Buenos días. My name is Daniel Arzola. I live in El Paso, Texas, and I retired in 1997 after 32 years as a meter repairman for the gas company. For 32 years my whole job was keeping gas where it belonged. Now my nephew Ben hands me a tank of propane, lights it on fire over his head, and floats away, and I chase him down the highway in his pickup. My wife Dollie says this is called retirement.

Ben is my wife's sister's boy. He teaches chemistry at a high school in El Paso, and he has been a licensed balloon pilot since 1990. I have crewed for him since 1993. His balloon is red and orange and gold with a band of turquoise and white diamonds around the middle, and if you were at the Fiesta last October and saw it, you probably saw me too, holding on to something.

This was our fourth Fiesta. Dollie and I drove up in the pickup with our travel trailer and parked it in the RV lot for all nine days. Ben and his wife Carolyn stayed in a motel, which is smarter. The rest of the crew was Mike Langham, a friend of Ben's from El Paso, who is 33 and can carry a propane tank under each arm, and me, who is 63 and can carry one if I talk to it nicely. Dollie runs the radio and the coffee, and I would not want to say which job is more important.

Here is how the week went. I took the pictures myself on my little camera, except the ones I'm in. What does a crew do? Click here, and there's a glossary too.

Up at 4

Every day of a Balloon Fiesta starts at four in the morning. I don't mean you get up at four and have a nice cup of coffee. I mean at four o'clock the whole RV lot starts up at once, generators and car doors and people saying "Where are my gloves" in the dark. By five you're on the launch field with the truck. It's cold, too. October mornings up there are in the 40s, and by noon you're in shirtsleeves.

Before anybody else goes up there's the Dawn Patrol: a few balloons that launch in the dark, before sunrise, and they glow every time the burners go, like big lanterns going up into the stars. You stand there with your coffee and watch them and you forget it's cold.

Saturday, October 3: Opening Day

Cold inflation in the blue dawn. That's me holding the mouth open, Ben at the basket.

This is the cold inflation. You lay the envelope out flat on the grass downwind of the basket, and you put the big fan at the mouth and blow plain air in until it's round enough for the pilot to fire the burner into it. Somebody has to hold the mouth open so the fan can do its work, and since 1993 that somebody has been me. You can see some of the Dawn Patrol already up behind us. Mike took this one. He says I look like I'm trying to hug the balloon. I say I'm trying to keep it from eating me.

Mike and me in front of Ben's balloon, a minute before he lifted off. Ben is in the basket behind us.

And this is the mass ascension, about half an hour later. They don't send everybody up at once; the balloons go up in waves, and the launch officials in the black-and-white striped referee shirts, who everybody calls the zebras, walk around the field and blow whistles and point at you when it's your turn. By the time Ben went the sky was full of them, hundreds of balloons in every color you can think of, with the Sandia Mountains behind going pink and then gold. Carolyn took this from the basket side. Ben was already in the basket and very impatient with her.

I have seen this four times now and every time I stand there with my mouth open like a tourist. Dollie says I am a tourist.

Sunday Night: The Balloon Glow

The Glow. Ben's balloon is the big one in front.

At the Glow the balloons don't fly. They inflate on the field at dusk and stand there tied down, and when the announcer says so, all the pilots fire their burners at the same time and the whole field lights up like a row of paper lanterns. Then they do it again, and again, and the crowd goes "ohhh" every time. The people can walk right out among the balloons. A little boy asked Ben if it was hot inside. Ben let him feel the heat coming off the burner from a safe distance and the boy said "Whoa" and that was the best part of my night.

Tuesday, October 6: The River

Ben over the Rio Grande. Mike and I are on the bank, Dollie took it.

On weekday mornings the crowds are smaller and the pilots have more fun. On Tuesday the winds took Ben west over to the Rio Grande, and he brought the balloon down until the basket was a few feet over the water and just hung there, drifting with the river, the whole balloon upside down in the water under him. Pilots call it a splash-and-dash when they actually touch. Ben didn't touch, he says, though Mike says the bottom of the basket was wet. The cottonwoods along the river were turning yellow. We drove the truck down a dirt road to the bank and got out and just watched. Dollie took this one with my camera, and I think it's the best picture of the whole week, and I didn't take it.

Wednesday, October 7: Breakfast

Dollie and me and two very good breakfast burritos.

Wednesday the wind was too strong for Ben to fly, so it was a day off for the crew. We sat outside the trailer in the lawn chairs with breakfast burritos, green chile, egg and potato, and coffee from the thermos, and watched the balloons that did go up. Carolyn took this. I am in the middle of a bite and Dollie is laughing at me, which is how most of our pictures come out after 39 years. The burritos at the Fiesta are as good as they are in El Paso. I said that in front of my sister-in-law once and I won't say it again.

Saturday, October 10: The Alfalfa Field

Down in the alfalfa. Me at the basket, Ben at the top end, squeezing out the last of the air.

The second Saturday Ben took up a passenger, Norma Shisler, a retired schoolteacher from Las Cruces and an old friend of Dollie's, on her first balloon ride ever. Norma is 57 and said she'd been wanting to do this since she was 12. They flew about an hour and Ben set them down very gently in an alfalfa field down in the valley. When you land on somebody's land you ask permission and you thank them, and the farmer came out on his tractor to see what had landed. He stayed and helped us roll up the envelope. That's him in the red tractor way off at the edge.

Then the champagne. It's an old tradition with balloonists, and the story goes that it started with the very first flights over in France, more than two hundred years ago: after you land, everybody gets a little champagne, and a first-time passenger gets a toast and a certificate. Ben says the words, Norma got a little teary, and the farmer had a glass too. Norma called Dollie the next week and said she had told everybody in Las Cruces, some of them twice.

Sunday, October 11: Home

The last morning we packed up and drove home down I-25, five hours with the trailer, and Dollie slept for three of them. I was tired in a good way, the way I used to be after a long day in the field with the meters. I tell people that crewing a balloon is the most fun you can have standing in a field at five in the morning, and they look at me like I've lost my mind. Maybe I have. We're going back.

What does a crew do? »

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My granddaughter scanned the pictures and showed me how to put them in. Gracias, mija.
Last updated Saturday, September 11, 1999