I don't fly the balloon. I want to get that out of the way, because the first thing everybody asks me is "Do you get to go up?" and the honest answer is: twice in six years, and I'm fine with that. My name is Martha Christman. I'm forty-seven, I'm a loan officer at a bank here in Albuquerque, and on weekend mornings from September to May, and every single morning of Balloon Fiesta, I'm crew chief for a hot air balloon called Mesa Morning. I get it up. I follow it across the mesa. I get it packed up again. The pilot gets the view. The crew gets the stories.

On this page: What a Crew Chief Does · A Flight Morning, Hour by Hour · The Chase · Landowners and Manners · Fiesta Countdown New to this? Crew 101: A Beginner's Guide

The balloon: Mesa Morning is a seventy-seven-thousand-cubic-foot envelope, middle-sized as these things go, in six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, the way I've tried to draw it at the top of this page. On a field with hundreds of balloons, the rainbow ones are a dime a dozen, so ours has a white band near the top. Look for the white band.

The pilot: Louis Sherrell, who was my next-door neighbor on our old street. One October morning in 1993 he knocked on my door and asked if I could drive a pickup with a trailer behind it. I said yes. At the time, I could not. I learned that morning, on a dirt road on the West Mesa, going backwards. I've been crew chief since the next spring.

The crew:

What a Crew Chief Does

The pilot is in charge of the balloon. The crew chief is in charge of everything else. In practice that means:

• Getting the people there. I call the crew the night before. Who's coming, who has to leave early, who's bringing the donuts. If we're short, I find somebody.
• Getting the stuff there. I keep the checklist: fan, fuel, radios, gloves, the first aid kit, the map book, the drop line, the champagne and the cups. If it's on the list, it's on the trailer. If it's not on the trailer, it's my fault. That's the deal.
• Running the ground. At the launch, the pilot is busy with the burner and the weather. I'm the one who says who's on the mouth, who's on the crown line, and who stands where. Once the balloon is up, I'm on the radio with Louis and with the chase truck.
• Safety. Gloves on. Nobody stands downwind of the basket. Nobody wraps a rope around a hand, ever. Spectators stay back. I say no a lot, and I don't apologize for it.
• Training the new ones. Every season somebody's friend or nephew wants to try crewing. I wrote Crew 101 so I'd stop saying the same things at five in the morning, when nobody hears them anyway.

A loan officer turns out to be pretty good training for this. You make a list, you check it, you make sure everybody signs where they're supposed to, and when something goes wrong you don't panic, you just start on the next form.

A Flight Morning, Hour by Hour

This was last Sunday, September 19, our last practice flight before the Fiesta. A good morning, which is why I wrote it down.

The Chase

A balloon can't be steered. The pilot can go up and down, and the wind blows different directions at different heights, so he picks his direction by picking his height. That's all the steering there is. The crew follows on the ground in the chase truck, with the trailer, on whatever roads go in roughly the right direction, which in Albuquerque is often none of them.

Our rules for the chase:

1. Somebody watches the balloon. Always. Darryl drives, Terry navigates, and I watch, and I don't take my eyes off that white band until it's on the ground. You'd be surprised how easy it is to lose a balloon behind a row of cottonwoods.
2. Talk on the radio, short and clear. Louis tells us where he thinks he's headed and what he sees. We tell him where the roads are, where the power lines are, and where we can get the truck in. Power lines are the one thing a balloon pilot fears most, and the crew is a second set of eyes.
3. Drive like your mother is in the truck. We are not in a race. The balloon is going eight miles an hour. Running a stop sign gets you there four seconds sooner and gets us all a bad name.
4. Know the valley. In the North Valley and South Valley there are irrigation ditches everywhere, and you can only cross them where there's a bridge. On the West Mesa it's arroyos and sand. Terry has a map book with every ditch crossing we've ever found marked in pencil. It's the most valuable thing we own after the balloon.
5. Get there first, then wait. The best chase is the one where the crew is standing in the field when the basket comes down.

Landowners and Manners

Every balloon flight ends on somebody's land. Somebody's pasture, somebody's vacant lot, somebody's alfalfa. We are guests every single time, and the sport only works if the people who own the land are glad to see us. So:

• Ask first. If there's any way to get to the door before the basket gets to the ground, the crew chief goes and knocks. If there isn't, I go the minute we land.
• Gates are left the way you found them. Open stays open. Shut stays shut. No exceptions.
• Stay off the crops. We walk the edges of a field, not the rows. If we have to drive in, we ask first, and we go where the owner tells us.
• Stay away from animals. A balloon burner sounds like a dragon to a horse. Louis won't land in a pasture with livestock in it if he can possibly help it, and if he flies low over a ranch he stays quiet as long as he safely can.
• Some places are never. There is land around Albuquerque where we simply don't land, and Louis carries a map with every one of those places marked in red. If you crew, learn the red.
• Say thank you. Every landowner gets a thank-you, a glass of champagne if they'd like it, and a picture of the balloon when the film comes back. Some of them have become friends. One of them sends us biscochitos at Christmas.

The Fiesta Countdown

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta runs nine days every October, and this year it opens on Saturday, October 2 and closes on Sunday, October 10. If you've never been, picture hundreds of balloons going up in waves at dawn in the mass ascensions, filling the whole sky over the north end of town with the mountains behind. It's the reason the whole city gets up at four in the morning for nine days, and it's the reason Albuquerque is the balloon capital: the box. On a good October morning a pilot can drift one way low, climb, come back the other way higher up, and land not far from where he started.

Here is the plan for the week before. My boss already has my vacation slip.

If you're coming to the Fiesta for the first time: dress in layers, because it's cold at dawn and warm by ten. Get there early, and be patient with the traffic. Stand where the officials tell you, and if a crew asks you to help hold a basket, say yes. That's how I started.

Another crew's view of last year's Fiesta is right here in the Hangar: Daniel Arzola crews for his nephew Ben, and he wrote up all nine days of Balloon Fiesta '98. If you see either of them on the field this year, say hello from Mesa Morning.