Eula Biss - The Balloonists

Copyright 2002 by Eula Biss

This ebook published with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 1-931236-07-0 (paperback)

ISBN 1-931236-08-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-55597-919-5 (ebook)

Cover design: Benjamin Piekut

Cover photograph The Breitling Orbiter 3 balloon touching down 70 kilometers north of the Egyptian desert town of Mut early Sunday, March 21, 1999. Swiss Bertrand Piccard and Briton Brian Jones are the first aviators to fly a hot air balloon around the world non-stop. Agence France-Presse

For my sister, Mavis.

I wish you all-new mistakes.

Mother: I almost eloped once. When I was seventeen.

What happened?

Mother: I got a very bad stomach ache and he left without me.

In the newspapers someone is always searching the ocean for a black box. A record of what was said by the pilots before the crash. The search for a black box can go on for weeks after the search for survivors has ended. If the cause of the crash can be determined, the public will be reassured that similar accidents may be prevented in the future.

Aunt: She was still a teenager when she met your father. He waited four years to marry her. Supposedly, your father stopped in to see his mother after the first time he saw her and said, I just met the girl Im going to marry.

On the radio the announcers are always careful to say the so-called black box, or cockpit voice recorder, was recovered. So-called. One announcer explains that the black box, was located by the (she pauses) pinging sounds it emits.

Uncle: Your mother had a hard time in high school. She had a nervous breakdown and dropped out and moved to a commune in Vermont.

One transcript from a cockpit voice recorder includes the voice of an aircraft maintenance engineer speaking to the pilots over the radio. He refused to believe what they were telling him. Damage to the plane had resulted in the loss of all hydraulic systems. The pilots could no longer steer the airplane. The engineer thought this was very unlikely, even impossible. He asked the pilots to verify their loss six times before the plane crashed.

Mother: The man who did it was an old family friend. He had helped my sister find a job. My parents didnt say anything when I told them. They acted as if nothing had happened. They still invited him over to dinner and let my sister go over there to work in his darkroom. Thats when I left home.

My mother has three daughters, but she only told this story to her son.

The black boxes are not black, they are bright orange.

Aunt: She got her GED in Vermont. Then she went to California for a few years and lived with Liz and Bernie. She worked in a sandwich shop or a Chinese restaurant, I think. One day she just got tired of it and called up Roger to tell him she was ready to marry him. That was it. He came and got her.

She once hitchhiked across the country with truck drivers because she missed her bus in Chicago. She had not needed anyone to come and get her then. Maybe she just got tired of living a life with an unrecognizable shape.

Mother: Your father taught me how to drive. I had never driven a car before we were married. Our first apartment had a driveway with cement walls. I would scrape the car against the walls almost every time I parked it and I had worn all the paint off one side of the car. Roger and his brother spent a whole weekend sanding it down and repainting it. The day after his brother went back to Syracuse, I scraped it against the wall while I was parking and ruined the new paint job.

My sister admits that she is terrified of making the same mistakes our mother made.

Mother (to herself, from inside her room): I ruin everything.

I admit to my sister that I dont want to let anyone take care of me.

Grandmother: Roger must have put her through college. I dont know how he did it, he was still in medical school then. I dont know where she got the money. She never asked us for a dime.

My mothers education includes hours of anatomical drawing of birds from life, the study of fine woodworking and cabinet making with a German master, and a bachelors degree in English.

Mother: I couldnt stand his friends from medical school. They were all pompous and awkward. They knew how to memorize but they didnt know how to be human. Rochester was cold and ugly. Everything there was the same color. I was incredibly lonely.

She had her first child that year.

Malcolm McPherson recently collected a book of transcripts from cockpit voice recorders called The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents. It is the updated version of a 1984 classic. On some of these flights, there were no survivors. Only voices were salvaged.

Mother: If your father got his residency in Iowa I would have gone to graduate school there. I was already accepted. He was sent to North Carolina instead.

The transcripts in Malcolm McPhersons book were edited by the National Transportation Safety Board before he published them. Any emotional material was deleted. The curses and apologies that were yelled out just before the crash were deleted. Only material useful to the public in determining the cause of the crash was retained.

Mother: Im amazed that more people dont commit suicide. They just keep on living. Its so hard and they just keep doing it.

Useful to the public?

Mother: Whenever I told him I wanted to work he would tell me that it didnt make any sense. He would say, theres no reason for you to work if youll never be able to make even a fraction of what I make.

She hit her thumb with the hammer over and over, nailing wood paneling onto the ceiling of the shed to make a place for me to write. She wanted me to take myself seriously as an artist. Her thumbnail fell off.

All the pilots whose voices are recorded in The Black Box had extensive training and experience, but many were reluctant to actually fly their planes themselves. The use of autopilot contributed to several crashes. In at least one crash, which resulted in the death of 279 people, the crew might have saved the plane even in the final seconds if they had, flown the airplane with their own hands.

Mother: Rumi wrote thatroughlythe only thing that will be with you to your grave is your work. Only your work will speak for you after youre gone.

There are photographs, as evidence. In every photograph she wears the same strange expression. Its a look Ive seen on zoo animals. She had dreams about panthers in cages.

Uncle: I remember when she visited back then she was like a person living under water. She wandered around like a zombie with you in a basket on her back.

There are only two photos where she seems to be really smiling. Her wedding picture and the formal portrait of her with me, her first child.