He was also painfully aware of his chains, but wasn't about to be ruled by them -- not any longer.
You see... Larry had a dream, and he had been feeding it every-since he had walked into an Army & Navy Surplus store when he was around 13-years-old. The second his eyes laid on a couple of weather balloons just sitting on a shelf, the cogs of destiny began to turn -- not only on his mind, but in the universe at large. And so, many years later, he set out to conquer a dream so universal that it's shared by people, sick birds and caterpillars alike: he wanted to fly, to feel the air on his face, to see the world for what it was through the naked eye. And he did it in his own way.
It is fair to say that we had pretty much figured out this "flight" thing by 1982, but he didn't do it the easy way: he didn't buy a boarding pass for an aircraft, nor did he take skydiving lessons. Instead, he went back to that teenhood scene of his and bought a cluster of the same weather balloons that had once sparked his imagination so vividly as to hurt. Then he tied them to a lawnchair (!) he had seen on a local Sears... and that was his "aircraft". It sounds utterly ridiculous, but it worked just about perfectly.
This is what dreaming looks like.
NOW, he wasn't so careless as to just sit on a chair tied to a bunch of balloons to see what would happen -- there was a method to his "madness". A method which included carrying a couple of CV radios to talk with his significant other and his best friend several miles below him, people who loved him so deeply as to act as his ground crew even thought they had both begged him not to do it, to reconsider risking life and limb by trusting his everything to something he had made himself.
He then put on both a life jacket and a parachute, carried a camera to capture whatever awesome sights he would come across, and then added a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of Coke to enjoy the ride. Larry Walters was taking to the skies in a way I think we all dreamed of: by opening a cold one and enjoying the ride, drifting silently above the horizon.
But, of course, it wasn't that simple.
He had greatly underestimated the carry that a cluster of hellium-filled weather balloons could produce, which caused him to skyrocket as soon as the first rope, this fiber-made "chain" bounding him to the ground was released... forcing the other one to snap immediately. This caused him to lose his glasses (luckily, he had spares) and to just start getting way the hell up there. He got so high up that he started feeling the effects of both sunburn and frostbite. Let that sink in for a minute.
He then lost the BB gun he was using to pop the balloons in order to control his descent. Without this "safety barrier", he was completely at the mercy of the elements as his home-made craft got picked up by the wind and taken directly into the radar range (and, infinitely more frightening, path) of commercial airliners just doing their normal routes. He got reported by at least two pilots whilst his planned route got completely reversed by the nature herself: he had attempted to cruise over the Mojave Desert and make a sort of soft landing on it, but he was instead taken into the open seas.
This is close enough to heaven for me.
It was at this point that any rational person would panic. And while there definitely was some of that, this was also the moment where Larry Walters decided that he was having the time of his life. He was so in awe by what he was seeing that he completely forgot about the camera he was carrying. He didn't use it once. Instead, he calmly munched on his sandwiches as he could be facing one hell of a terrifying death at any second. He was so completely away from any of his ideal scenarios that the odds of him making it out alive were slim even if he somehow managed to get this thing down. He'd be fried on the spot as soon as his aluminum-piece-of-backyard-furniture-turned-aircraft touched upon power lines on the residential area he was now desperately shooting for.
But, as I said before, the people on the ground really loved him.
His best friend, Ron, got in touch with the local authorities, begging them to shut down the power to an entire area just so his friend may have a chance at not killing himself in ways that are only known to Frank Grimes and Team Rocket. I imagine the conversation on the ground was just as crazy as anything happening on the air. But while all of this was going on, Carol, the love of his life (and financial backer for this whole operation) kept reassuring him through the radio, clinging on to every bit of good news she could manage to deliver in order to ease his mind.
The sorta Quick Time Events are actually super important.
Whatever the case, Larry Walters MADE IT.
He landed safely due to a combination of dumb luck (he had managed to pop just about the right number of balloons to guarantee a safe, drifting descent) and the quick actions of those he had roped into helping. And what did our hero do after rejoining us, wingless folk? He folded the chair he had risked his life on and gave it to some neighborhood kid without batting an eye, never seeing it again. Then took a long sip of Coke from his now space-cold bottle, like the badass he was.
But the most fascinating aspect about this whole thing (for me, at least) was that authorities tried to penalize him immediately after he landed. He broke two sets of laws that day: the laws of nature and the mandates of man, but neither could touch him -- not during take off, not after landing. Innovators are not bound by pre-existing rules, and law-makers don't speak the language of dreamers.
I have been fascinated by Larry's story ever-since I first heard it because there's something oddly, beautifully relatable about someone just leaving solid ground behind to embark of an adventure of their own making. The fact that it went so wrong that his intended course and altitude were mocked by the universe itself only adds to the magic in a way that's too precious to even be conceived by the pen of the most gifted writers our species has to offer. He went higher than what would be deemed possible in the movie "UP!". Higher than the Sears Tower. Higher than anyone not belonging on a pressurized cockpit had any business being. And he did so because he wanted to, knowing the risks but deciding that they weren't going to keep him from dreaming any longer.
The sky has a way of both challenging and rewarding us. It can show us the most beautiful things in existence -- it can give us rainbows and starry night skies, it can bathe our best moments in unforgettable silvery lights or make us as golden as sunlight would go. It can give us rain when we are thirsty and snow when we are itching to play. Hell, it can even delight us with the cosmic ballet of comets from time to time, just often enough to make it feel special every time it happens. But, of course, it can also delight with scaring us shitless through lightning and thunder, cutting us with the invisible knives of wind and causing us to get lost in a darkness so impenetrable as to make time into a meaningless blob. It's this duality that make us turn to it for both advice and reverence, and what will continue powering our imagination for as long as we dare looking up.
Myself? I took to a different kind of sky to solve an issue I had been having.
Such simple, endless fun.
You see... one of my oldest kids is starting to reach the stage where he wants to test limits and see who he is in the grand scheme of things. It's this terrifyingly fascinating moment in which the earliest, sweetest connection we had begins to get severed in order to be replaced by whatever happens next, like an animal shedding its skin in order to grow into a better (or, at least, different) version of itself. And it is as exhausting as it is beautiful.
But videogames will always be a common ground. They were when my parents and I went through the same "dance", and I imagine that they will continue being for each new generation that inherits them.
Not long ago I asked my kid if he wanted to play "Jet de GO!", a PlayStation 1 game with NOTHING IN IT if you aren't already an aircraft fanatic. He had seen me play it, but didn't look all that impressed by it. Still, I extended the olive branch to him after an argument, and he took it, however hesitantly.
What I like the most about emulation is that it can turn ANY game into a two-player experience with some creativity, and so, I rearranged the controls, so we could both play it at the same time: me managing the actual flight controls and him taking care of the flying map and all the cockpit options and QTEs (raising/lowering landing gear, communicating with the control tower, checking the passengers, directing the flight attendants...). At first, it was quite an awkward experience, with him missing his cues and threatening to leave with each new mistake that happened, but then we soon fell into a sort of hypnotic rhytm, and we never looked back again as we went for larger and harder flights after every new landing that we managed to complete.
I actually didn't think we would be playing this one much, but we got sucked into it in a way that hadn't happened since I first showed him Pokemon Stadium 2. He was just as into it as I was, and I took particular delight in messing up on purpose just to see if he'd correct me (which he did. Promptly). We even managed to play the harder set of levels --which I normally avoid-- just to keep at it, taking many attempts to get the 747 to tax into the runaway without overshooting it, and then flying it into the eternal blue.
At one point he surprised me by telling me that he wanted to play pilot, and I was very happy to oblige... but it wasn't all that smooth of an experience because, you see, Jet de GO! is a simulator on the purest of senses, and it stands to no nonsense on the player's part. Stuff like taking off with the wrong angle or approaching the runaway a little off results on your flight getting ended on the spot (and your flying record getting tarnished as a result), so we actually experienced some small friction as the game decided that the different aircraft weren't being handled properly. Thank God for savestates.
Actually the hardest part of the game by far.
Still, there was something utterly refreshing about having to work as a team in order to accommodate to the game's (almost) unreal expectations. This was no GTA, no Snoopy vs the Red Baron... but it didn't need to be, either. The lack of barrel rolls and arcade-y handling of hijacked aircraft only enhanced the mood with each subtle touch of the yoke. Plenty of games offer manic escapism, but only a handful could provide the exact opposite whilst remaining a fun, enjoyable experience. And I just find it funny that a game about conquering the skies could result in such a grounding experience.
We certainly didn't ride a goddamn lawnchair to the stratosphere, but new heights were reached all the same.
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