, roaring corrective blasts until we could hug the rolling hills at a constant ten foot elevation.
It was an unbelievably great gig.
Until the day that our instructor, Frank, decided it was time to enter the Gordon Bennett Balloon race. This is a major annual event for balloonists, held in Fountain Valley. The wind that morning was higher than anything we’d flown in previously, but Frank figured if we were going to brave a nuclear blast, we better learn how to handle a little wind. Frank would handle the take-off.
The way you launch a balloon is this. You get a ground crew of six or so folks to lay out the envelope on the ground with the balloon basket on its side. You use a giant fan to partially inflate the envelope. Then, squatting in the basket, you slowly blast hot air into the balloon. It expands, then rises, tipping the basket upright as it goes vertical. Your ground crew moves away from holding out the envelope to holding the basket down hard, so you can heat the balloon up enough that it POPS up into the air when everyone lets go. That way you clear any low-lying obstacles quickly.
Now at the Gordon Bennett Balloon race, we had a whole heap of volunteers from the crowd to help with this process. Unfortunately, one of them didn’t get the message that only the pilot issues commands, and the rest of them didn’t get the message that you only listen to the pilot. When the balloon was vertical but only half-heated, with the wind pushing hard, somebody in the crowd shouted “Let go.” It wasn’t Frank.
We took off, but only just. We were careening through the crowd of spectators, who were parting before the balloon’s path like the wake from a ship. The image that sticks in my mind is an absurd cartoon of a guy having a picnic with his family, just raising a chicken drumstick to his mouth and staring, wide-eyed and frozen in disbelief, as our wicker basket headed straight for him. We barely cleared his head. Frank was furiously hitting the burners full blast to get altitude, but I was reaching for the emergency deflate. This is a line that descends from the top of the balloon through the envelope, which you yank on to pull a velcro cap down from the balloon’s crown to let all the hot air out. But it was dangling outside the basket, and as I reached for it, the last thing I remember was following my arm out of the basket and pinwheeling through space. We’d hit a tow truck. Then the bandstand. And the balloon sailed off without me — though I didn’t know that, because I was unconscious and somewhere way down the yellow brick road surrounded by munchkins.
Gene stayed in the basket, but broke a rib. Frank flew the balloon to a safe landing and managed, despite getting down as quickly as possible, to cross the finish line. We would have won second place if we weren’t disqualified — for illegally discharging a passenger.
I messed up my back for a while, but the only serious damage was to my pride. This was the picture that my mom, my friends, and my fellow canvassers saw the next day in the newspaper:
It wasn’t until a decade later that I saw this footage of my fall. I was channel surfing with my mother-in-law back in the US, looking for a Yankees game, when there was the balloon cruising across the crowd and unceremoniously ejecting me. I had no idea anyone had caught it on film, but they had, and sold it to some home video channel. “That’s me” I told Mom Muldoon. “That’s YOU? Now why would you go and do a thing like that?”
Another ten years later, a television company tracked me down for an interview about the incident for Reality TV, which has made the rounds now in a variety of repackaged formats worldwide with humbling titles like “Dumb and Dumber” “America’s funniest home videos” and “Lived to Tell.” I saw it first at my brother’s house. He’s went to some trouble to get a copy, and had a mischevious glint in his eye as he put the DVD into the tray that reminded me of when we were 10.
It was, ha ha, a deflating experience.
We never would get the balloon into the test site that year, though we were back next year and four of us did, finally, make it to ground zero.
We walked.
I was at this event with my 2 yr old in my arms (thank god) when the balloon came straight towards us. We had just left the bandstand when the Greenpeace balloon stood up. It was and still is one of the most frightening things I have ever witnessed. I warn everyone to stay well away of hot air balloons! I took my photo after the balloon cleared the bandstand. It’s amazing.
Nice! Leave it to the internet. I JUST saw this footage on Discovery Channels’s program “Destroyed in Seconds”. I grew up in and live in Huntington Beach, which is right next to Fountain Valley so I had too look up this balloon race since I wasn’t aware of it. Sure enough, it happened at a time when I was a young teen so I wasn’t really paying much attention to these things.
Very interesting to hear the first-hand account and also the motivations behind the balloon adventure.
Sure enough though, the TV show states some of the facts differently. Namely that there were two passengers to begin with and that the instructor was thrown from the basket, leaving the student to safely land the balloon.
There was also information that you landed on a child. Was this also different than your account or were you knocked too silly from the fall to know where you landed?
Either way, thanks for the story and I’m glad you were relatively unhurt.
I might be the child that you mentioned here… lol! I would love to see the show you saw that explained the rest of this story. My mom has newspaper clippings of me on the cover in a pink shirt laying on the ground. I was at this event with my parents (around 7 years old) and watching the band play sitting on the stairs by the drummer and was hit directly in the back by the basket of this balloon! I remember going to the hospital in an ambulance and receiving flowers from (I believe) the pilot. When the doc came in my family was telling me exactly what happened (I had no clue) and I guess, I was laughing at the story in disbelief! The doctor looked at my back and there were criss cross basket marks on my back! CrAzY I came across this video! I did see a story on it years ago on TV too. I believe it was “worlds amazing videos” or something like that. ANYWAY.….. thought I’d share ;)?
I am a friend of Gene Stilp’s. I wanted to submit a copy of our balloon adventure, where we were using a pink-pig hot air balloon to publicize our “vote no” campaign for judicial retention in Pennsylvania. For whatever reason the balloon photo wouldn’t send.
Dennis
Dear Brian,
My e-mail address is richtitchen [at] yahoo.co.uk
Cheers,
Richard
Hi Richard,
Leave your email address here (with the word AT instead of @ to fool the spam harvesters) and I’ll pass it along to Wyle.
–b
Looking for an e-mail address for Anne Dingwall. We are very old friends from Greenpeace. Cheers, Richard
Anne & Brian,
Yeah, I’d love to touch base with Flip! Haven’t heard from him since the RCMP stole his equipment in Montreal, he called me a 4am asking how to inflate without a fan! Never a dull moment. I got more… but not here. 😉
Anne,
Can’t work out how to email you directly? Could you possibly visit and email me your address? That would be great!
–
Whit
Whit,
If you want to contact Flip I have the information. Email me.
Cheers,
Anne
Hey Whit, Yep, I know Flip — we worked together on a banner action on the Statue of Liberty in 1985 — I coordinated, he climbed.
He hung out with Anne Dingwall — who currently sits at a desk ten feet away from me– for a goodly time.
I think the Mac you’re thinking of is Steve MacAllister, owner of an aluminum sailing ship, Aleyka, back in the 80s that was used as a Greenpeace ship up and down the US east coast for a couple years.
Enjoyed you blog. Is the David McTaggart you mention aka “Mac” from the DC area? Do you know “Flip” by chance? I trained him to fly balloons, and he successfully flew the same balloon into the nevada test site in the late 80’s.
–
wl
Thanks for the snap, Ze! Sweet.
And Page, you’re the one inspiring ME. I’m the one driving a desk these days… mostly 😉
Hair — why IS it that we never recognise our haircuts as being of a particular time until that time is past? Just seems like a haircut at the time without any chronological content. But look back 20 years and POOF: it becomes a 20-year-old haircut.
–b
Ok, so I’m a n00b with actions, as you know (I’ve only done 5). I guess I’ve had good luck that I haven’t had a major “DOH!!” moment like Brian’s Amazing Hot Air Balloon Adventure™. But I can say that all you’ve done has inspired me more than you know.
I’m so glad you’re blogging all of your experiences. It’s like a fascinating book, and you’re a great storyteller.
I also noticed that your flickr photostream now has news articles you’ve scanned. Really cool!!
You’ll never catch me scanning any of the OMG 80s hair! pictures of me in the Albuquerque papers, back when I was a science fair geek. Nuh uh. No blackmail material for you or anyone else 😉
Thanks for the post. You rock.
for the memory of that “feast”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeinah/682487425/
and keep walking brian.