The Balloonist | Remembering Brian Boland

In early July last year,Ellen Blake phoned her daughter to ask what she wanted for her birthday. Heather* would turn 37 on July 10, and because she shares the day with her younger brother, her parents wanted to use the occasion to spend some time with both their kids. Perhaps her brother could come down from his farm in Hinesburg, just outside Burlington, Vermont, and the family could do something together, Ellen said.

Heather, who lives with her 10-year-old daughter a few miles south of her parents in Wilder, Vermont, liked the idea. “I’ve never been in a hot-air balloon,” she suggested.

“Then we’ll call Brian to see about his scheduling,” her mother replied.

In Vermont’s Upper Valley region, Brian Boland was the sort of figure it was impossible not to know about. From his home at the Post Mills Airport, a small, private World War II–era facility he’d purchased in the late 1980s, Boland led a life of perpetual motion. Though it could take some coaxing for him to admit it, he was arguably the world’s leading hot-air balloonist. Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, the 72-year-old had logged more than 11,000 hours of flying time, a staggering total that dwarfed most of his contemporaries’. He designed and built the balloons he flew, and over the years he had broken world records and piloted flights all over the globe, including a series of rugged adventures in Venezuela that became the subject of a TV documentary.

But it was in, and above, his Vermont community that Boland became a larger-than-life figure. Standing 6 foot 4 and with a booming voice that could be heard from hundreds of feet in the air, Boland flew year-round, and the sound of his burners firing and the sight of one of his colorful balloons hovering in the sky were built into the rhythm of life in and around Post Mills. From his basket, he liked to drop candies and stuffed toys onto the yard of a young family he knew in nearby Thetford. His early-morning flights could inspire neighbors to rush out of their houses in their pajamas (or, in a few memorable instances, with nothing on at all) to wave hello. He made announced visits to schools and unannounced ones to weddings and barbecues, even when he didn’t know a soul at the gathering. “The balloon is here!” he’d announce triumphantly, before being welcomed, without fail, into the scene. Even those who didn’t know Boland probably had a connection to him, or at least a story about “the balloon man.”

The Blakes did. Ellen and her husband, Roger, live in a ranch house with a backyard that fronts onto the Connecticut River, and the blue metal roof of their garage was one of Boland’s identifying markers from the air. He knew, for example, that his landing options would dwindle if he continued a few miles south, where the Ompompanoosuc meets the Connecticut. Or that crossing into New Hampshire meant adding a good 25 minutes of driving for his “chaser,” the person tasked with ferrying a balloonist home after landing. Over the years, Roger Blake had watched Boland land in his backyard, in a neighbor’s field, and on a party barge.

“If you want to stay married, don’t become a balloonist,” Boland had joked to him once.

For the Blake family’s balloon trip, Boland had scheduled a departure of 6:30 a.m. on July 15. But an hour before takeoff, Boland—who often rose at 4:30 in the morning to check the wind—decided to postpone. Humidity had pushed a band of fog over the landscape, making visibility poor. “Let’s keep in touch during the day, and if the wind is favorable this evening we can go up,” he told Ellen.

Calling off a passenger flight was always bittersweet for Boland, who delighted in showing friends their home turf from a different vantage point. He loved helping people set the scene for tender moments, too: Wedding proposals had been made in his basket, and he’d quietly watched families scattering a loved one’s ashes over a particular spot. Yet Boland also relished going up by himself—his “therapy flights,” he called them—when he could turn control over to the wind and just be still. His days were never as good if he couldn’t fly, and he could be difficult to be around if he was grounded for a long stretch, as he had been following major heart surgery the year before.

But even while he would fly solo in conditions other balloonists wouldn’t consider, Boland could be ruthless with his protégés about safety. (“He’d rap you upside the head if you didn’t have a backup igniter in your pocket,” says one aeronaut.) Double-check your burners, he’d preach, and never risk the weather.

With the Blakes’ flight postponed, Boland made the most of the day, working around the airport with his close friend and regular chaser, Aaron Johnson, a former Army paratrooper whom he was training for flying certification. Late that afternoon, with visibility improved and calm winds, Boland made plans for an evening flight.

Around 6, the Blakes arrived: Ellen and Roger, along with Heather and her young daughter, but minus Heather’s brother, who had to return to his farm. As they pulled in at the airport, Boland, who was wearing jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, and his signature tweed cap, was working with Johnson on hauling out the equipment. Soon the whole group was unfurling one of Boland’s favorite bigger balloons: a blue, yellow, and orange striped number he called Middle Fred. Two gas-powered fans inflated the fabric, and then Boland fired the basket’s propane burner, blowing heat into the balloon and giving it lift. Before long, the nearly 10-story structure was towering overhead, and the passengers climbed into the basket.

Just before the balloon took off, Boland gave the group a bit of safety advice. “Sometimes the landing can hit hard,” he told them. “Bend your knees to absorb some of the shock, and hold on to the basket.”

———

In its village of 300 residents, the Post MillsAirport is the closest thing you’ll find to a community center. The property spreads across 52 acres, with a pair of long grass runways, an airplane hangar, and various outbuildings, along with the two-story structure where Boland lived with his longtime partner, Tina Foster. Off the back of the main house sits the Experimental Balloon and Airship Museum, which pays homage to Boland’s long career and the different vehicles he’d flown over the years. Every May, thousands of people gather just outside its doors for the Experimental Hot-Air Balloon Festival, where pilots from around the country show off and fly their creations. In the winter, aeronauts with nothing more than backpack propeller systems and skis make use of the place.

For more than three decades, the man at the center of the action was Boland. He welcomed friends and newcomers alike to make his airport—and whatever project he might be working on—a part of their life, too. For Boland, a former high school art teacher, his home doubled as his laboratory. One summer he became obsessed with treehouses and proceeded to build a series of them on his land. Another time he transformed a fleet of Chinese three-wheeled motorbikes into head-scratching new transportation: a mobile picnic table, a mobile barbecue, a mobile bed, and what he proclaimed as “the world’s shortest car,” measuring just 45 inches long. His love of being on the water led him to motorize a pair of kayaks he’d tethered together, which he parked not far from something he called a “canoe car.” Last winter, his fixation with diners inspired him to buy a retired coach bus and begin to build a restaurant on wheels.

The famously frugal Boland also saw art where few others did. A little more than a decade ago, he and about 100 volunteers turned a giant pile of scrap wood into a dinosaur he nicknamed the Vermontasaurus. Old roof shingles became “Mount Shingle”; a retired farm silo, a rocket ship. Boland’s imagination and playfulness were everywhere you looked—and you were invited to join right in. “Jump on the deck!” reads a sign posted on a door. “Turn around. Hit the gong loudly with the hammer and yell.”

“He had this way of getting people involved and feeling like they could be a part of something that maybe they didn’t think they could do,” says Foster. “He was a guy who really loved life and sharing that with others.”

Nothing about this could have been expected from a quiet boy from the suburbs who found solace in drawing. The second of three children born to Margaret and Frank “Pat” Boland, Brian spent his early years in Hicksville, New York, the working-middle-class hamlet on Long Island where his parents carved out a typical American life: Margaret stayed at home with the kids, while Pat, a fireboat engineer, put in long days in New York City.

Shy and reserved, with a strong artistic streak, Brian rarely brought friends to his house. Instead, he preferred being by himself in his room, filling up sketch pads with intricate drawings of soldiers and battle scenes.

“He didn’t stand out in a crowd,” says his older sister, Sue Weyermuller. “If our parents compared us, they’d say I was the social butterfly and he was the introvert. He wasn’t one of those kids you felt bad for because they were on the outside looking in. He was just happy to be a loner.”

In that respect, young Brian seemed to reflect a bit of his father, a strict but quiet man who found contentment in tinkering in his basement workshop. “He was the kind of guy who, if you were watching TV with him, would see an advertisement for some product and exclaim, ‘I invented that 10 years ago,’” says Foster. “And then go rummage through a closet to show that he actually had come up with the thing.”

When Brian was about 7 or 8, the Bolands moved to a bigger house in nearby Northport. Along with his sister, Brian attended the brand-new John Glenn High School, and it’s there he grew a little more into himself. He found friends to hang out with, played soccer, and excelled in his art classes. As he neared graduation, he had a steady girlfriend, Sharon, whom he’d met at a dance, and he talked about becoming an art teacher.

In the fall of 1967, he enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; among its demanding professors, Brian, who favored creating large abstract paintings, would find his talent validated. He and Sharon married in 1968, and later that year they had a son, Jeff. After finishing his four-year program in three, Brian remained at Pratt for his master’s degree. The young couple scraped by, living in a cramped fourth-floor apartment near Pratt, with Sharon working part-time as a secretary in the school’s architecture department.

As Brian Boland would later recall, his entry into ballooning was born out of desperation. Eager to avoid submitting a written thesis for his master’s—and having read about an aeronaut who’d piloted around Colorado—he had proposed building a hot-air balloon as a form of sculpture. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’ll knock this off in two weeks and have the rest of the year free,’” Boland told The New York Times in a 1979 profile.

Instead, the project spanned eight months, an early sign of the all-consuming, made-from-scratch work ethic that would define Boland’s career. He poured hours into learning about the intricacies of different nylons, then scoured Manhattan’s fabric district for the right material. He sketched diagrams, spreading out big sheets of paper in his apartment, and he set up a table and his grandmother’s Singer sewing machine in the basement of the apartment building so he and Sharon could cut and stitch the different sections together. For days, the couple soaked wicker for the balloon’s basket in their bathtub.

On the morning of May 17, 1971, before a small crowd of students and faculty gathered at a Pratt parking lot, Boland debuted the result: a 17-story-high multicolored balloon he’d modeled after a beach ball. He called it The Phoenix.

“It was very big, and that was part of the attraction for him,” recalls Sharon. “And he loved that people came to see it and were excited about it. It was showy and fun, and there was this festive atmosphere. And I think, for him, it all of a sudden predicted his future.”

———

The balloon carrying Boland and the Blake family rose quickly. In a matter of seconds, the group was soaring several hundred feet off the ground, a gentle northeast breeze pushing them over the airport’s grassy runways and toward Lake Fairlee. A nervous excitement ran through the guests, especially Heather’s young daughter, who had been a reluctant participant. Even after Heather had assured her about Boland’s long experience, she had been adamant that her grandfather, Roger, be with them.

“I’ll only go if Papa is in that balloon,” the girl had told her mother.

As they floated over the land, she kept her distance from the edge of the basket, clutching her grandmother’s hand. But slowly she began to relax. Boland had helped: As the balloon settled at a height of about a mile above the ground, he pointed out a landscape that looked both familiar and different. Over the shores of Lake Fairlee he gestured to a girls’ camp that Heather had considered sending her daughter to. In the near distance was Lake Morey, which to Roger’s eye looked unexpectedly close to the body of water they now hovered over. To the northeast was Interstate 91, which Boland traced with his finger and explained some of the obstacles that planners had faced in laying it out. In time, the balloon’s youngest passenger stepped to the edge of the basket and cautiously looked out.

Roger watched his granddaughter. But he also watched Boland and how he operated the balloon. Roger had owned a car repair shop in White River Junction for nearly three decades, and with his natural curiosity about how things operate, he observed how Boland reached overhead to periodically fire the burner, sending up a quick blast of flame. The pilot didn’t lay on the trigger for long, Blake noted—just enough to keep the balloon’s altitude steady.

The group was still floating over Lake Fairlee when the balloon started a mild descent. Standing behind Boland and to the left of his wife, Roger took only slight notice. It’s probably just part of the tour, he thought. He wanted to show us what 5,500 feet would be like, and now he wants to head down to get us closer to the ground to show us smaller details.

It was about then that Boland looked up at the burner and saw the pilot light had gone out.

“That’s not good,” Boland said.

———

Ballooning was humankind’s first successful conquering of gravity. On a chilly Paris day, November 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes made history when they lit a pile of straw and wood to carry them 500 feet into the air in a silk balloon. A balloon craze spread across Europe and the United States, drawing fascinated crowds—sometimes even frenzied ones—by the thousands. Over the next two centuries, gas-fired ballooning launched a spate of adventurism as well as military innovation, as when Abraham Lincoln commissioned a balloon corps during the Civil War. But it was very expensive, complicated, and often dangerous.

That all changed one day in October 1960, on a farm in Bruning, Nebraska, where an aeronautics engineer named Ed Yost strapped a pair of propane tanks to a seat resembling a lawn chair, attached that to a 40-foot-tall nylon balloon, and sailed about 500 feet high for a good 25 minutes. Yost’s simple invention—a nylon envelope, aka balloon, with a propane burner system for heating the air inside it—would greatly democratize the sport of ballooning, opening it up to a new generation of enthusiasts.

“There was just this whole spectrum of people who got into it,” says Kathy Delano, Brian Boland’s second wife and longtime business partner. “[In those early days] you’d go to these festivals, and there’d be people who had practically nothing but their balloon and then you’d have the Malcolm Forbeses of the world.”

The ballooning community was still very much in its infancy when Boland unveiled his creation in that Brooklyn parking lot back in 1971. And at first, it didn’t seem like one he was destined to join. After graduating, Boland moved his young family to Farmington, Connecticut, where he’d been hired to teach art at the local high school. They bought a small house. Sharon stayed home to raise their son. Boland’s thesis project was put into the attic, and he poured himself into his teaching.

At the high school, Boland quickly developed a following among his students. He was an energetic presence, gesticulating with his hands as he paced around the room, talking excitedly about his students’ work or some side project he was creating.

“He made you feel good about yourself,” recalls former student Paul Stumpf. “He really connected with us, asking questions, showing support for whatever it was we were working on. He didn’t look at things in a conventional way. One day he’d bring in his sewing machine for a project, and the next day he might throw a bunch of us in his VW bus and drive us to New York City to take pictures. He was always getting into trouble with the administration.”

When his students eventually learned about the balloon he’d built, they clamored to see it and even pushed him to make another one. He did, with mixed results. In January 1972, the Hartford Courant reported that the young art teacher had disengaged his basket on his “third 25-foot bounce into the air” because the balloon had started smoking. “The wind rose fast with the sun Tuesday or the balloon would have taken me up,” an unfazed Boland told the Courant, vowing to try again once repairs were made and the “impulse strikes me.” In another incident, Boland was arrested after landing a balloon on the roof of a bakery; a school official had to bail him out. But Boland’s ambitions only grew. In 1975, he had built the world’s largest airship, a cigar-shaped vessel as big as the Goodyear Blimp that required 40 people to get off the ground.

“At one point the school was hiring another art teacher,” Stumpf says, “and in the interview they asked him, ‘Do you fly balloons?’ He said no. They said, ‘Good, you’re hired.’”

By the late 1970s, ballooning consumed Boland’s life. He had left teaching, gotten divorced, and remarried. With his second wife, Kathy, he built a business that would put their hands into every part of ballooning, from rides to repairs to custom builds. “Depending on how you look at it, I have become the largest home-built maker—or the world’s smallest balloon manufacturing company,” Boland told The New York Times. “In any case, there are only 13 other people on earth who do what I do.”

Boland’s piloting exploits put him in equally select company. He and Kathy set 18 world and national records for altitude, distance, and duration. Boland was the first to pilot a small balloon across Long Island Sound, and later he notched a similar achievement with a trek over the Alps, from Gstaad, Switzerland, to Forno Canvavese, Italy. In 1981 Boland and Kathy were commissioned by a wealthy Venezuelan businessman to head up a series of ballooning adventures to promote the scenic beauty of his home country. There were additional trips in Central America, across more of Europe, and in parts of Asia. It was rare for Boland to travel to any place where he couldn’t go ballooning.

“I’d long ago resigned myself to the fact that he would never just come down for a visit,” says Boland’s sister, Sue, who lives in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. “We had to be on his way to someplace where he planned to fly.”

Constantly sketching out new ideas, Boland had an obsession with efficiency, one that led him to design a groundbreaking series of compact collapsible baskets. And he prioritized thrift, too: For one ballooning excursion, he cut his propane tank in half so that he could use it as a luggage carrier for the plane ride over.

But he was also a showman. After all, why use a basket when you could fly in a car, a picnic table, or a replica double-decker bus? Once Boland went ballooning in England while strapped to a wheelchair, and landed in a park in front of unsuspecting picnickers. As he careened in his wheelchair toward a lake, bystanders grabbed him just before he hit the water. After wheeling him to higher ground, Boland’s rescuers had a surprise.

“I feel slightly weird,” he told them. “I have some feelings in my legs.”

Boland rose shakily to his feet. “It’s a miracle!” he declared to the stunned group. “I can walk!” He then went off to collect his balloon.

While there are other vocations that might have suited Boland, ballooning allowed him to be many different things while staying true to the core of who he was, Kathy says. The showman, the obsessive, the frugal inventor, the artist, the adventurer—sometimes all at the same time. And the more he flew, it seems, the more he discovered himself.

“He was just this incredibly dynamic guy,” says Kathy, who divorced Boland in 1984 but remained close with him over the years. “You never had to wonder who the heck he was. A lot of people, you wonder what their essence is. What do they really mean? Not with Brian. Sometimes he’d do something outrageous, and other times he’d make you smile. And other times you’d just be like, ‘God, I can’t believe you did that.’ But he was really someone to know and to have had in your life.”

———

The balloon began to descend with frightening speed, tilting forward as it dropped in a near free fall. Boland, who’d already swapped in a fresh fuel tank, searched his pockets frantically for a second igniter.

The Blakes watched him with alarm. Roger Blake grabbed the edge of the basket; his daughter did the same, while his granddaughter curled into a ball on the floor. Ellen Blake leaned against her husband. Nobody spoke—not out loud, at least. This can’t be happening, Ellen repeated to herself as she watched the treetops rush closer.

Boland finally located a new igniter in one of the sacks where he kept extra supplies. He ripped open the package and reached up to relight the flame. He then laid on the trigger to send a prolonged blast of heat into the balloon.

It was too late. By Roger’s estimation, they were just 60 feet above the ground when Boland fired the flame, and the balloon’s downward momentum was too strong to stop. They hit in a sloping field on the outskirts of Fairlee, the basket bouncing off the ground at a slight angle. Ellen’s feet left the floor and her face nearly hit the edge of the burner before her husband grabbed her and pulled her back. The basket rose slightly, then slammed back to earth. This time Ellen shot forward out of the basket with such force that her feet came out of her shoes. She was on the ground when Boland also fell out, landing on top of her, his cap tumbling off his head.

Then, just as quickly, the balloon rose—taking Boland, whose foot was hooked into one of the basket handles, along with it. In that single moment, the entire situation flipped: The Blakes were now the balloon’s pilots, and Boland was a helpless passenger. Roger leaned over the edge of the basket and saw his wife sit up; she was OK. Then he locked his eyes on Boland, who had started to wrench himself up to free his foot. The balloon was climbing rapidly.

“Stay in the basket!” Boland shouted.

———

In part because of Brian Boland’s successes there, Farmington became an epicenter of ballooning. For him, that meant increased competition for business and stature, so he went looking for a fresh start—and found it in Vermont. In 1988 Boland bought the Post Mills Airport and moved there with Ruth Ludwig, a journalist and well-known balloonist who was his girlfriend at the time.

“It gave us the chance to do a lot of flying,” says Ludwig (now Lind). “He always wanted to be the best, the most well-known, to have that kind of respect. He thrived on it…. [But] the beauty up there was another big thing for him. Even on the gray, yucky November days, he could find joy in the landscape. A lot of nights we spent sleeping outside, looking at the stars.”

Over the next three decades, the airport came to reflect the whims, obsessions, and ethos of its owner. The museum that Boland created wasn’t just a guide to his ballooning career—it was a tribute to his ability to see the possibility for art in almost any object. Nicknamed the “Scrap Palace” by its founder, it’s there that crutches became a sculpture that snaked along the ceiling; skis transformed into an outlandish tree. There were collections of dentist chairs, vintage cameras, Spam cans, creepy dolls. The museum housed a 1903 Model T and a tire from the space shuttle. Behind a wicker-encased bar stood a giant shelf lined with hundreds of old beer bottles.

“He had an art instructor at Pratt who told him that you could do cool things with something if you have lots of that thing,” says Foster, his longtime partner. “So he never threw anything away. That’s why we have hundreds of light bulbs, because he figured he might do something with them at some point.”

In 1993 Boland’s son, Jeff, an avid cyclist, died unexpectedly of a heart attack while riding with friends. For Boland, the loss made him realize that “life was not forever,” as he told the Burlington Free Press in 2008. That it was important to “go for it, whatever it might be, a relationship or going somewhere or building something.”

But Boland’s drive to be perpetually making and doing things had its consequences. By his own admission, Boland, who married and divorced three times, was “a hard guy to live with.” And his strong opinions about how ballooning should be done could alienate fellow pilots.

“Everyone who had a relationship with Brian experienced both sides of the coin,” says Paul Stumpf, who followed his former high school teacher into ballooning. “He could be wonderful but then … he could be extremely critical. It was his way or the highway, and sometimes he could just drop the hammer on you. Brian might come up and say, ‘I think you should think about using a different (whatever),’ but you would never ever dare to constructively criticize him. If you did, it was like talking to a wall. There was just no negotiating with him.”

For Boland, real ballooning was an artistic endeavor, and the process of building and making something you could fly was almost sacred. He drove this home at his annual festival, giving out membership cards to his Experimental Balloon and Airship Association, an informal club of balloon makers like himself. “All balloons are beautiful,” the card read. “To create one’s own is to construct a huge, magical, educational work of art.”

Stumpf, who made his first balloon in the mid-1970s, became one of Boland’s most accomplished protégés. He would go on to build a successful ballooning business of his own, but at the cost of his personal balloon making. Meanwhile, his relationship with Boland grew strained. The two hadn’t spoken for several years by the time they ran into each other at a hot-air balloon festival in Stowe in the early 1990s.

“We did the ‘How are you? Good to see you’ small-talk thing,” remembers Stumpf, who today lives and works in Andover, Vermont. “And then he starts hemming and hawing. He finally says, ‘I just gotta get this out of me: You haven’t done anything creative since college.’ I let it glance off me but I was pissed. I later ranted to my wife, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve built this business. We renovated this beautiful home. I built the world’s first glass-bottom basket. I’ve done all these things.’”

Stumpf later came to understand what his friend had meant. In 2010, having stepped away from his tour business and gained a little more free time, he returned to balloon making. “I realized how much I missed it,” Stumpf says. “It really brought me back to the fun of the engineering and design. I think Brian was disappointed because I wasn’t building. Because, to Brian, that’s what defines who you are.”

———

The balloon continuedits rise,pushing north toward Bradford, Vermont, and the Connecticut River. In the basket, Roger Blake felt helpless. To him, the balloon was in control. He kept his focus on two things: the pilot light and the increasingly distant land below. His granddaughter crouched silently near his feet, his daughter tenderly reminding her to take breaths.

Outside the basket, Boland had freed his foot and was now hanging on to the handle with both hands. There was nothing Roger could do. There was no line to throw him, and even if he could reach far enough to grab Boland, the pilot was too big for him to haul in.

Down on the ground, Aaron Johnson, the chaser, was trying to make sense of what he’d just seen. Driving Boland’s battered Chevy Astrovan, he’d darted ahead of the group to get gas in Fairlee. As he got back onto Route 5 and headed north again, he watched the balloon make its descent, which seemed curious but, with Boland, who was known for impromptu stops, not surprising. The balloon disappeared behind a hillside, then quickly reemerged, ascending—and now someone appeared to be hanging from the basket. Johnson’s heart started to beat fast. Trying to stay calm, he told himself that maybe Boland had hung a shirt from the balloon as a practical joke.

Over the next several minutes, the balloon drifted north, with Roger occasionally firing the burner in an attempt to maintain a steady altitude. It became a careful dance: keeping the balloon high enough to clear any obstacles, but low enough toland if Roger found the right spot. Could he do it? Could he save his family? There was no other choice, he told himself. At one point, an old Henry Ford quote came to him: Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.

Below the Blakes, still clinging to the balloon’s basket, Boland was weakening fast. It had been at least 10 minutes since the crash in Fairlee. “I can’t hang on much longer,” he yelled, as the balloon soared over Bradford a good 500 feet from the ground, with nowhere to land in sight.

A few minutes later, right at the edge of town, where Waits River Road curves toward the Connecticut, Boland spoke again. “I can’t hang on anymore,” he said.

Then he let go of the handle, crossed his arms across his chest, and plummeted toward the ground, looking up at his balloon as he fell.

———

“Did he survive?” Roger’s granddaughter asked him. He didn’t know how to answer, so he stayed silent and stared straight ahead. By this time, the balloon was crossing over the Connecticut River, into New Hampshire. The girl spoke up again. “Papa,” she said, “if we fall into the river, will you save me?”

He turned to look at her. “Of course I will.”

Moments later, though, Roger was reminded of how little was in his control. Caught by a stray air current, the balloon spun a full 360 degrees before pushing north again.

The family was floating overPiermont, New Hampshire, when Aaron Johnson, the chaser, called on the radio. “Do you want me in New Hampshire or Vermont?” he asked.

Roger’s daughter, Heather, picked up. That’s when Johnson learned that Heather and her father were now flying the balloon, and that Boland and Ellen were not on board. Over the next several minutes Johnson did his best to guide the family. He sped into New Hampshire, keeping his eye on the balloon, instructing them when to fire the burner and asking what they were seeing from above. At one point, he pulled over to the side of the road, closed his eyes, and tried to visualize the landscape.

It was on the outskirts of Piermont, over a farm that hugs the Connecticut River, that the balloon began drifting downward. After crossing over some power lines, it headed toward a stand of poplar trees on the bank of the river. Roger blasted the heat for a solid 10 seconds, hoping to gain enough lift to avoid a collision, but again the balloon seemed to have a mind of its own. Amid the poplars, in an opening of maybe 15 feet wide, the balloon’s basket settled between two tall trees, coming to rest on a pair of branches high above the ground. Heather immediately pulled the rip cord,dropping the envelope’s top flap and releasing a rush of hot air.

“I don’t want to go back up,” she said to her father.

Suddenly, one of the support branches gave way, quickly followed by the other. For the next few seconds, the basket and its passengers rode a series of breaking branches toward the ground. When it finally stopped just a few feet above the ground, Roger’s granddaughter leaped out and ducked behind a tree to throw up. Roger and Heather jumped out after her.

None of them spoke. Roger simply pointed and they started to run—across the field, toward the road—desperate to get as far away from the balloon as possible.

Johnson, who could still see the balloon, turned off the road and blazed a path into the field. The Blakes sprinted into view. When the family reached Johnson’s van, Heather and Roger were talking so frantically that he struggled to understand what they were saying. What had happened to Brian? he wondered. Was he with Ellen? Then Roger said something that stopped him.

“I don’t think Brian—or anyone—could have survived that fall,” he said.

———

Shortly before 9 that night, the Vermont State Police issued a report that a balloon pilot from the Thetford area had died in a flying accident. There was no name given, but “we all knew,” says Stumpf, who called Johnson immediately.

“He told me what had happened,” Stumpf says. His voice grows quieter. “That was a long night.”

After a pause, Stumpf continues. “It was just shock and disbelief. How can this guy who survived all these crazy ballooning adventures die in a ballooning accident?”

As the world would soon learn, Boland’s body had been found in Bradford, Vermont, in the yard of a house on the Connecticut River; oddly enough, he had landed his balloon there a few years earlier. Trying to piece together Boland’s final moments, Stumpf found himself thinking a lot about the man he knew. About their early times together, certainly, and some of the bumpy stretches, but also the recent years in which they’d grown close once more. In the older Boland, Stumpf says, he found a version of the person he’d first encountered all those years before in Farmington. He seemed softer, less protective of his status in the balloon world, and more enthusiastic about the projects others were doing. At one point, Boland had even pulled Stumpf aside and told him he was proud of his work as a balloon maker.

Last January, the two men had gotten together at the airport. Stumpf brought his recorder, and for 45 minutes he interviewed Boland about his life and his adventures. The visit included a morning flight in one of his old friend’s balloons, with Boland taking the role of chaser—something that had never happened during their nearly 50 years of friendship.

“These were things that just showed a real cultural shift in Brian. He realized that it didn’t just have to be about him anymore,” he says. “We spent the most time together that day than we had since high school. Looking back on it now, I’m grateful, but it’s also kind of hard because right at the end, when it felt like we were really connecting again, we lost him.”

———

It is Saturday, mid-September, and the Post Mills Airport bustles with life. The Experimental Hot-Air Balloon Festival, which Boland had postponed in May because of Covid, is in full swing. To Paul Stumpf, Tina Foster, and others who were close to Boland, canceling the event seemed like the absolute last thing he would have wanted—which means now the weekend has been transformed into a different kind of celebration.

Balloonists have arrived from around the country to fly, to barbecue, to visit the museum, to reminisce about their late friend. In the morning, a crowd gathers to inflate 35 of Boland’s prized creations. Kathy Delano is here to showcase Peaches, the balloon Boland flew during his record journey across the Alps. Here, too, is Aaron Johnson, who is scheduled to earn his flying certification later this day, just as he and Boland had planned. Stumpf, who helped organize the event, can’t stop smiling as he walks around the property. “It’s the only festival in the world where all the balloons come from one balloonist,” he keeps telling people.

That evening, as a big moon climbs the sky, local residents, maybe a few thousand in all, fill in the scene. They picnic, throw frisbees, and play volleyball as they wait for the wind to die down so the balloons can take off. It never does, however, and there is some disappointment about this.

And then one pilot unfurls his envelope, a red and yellow striped creation, and begins filling it with air. The burner comes on and soon the balloon rises, still tethered to the ground as it dances in the breeze. A crowd of children sprint in its direction. They come in close, and their parents do, too—all to get a better look.

Other pilots follow suit. The sounds of fans and burners pierce the evening. Soon the field is alight with glowing balloons in different colors, sizes, shapes. Children let out squeals, a few shy ones running up to touch a favorite before scampering back to their parents. One little girl holds out her arms to “hug” a giant blue balloon; a boy playfully shadow-boxes another. Moms and dads move about in a happy daze, craning their necks and pointing. For a brief moment, real life has dropped away, and in its place is a meadow of color and wonder and curiosity.

Just as Brian Boland imagined there should be.

*Name has been changed for this story at the family’s request.