All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t know why. Nobody saw this coming. Larry left no word.
    I guess the depth of his despair matched the height of his imagination.
    Larry’s photograph is on my wall. He’s way, way, up there.
    And now he’s Up There somewhere—forever.
    His tombstone says:
     
    LARRY WALTERS
    April 19, 1949—October 6, 1993
    Lawn Chair Pilot
    Beloved.

 
     
     

    B ALLOON L AUNCH
    T HE FOURTH DAY OF THE MONTH of June 1783—more than two hundred years ago. The market square of the French village of Annonay, not far from Paris. On a raised platform, a smoky bonfire fed by wet straw and old wool rags. Tethered above, straining at its lines, a huge taffeta bag—a balloon
—
thirty-three feet in diameter.
    In the presence of a “respectable assembly and a great many other people,” and accompanied by great cheering, the
machine de l’aerostat
was cut from its moorings and set free to rise majestically into the noontide sky. Six thousand feet into the air it went, and came to earth several miles away in a field, where it was attacked by pitchfork-waving peasants and torn to pieces as an instrument of evil. The first public ascent of a balloon, the first step in the history of human flight.
    Old Ben Franklin was there, in France as the agent of the new American states. He of the key and the kite and the lightning and the bifocals and the printing press. When a bystander asked what possible good this balloon
thing could be, Franklin made the memorable retort:
“Eh, a quoi bon l’enfant qui vient de naître?”
(“What good is a newborn baby?”) A man of such curiosity and imagination could provide an answer to his own question, and in his journal he wrote: “This balloon will open the skies to mankind.” The peasants, too, were not far from wrong. It was also a harbinger of great evil for Annonay, which would one day be leveled by bombs falling from the sky. But I am getting ahead of myself.
    Some months before that June day, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier sat one evening staring into his fireplace, watching sparks and smoke rise up the chimney from the evening fire. His imagination rose with the smoke. If smoke floated into the sky, why not capture it and put it in a bag and see if the bag would rise, perhaps carrying something or someone with it?
    In his mid-forties, the son of a prosperous paper maker, a believer in the great church that was Science in the eighteenth century, a brilliant and impatient man with time on his hands was Monsieur Montgolfier. And so, with his younger, more methodical brother, Etienne, and the resources of their father’s factory, he set to work. With paper bags, then silken ones, and finally taffeta coated with resins. And
voila!
came a day when from the gardens at Versailles a balloon carrying a sheep, a rooster, and a duck went aloft. All survived, proving that there were no poisonous gases in the sky, as some had feared.
    The most enthusiastic supporter of the brothers Montgolfier was a young chemist, Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier. He didn’t want to make balloons; he wanted to go up in one. The Montgolfiers’ interest was in scientific experimentation. They were older, wiser groundlings. Pilatre wanted to fly. He was full of the adventure of youth. And so, that fall, November 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier got his wish. In the garden of the royal palace at La Muette, in the Bois de Boulogne, at 1:54 P.M. , in a magnificent balloon seven stories high, painted with signs of the zodiac and the king’s monogram. Up, up, and away he went—higher than treetops and church steeples—coming down beyond the Seine, five miles away.
    Joseph-Michel and Etienne Montgolfier lived long and productive scientific lives. They died in their beds, safe on the ground. Two years after his historic flight, trying to cross the English Channel west to east in a balloon, the young Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier plummeted from the sky in flames to his death. But his great-great grandson was later to