Floating

One morning five years ago, I got up early and, by car, drove to the take-off site. I don't really remember how we later got back to the takeoff site.

We came off the ground on a spring morning with very little wind. But the fact is that in a hot air balloon you hardly feel the wind. It is a way of flying that flying is not the right word, you need another one. It is a way of moving. It comes easy to say float, because that is what actually happens. But neither float describes it enough.

It seems to me that it is necessary to resort to a periphrasis: let yourself be carried, and you come close.

As we moved over the ridged fields, over the all straight highway, over the woods still wet with the long shadows of morning, as we let ourselves be carried, a deer I did not recognize crossed the countryside below us.

I don't remember if I thought it at that time or if I thought it later, after I landed. I thought about the overview effect, I think about it a lot, actually, I've been thinking that maybe you don't need to go into space to experience it, maybe you just need to let the air take you much lower, well into the thin atmosphere.