 |
|
 |
Monday, Oct. 16, 2000
|
|
|
Scene from Above
Fast Forward takes off with Swiss balloonist Bertrand Piccard
By THOMAS SANCTON Château d'Oex
I'm afraid of heights. That should have made me the least-likely candidate to float 3,000 m over the Alps in a wicker basket attached to a hot-air balloon. But the prospect of taking the trip with a world-famous adventurer like Bertrand Piccard, the man who made history with his 1999 round-the-world balloon flight, was enough to overcome my inhibitions.
The media-friendly Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, hypnotist, balloonist and acrobatic sky-diver, accepted TIME's request for an airborne interview. But his busy schedule left only a two-day window of opportunity. At first it seemed that a spell of bad weather might scuttle the project, but last-minute forecasts pointed to ideal conditions. So TIME Geneva stringer Helena Bachmann (who did all the advance work) picked me up at 5:30 a.m. and headed for Château d'Oex, near the eastern end of Lake Geneva, for our rendezvous with Piccard.
It is pitch black outside. As we drive along the lake, the black mountains are silhouetted against a slate gray sky that gradually becomes turquoise, then pink, with just a few streaks of clouds. At 6:45, we arrive at the field that serves as our staging ground. The sky is now a pristine blue. The temperature is 12°C and the weather is perfect.
Piccard shows up at 7 a.m. Trim and fit at 42, he is dressed in impeccable khaki pants and a brown leather flight jacket. His lean, handsome face and pale green eyes glow with enthusiasm as he describes the flight plan. "We'll take off toward the southwest, then when we get fed up with that valley, we'll go higher then come back in the other direction." He explains that there is no way to steer a balloon other than to change altitude and look for a wind that's blowing where you want to go. "Here in Château d'Oex, there is a microclimate that allows us to fly with different wind currents. We'll go up to 2,000 or 3,000 m and try to come down as close to this field as possible."
The dawn air is still chilly. While we wait for copilot Bernard Klaus, I ask Piccard about his theories on the psychology of risk. "Contrary to what most people think," he says, "the biggest danger is not stress but to slip into certitudes and routines — everything that makes humans function in an automatic way. True adventure confronts the human being with the unknown, and forces him to find other ways to relate to himself and to others."
I ask Piccard just how dangerous the sport is. "Well, in a balloon like this, there is not that much risk," he says. "But with long-distance flights, like our round-the-world flight in the Breitling Orbiter 3, there is more risk. It seems logical that so many new sports — hang-gliding, acrobatic parachuting, snowboarding — are an attempt to escape automatism. Society has too little individual responsibility. Risk awakens the consciousness of existing in the present moment. Risk is an apprenticeship in flexibility, a game with life's unknowns. The human being is naturally afraid of the unknown. But the unknown is really a good thing. It permits man to advance."
Piccard sees ballooning as a metaphor for life. "The balloon," he says, "is pushed by the winds and is a prisoner of them, just as a human being is a prisoner of life. For a balloon to change direction, it has to change altitude and find other wind currents. In life, we also have to change altitudes — psychological, philosophical and spiritual — and find other directions."
At 7:30, Klaus arrives in a black pickup truck with a canvas-covered trailer behind. Along with an assistant, he starts to pull off the tarp, revealing the wicker gondola, the burner and other bits of equipment. The gondola, which will carry four people and six cannisters of propane gas, looks disturbingly small and fragile to me. Klaus, 49, a short, muscular sportsman with salt-and-pepper hair, has been a close friend of Piccard's for 15 years and is the man who first taught him the fundamentals of ballooning.
Klaus sets the burners in the gondola and fixes them in place with cables attached to the nylon balloon. "I'll do this myself," he says. "Our lives depend on it." He then turns on a large electric fan to fill the balloon with cold air. The gondola is still on its side as the nylon begins to swell, revealing its colors of green, black, red, yellow and blue and its unique amphora shape. The motif, designed by Klaus' artist girlfriend, depicts what he calls "two sides of life — a God that is good and a God that is not so good." For some reason, they take the form of nude male and female figures. The nudity, he explains, is to show that "we have to respect nature." Political correctness prevents me from asking which is the good sex and which is the bad.
At 8:05, Klaus lights the burners. They make a loud whooshing noise and shoot flames four meters long into the balloon. Slowly, the sack-like form begins to rise, lifting the gondola to a vertical position. Piccard hops into the basket. He gestures at me to join him. Klaus jumps in last, bringing aboard a radio and an altimeter, which he attaches to the vertical struts with velcro. One final detail: Klaus asks me to sign an insurance form, then hands it to his on-the-ground assistant to keep — just in case. "Okay, cut us loose," Piccard shouts. The tether that held us down is released, and the balloon begins to float gently skyward.
I am disturbed to note that the first thing we fly over is a cemetery and wonder if this is some kind of omen. But Piccard's cheery demeanor and his steady gloved hand on the red throttle of the burners have a calming effect. The burners roar and the balloon gently rises. "As we gain altitude, we'll encounter other air masses, with different speeds and directions. Now we're going straight up. We're at 1,500 m, and the visibility is superb."
I swallow hard and look over the side at the green valley below. The cows look like ants as they graze on the green pastures, and the cars on the narrow roads are no bigger than sugar cubes. Piccard points to patches in the forest where fallen trees lie like scattered matchsticks. "That's from the storm that passed through here last December." As we fly over a series of lakes, Piccard grins with an almost childlike delight at the panorama unfolding below our fragile basket. "This is the light I love," he says. "The mountains to the left are bathed in sunlight, those on the right are still in shadow." He points out the Jura range, Mont Blanc with its majestic snowy cap, Lake Geneva, the blue-gray Plaine Morte glacier over Crans-Montana. The scene is breathtaking, and my anxiety eases in the face of all this beauty.
"What is the riskiest thing about flying a balloon?" I ask. "Having to land in a bad place," says Piccard. "That can happen when there is no wind and your gas starts to run out. You can find yourself blocked over the Alps for two hours and have to land on a forest or a rocky mountain peak. But don't worry — we have insurance."
Piccard points to the shadow of our balloon as it glides across the mountainsides and fields. The weird amphora shape of the balloon, with its twin handles, becomes part of the landscape. "We're totally integrated with nature at this moment," he remarks, "because we have only the wind to direct us. Too often we tend to put nature on one side of the equation and man on the other, and we forget to integrate man into nature."
The balloon has reversed direction and is now headed northeast. Piccard checks the altimeter: 2,700 m and falling, back where we came from. "I have to brief you on the landing," he announces suddenly. "When we hit the ground, it can be a real jolt. Bend your knees to absorb the shock, hold the handles on the side of the basket. Otherwise, you can be ejected. Never put your hands outside the gondola, and whatever you do, don't touch the red rope." "What does that do?" I ask. Klaus volunteers: "It's the emergency release line. If you pull on it in flight, the balloon will detach from the gondola and we go straight down." Now he tells me!
Piccard squeezes the throttle to prevent the balloon from descending too fast. We feel the hot blast of the burners. Piccard points to a barnyard where a dozen or so pigs are running frantically in a circle. "The cows are used to seeing us around here, but the pigs always go berserk. Sometimes one of them drops dead of a heart attack and the farmers make us pay for him."
Notwithstanding the porcine panic, Piccard eases the craft toward a field less than 100 m from the pigpen. I bend my knees and brace for the jolt, gripping the sides of the basket to avoid the indignity of being ejected into a pile of cow manure. But the gondola lands like a soap bubble on water. The pickup truck arrives within minutes to collect the equipment and take us back to Château d'Oex. As far as I know, all the pigs survived.
As Piccard radios our location to the support vehicle, Klaus, photographer Mario Fourmy and I jump out onto the boggy field and secure the balloon. Then begins the long, laborious process of squeezing out the air and rolling up the canvas. It is nearly an hour before the balloon is packed in its box and loaded, along with the gondola, ropes and burners, into the trailer.
We part company with Piccard and Klaus and pile into Helena's minivan. As we head off to a local restaurant for an early lunch of raclette — melted Swiss cheese, potatoes and dried ham — everyone is in an upbeat mood. Helena is gratified to see that all her advance work paid off. Photographers Fourmy and Christopher Pillitz (who shadowed the balloon in a helicopter) are marveling over the spectacular Alpine backdrop for their pictures. And I am elated to be back on terra firma. I have faced risk, braved the unknown and, I hope, emerged a better man for it. But I'm still afraid of heights.
Click here for a photo essay of TIME's flight with Bertrand Piccard
Check out timeeurope.com for
more Fast Forward Europe stories in the days and weeks to come. Our Fast Forward
coverage culminates in a year-end special issue and website to be published on
December 14
PHOTO - MARIO FOURMY—REA for TIME
|
|
|
|
 |
