While I normally put in a lot of internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.
Yeah, we’re definitely losing some steam here. All of the NaNoWriMo pep talks are mentioning that it will happen right about now, and I’m right on schedule. Also starting to enter “Phase Three”, i.e., “This story sucks and is worthless!” I know that this is not a good time to be making rational, calculating, unemotional judgments on the topic, so I’ll just ignore those thoughts (“Bad thoughts! Bad, bad thoughts!”) and keep going.
There’s also the real world to deal with. The first ten days you blissfully shove as much of the real world out of your life as you can, because you’re in love with writing and the story consumes you with the wonders of creativity and creation. By the end of the second week, with doubts and the real world banging on the door with both fists (“Bad thoughts! Bad, bad thoughts!”), you start finding and remembering things in the real world (paying bills, other commitments) that can’t be put off any longer.
So you spend all day with growing dread, knowing that you’re “burning daylight” doing stuff other than writing but stuff that really, REALLY has to get done. You’re feeling really short on sleep and stressed and you know that you can’t really stay up until midnight writing tonight because you’ve got to get up at zero dark thirty to get to the Wednesday writer’s group down in Irvine and that commute’s just going to be a pain. You finally get everything else cleared away and it’s time to write like the wind. That’s when your iPhone does that beep-beepy thing that you have it do at the top of each hour and your brain thinks, “Great, it’s already 19:00, I’ll never get this done tonight,” but your eyes look at the clock and oh CRAP it’s really 21:00, not 19:00, and you just want to cry a little but you can’t because guys don’t cry and it won’t help because you can’t type while crying anyways so…
Again, I find relevant to this situation the exact words I remember telling myself while running down Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Pantages Theater just short of the thirteen-mile marker: “Remember to smile! We’re doing this for fun, right?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN (continued)
As they parked, Margaret did another quick check of the winds and weather reports before giving the go ahead to Neil and Bobby to help her in laying out and assembling the balloon. Tom offered to help where he could and Margaret promised to let him know if there was anything he could do, but it was pretty clear that staying out of the way was his best move.
Soon the balloon envelope was stretched out across the crop stubble and dirt of the field, lying on several large tarps that had been put down first to protect it. The basket was removed from the trailer and attached to the balloon by cables. The propane tanks were hooked up to the two huge burners at the top of the basket and the basket was laid on its side. Several pairs of large sandbags were attached to the basket for ballast.
Tom finally got to help when it came time to inflate the balloon envelope. As the burners were lit, a large, gasoline-powered fan was put between the burners and the opening at the bottom of the balloon. Tom helped Neil and Bobby hold the mouth of the balloon open so that the heated air could start to fill it. Within minutes the large balloon started to become buoyant and inflate on its own.
Throughout this whole process, Margaret had been releasing helium-filled party balloons every few minutes and watching them rise so that she could get a good idea of the prevailing currents aloft. In general it seemed to be calm near the ground, but once up a few hundred feet the balloons were blown toward the northwest.
At last the balloon envelope was inflated enough to lift itself off the ground. As it pulled the basket upright, the burners were now directly below it and the air in the balloon started to heat rapidly. Margaret jumped nimbly into the basket and clipped a radio onto her belt. Tom dropped his backpack of gear into the basket and was helped over the side and in. Neil and Bobby clung to the outside of the basket for additional weight, holding the craft down. After another minute more of heating, the whole aircraft started to bob and rise even with the ballast attached.
Margaret yelled for Neil and Bobby to jump free, and as they did so she released the ropes holding the sandbags to the side. Free of all of that extra weight, the giant rainbow colored balloon started rising gently into the breeze.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As they rose, Tom saw the guys scrambling to pack up the tarps and get all of the other gear back into the trailer. As the ground fell away, the patchwork quilt of fields in the flood plain of the river began to spread out below him. There were still patches of snow in some of the fields and areas that were in shadow most of the day, but in general the ground below was painted in various shades of brown and tan.
To the south, on the other side of the highway, the river wound its way toward the west, where it would join the Colorado River and descend through the Grand Canyon. At this time of year the water level was low and it didn’t look particularly deep in many places where the channel was broad. The steep banks and oxbow curves gave witness to how full, fast, and dangerous the river could be in the spring. The bottom of the river bottom near the channel was filled with small trees and brush, some of them still struggling to stay green this late in the season.
“Where do you want me to try and go?” Margaret yelled over the roar of the burners.
“Do you really have that much control?” Tom asked. “I thought that we just drifted wherever we drifted.”
“We have some control, not a lot. The winds will swirl in different directions at different altitudes, so by going up and down into different currents we can move around a bit. You said that you wanted to see the Hogback?”
“Yes, in particular the area where the river cuts through it. Then if we could look up along the escarpment and the mesa above it to the north, that would be great. It looked from the maps like there are a lot of little stream beds and canyons cut into the mesa north of town, sort of a wrinkled texture in the big picture. If we could get up there it would be fantastic.”
“That is where the prevailing wind is going, so I’ll see what I can do. Before we get up into that, let’s see if we can swing over to the west a little bit.”
Staying below the top of the Hogback, Margaret bobbed the balloon up and down a hundred feet at a time to test various wind gusts. Tom got to work taking lots of pictures of the ridge and escarpment, focusing primarily on where stream beds had carved their way into the bedrock. As long as he was going to use this as his cover story, he might as well make a good show of it.
When Margaret needed them to go up a bit she would light off the burners again, their roar like a small jet engine over their head. When she simply wanted to hold altitude or allow the balloon to descend a bit, she would shut down them down and the silence was hypnotic.
Aside from an occasional squawk from Margaret’s radio, the ticking and pinging of the cooling metal burners above them, and the clicking of Tom’s cameras, it was completely quiet as they drifted along. Six or seven hundred feet below them they could clearly hear cars on the highway and farm animals in the scattered barnyards. One farmer could be seen driving a tractor out in a field, and he looked up and waved as they passed over him.
Margaret was indeed good at what she did and soon they were just a few hundred yards away from the cut in the ridge where the river and highway passed through. Margaret found a calm layer of air just below the top of the ridge. With the burners off they just hovered, Tom shooting picture after picture as well as some video.
“I hope you don’t need to go any further south or west from here,” Margaret said. She pointed up above the gap in the ridge where Tom could see several large birds circling. “There’s a big thermal there where those hawks are riding, and if we get into it we’ll end up going way off to the west and not to the north.”
“No, that’s fine right here,” Tom said, moving around to that side of the basket to shoot pictures toward the south. He could clearly see a large reservoir there with a long, earthen dam blocking off the end of a canyon. The fields there extended for maybe a mile south of the road and the river, then cut off like a knife, leaving nothing but dirt and rocks into the distance.
“Why do the fields stop so suddenly along that road?” he asked.
“That road marks the boundary of the reservation. The ridge is the east-west boundary and you can see that the tribes do a fair amount of farming down in the flood plain to the west. But outside of the flood plain they don’t bother trying to irrigate and grow anything. Maybe they know something that we don’t.”
“Okay. I’ve gotten what I need here,” Tom said. “Can we go up to the north and north east along the ridge and up over the mesa there, toward the foothills of Lone Tree Mountain?”
“Sure, if we pop up over the top of the ridge we should get taken that way. We’ll have to stay up a bit to the north anyway to stay out of the airport’s airspace and the approach paths for runway two-three. If we start to drift that way we’ll either have to go up to get over the airport or put down before we get there. I’ll try to keep it slow so you can take your pictures, but get what you need while you can because we won’t be coming back this way by air.”
Margaret got on the radio and called down to Neil, who was now fully loaded and waiting instructions. She told him where to head for a first approximation of their direction, and then lit off the burners again. The balloon had settled a hundred feet or so and drifted nearer to the cliffs, but now it started to slowly bob upward again.
As the balloon cleared the top of the ridge, the whole perspective changed. Where there had been a wall off to their west, now there was a giant, broken table underneath them, like a slab of concrete that had been cracked with one side dropped down in relation to the other. The top of the ridge was wrinkled and bent, the ground rough and ripped. It looked like challenging terrain to cross on foot.
As they settled at an altitude about six or seven hundred feet over the upper mesa, the winds started to carry them to the northwest. It was not a fast pace but it was definitely steady, and Tom was busy with the camera. He started to recognize certain landscape features from his research earlier in the day and oriented himself to where he thought the commune compound (if that’s what it was) was located.
The upper mesa sloped generally uphill toward the mountains of southern Colorado and the foothills around Lone Tree Mountain. The whole plain was covered with erosion gullies and streambeds. Some were only a few feet deep and wide, while others were deep and wide enough to have dirt roads and buildings tucked away in them.
Almost all of the buildings that Tom saw were ramshackle and dilapidated, weather worn and collapsing. A few looked like they were occasionally occupied and kept in useable shape. Tom was surprised to see railroad tracks running near the base of the Hogback and climbing up onto the mesa before heading off into the distance toward Colorado.
“Those aren’t the tracks for the trains I keep hearing in town, are they?” Margaret turned to look where he was pointing.
“No, the main tracks run along the highway to the east and through town, then pretty much parallel to the highway about ten miles south of it once they get out of town. Those tracks there are some old mining tracks, that haven’t been used in probably close to a hundred years. If you look over there,” she pointed, “and there you can see some spurs that went off to old abandoned strip mines.”
Tom picked up the binoculars and looked down at the tracks. Something was bugging him about the way they looked. He suddenly realized that the reason they stood out so well on the brown and beige landscape was because of the way the rails were glinting in the sunlight. If they hadn’t been used in a decades he would expect them to be dull and rusted, but they seemed to be much brighter and shinier. It was something else that didn’t add up that he would have to check out.
After the Hogback wall had gradually worn down and met the rising ground about ten miles to the northwest of Farmington and the airport, several of the larger gullies and gulches emptied out of box canyons, the streams meandering down toward the river to the south. Right next to the mouth of one of these canyons, near a small ridge to their north and with hills to both the east and west, was the collection of over a dozen non-descript buildings that Tom was looking for.
The wind was carrying them to the north of the compound. Tom might have preferred to be to the south since part of his view would be blocked by the ridge descending down from the mesa, but it would have to do. Making sure that he was taking pictures of the entire area and each erosion gully they passed over, Tom switched to high-definition video and zoomed in when they got near the buildings.
It looked like an industrial compound, a farm without a farmhouse. A gravel driveway led in from off of a dirt road. A tall chain-link fence surrounded everything, with what looked like a remote-controlled gate at the entrance. The south side of the fence where the entrance was ran right next to the “abandoned” rail line.
The buildings loosely surrounded an open courtyard and parking lot. Outside of the buildings but inside the fence at the back were four small plots that looked like gardens. Two of the buildings that faced the gardens had long greenhouses attached to them. An old-fashioned windmill on a tall steel lattice structure sat next to a water tank, and four other three-blade wind turbines rose on poles at the four corners of the compound. They were nowhere near as large as the ones seen in commercial wind farms, but they were all spinning steadily.
The buildings were all single story. They looked like industrial buildings, not residential homes, but they didn’t look cheap or flimsy by any means. The buildings were all arranged with the north walls several feet higher than the south walls, sloping them to keep snow off, but also allowing them to be covered wall-to-wall with solar panels.
From their position several hundred feet above and a half-mile or more to the north, Tom could see far more detail than the grainy online photos had shown, but it wasn’t as good as he would like. He could clearly see six cars in the parking lot, including a familiar white Tahoe, but no movement was visible.
Just as they were starting to drift out of sight of the compound and he was getting ready to shift his attention back to his cover of geologic erosion features, a door opened in one of the buildings and several people came out. From this distance it looked like three men and two women and Tom was certain that the two women were Ellen and the woman that he had seen at the post office two days earlier. He didn’t recognize any of the men. They all seemed to just be talking about something as they walked to two of the parked SUVs.
The balloon had been drifting quietly and sinking ever so slowly, but now Margaret again lit off the noisy burners. Through the long telephoto lens Tom could see all five of the people look up toward the balloon just visible over the ridge from their viewpoint and disappearing to the north. It must not have been that unusual of a sight since they all quickly turned back to the cars.
Just as the compound was disappearing out of sight, Tom saw the doors of the SUVs opened up. Out of the two vehicles came dozens and dozens of cats. They hopped down from the car and began to run all around inside the compound and were then all lost from Tom’s sight.
Tom went back to photographing rocks and gullies for a few minutes before he turned to Margaret. She had been quietly letting him do his work and keeping them as low as was reasonably safe. She had occasionally made calls to Neil and Bobby and they all seemed to have a plan in mind.
“I’ve pretty much got what I need,” Tom said. “This has been great, I really appreciate your help. It’s marvelous being up here and floating along like this. I see why you like it so much. Do you have a particular destination in mind for landing and meeting up with Neil?”
“More or less. We fly up north of here a lot, near the Colorado line on the other side of these mountains.” She pointed toward Lone Tree Mountain and the other peaks around it. “There’s a big river valley where the Animas River goes up into Colorado and the main highway up that way runs through there. In a few miles we’ll be there and the mesa here will fall off with some pretty spectacular cliffs down into the valley. It’s not the widest valley in the world but we should be able to drop down into it pretty quickly and be out of this northward flow. The winds down in there might be swirling around a bit, but we can work with whatever we’ve got and find a flat spot to put down. Neil is heading that way and he’ll scout out someplace in advance and then I’ll see if I can hit it. Simple!”
“If you say so. I’ll just keep taking pictures, you tell me when to hold on.”
In the end it worked pretty much as she had said. The edge of the mesa was sudden and the drop off into the valley was steep, but she had started their descent about a mile out and they dropped down past the edge of the cliff about two hundred yards out from the rocks.
Once down below the edge of the mesa, as predicted, they lost most of their northward momentum and drifted back and forth on some swirling currents in the valley. Below them there was a smaller river, a highway, and a few scattered fields. There were a lot of empty areas with just a few short trees and scrub brush, but Tom was guessing that even a few trees were too many.
Margaret kept up a running conversation with Neil over the radio, and soon Tom saw the bright red SUV and trailer parked just off the highway in a more or less flat area between the river and the road. Tom saw Neil let loose a couple of party balloons again and Margaret watched their paths to get a picture of the winds. They were in a good position so she let them start to cool and descend quickly.
Margaret was very, very good at what she did. They skimmed over a pair of trees on the far side of the highway, almost close enough to touch, before clearing the highway and the parked truck by about ten feet. Drifting at a little better than walking speed, Margaret dropped a pair of ropes which Neil and Bobby grabbed onto.
As they grabbed ahold and started dragging the balloons horizontal momentum to a stop, Margaret reached up and pulled a rope to open a vent in the top of the balloon’s canopy. The release of warm air caused them to settle to the ground with a gentle-ish thump. Neil and Bobby grabbed the basket as Margaret opened two more vents in the canopy. Deflating and pushed by the gentle breeze, the balloon fell to the ground downwind.
From there it was just a matter of disassembling the basket and rig, folding up the balloon envelope, and packing everything into the trailer. Margaret and the guys had done this many times so it went quickly. Tom had the sense to stay out of the way, swapping the normal lens for the telephoto and taking more pictures of the whole process. In twenty minutes they were back on the road.
As promised, Margaret dropped him off at his hotel on the way back into town. It was almost four o’clock by the time they got there. They spent a few minutes doing the paperwork for Tom’s credit card payment for the day’s adventures, then the balloonists were off to their hanger and Tom was off to let Jason in on what he had seen.
Ellen was most certainly out there, as well as the other lady and several others. Since there were at least six cars there, Tom suspected that there were more than just the five people he had seen. And what was going on with all of those cats? And the train tracks that weren’t on any map and were supposed to be abandoned?
The more they learned, the more questions they raised.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 