Ballooning

“He looks like The Great Oz,” a friend wrote.  I found this caricature while researching my house.  Myers, the guy who built it, is in a balloon because he was a member of the Kansas City Aero Club.  In his day, around the turn of the 20^th century, flying was a dangerous, wacky hobby.

Last weekend, I drove up to the monastery in Atchison for the retreat I had signed up for.  The theme of the retreat was “The Wizard of Oz.”  I have loved the story for years—the book and the movie.  As I drove north, next to the river and back and forth over the Missouri River, I was eating a sandwich and thinking about The Great Oz.  He was a flim-flam man, a con artist, a Harold Hill, a charletan.  And he was into balloons, like George Myers.

The Great Oz (not his real name) goes up in a hot air balloon, gets blown off course, and ends up in Oz.  Like Dorothy, he doesn’t especially want to be there, but there he is.  He is hailed as superhuman (like Dorothy), and installed as Wizard by the people of the Emerald City.  He makes himself a wizard, because people want to think he is one.  He pretends to power, although he has some authentic power.  He can make a balloon rise.  It’s just the navigation he struggles with.

I ended up in the Oz of the compound, that is, the mansion and the carriage house where I started renting three years ago.  My landlord, who first welcomed me, didn’t exactly proclaim me a god, but he was short of stature and cheerful—part munchkin, part Truman Capote.

Dorothy and her crew, of course, expose Oz.  He is a humbug.  “Humbug” is old-fashioned for “bullshit.”

Frank L. Baum, creator of The Great Oz, was a flim-flam man himself.  He tried a million different jobs, moved all over, and made a huge mess of his life before turning the Oz business into a business.  Just last week, we read an essay in my class which included this quote: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” and in every class I had a kid who could explain what that meant in the context of the story: “He’s not a real wizard.”  The story endures.

My retreat was in Atchison, hometown of Amelia Earhart, famous flyer.  Near Atchison, my grandfather is buried in a country cemetery.  He also flew out of northeastern Kansas.  In the 1940s, when flight was less dangerous, but still glamorous, he left rural Kansas to become a pilot. There is an airplane etched on his headstone.  He came back to where he started, in the end.

I’ve always wanted to learn to fly, to go up in a small plane.  I always wondered if my grandfather passed some flying lust on to me.  He would not approve of me trying to fly a plane, though.  I know that.  “Never fly with a weekend pilot,” he said.  “These guys are dangerous.  They don’t know what they’re doing.”

On my list of things to do before I die, composed in third grade, I had “go up in a hot air balloon.”  I haven’t done it yet.

I am flying now.  Living without a landlord, wrangling the utilities and setting up a party without the luxuries of electricity or heat.  I do feel light-headed, off the ground, and invigorated.  I am above, loose, seeing things from a new place.

On the handouts at the retreat, there were images of hot air balloons.  I thought, planes may not be for me.  Last year, they didn’t agree with me at all.  I might be more of a hot air balloon person.  I have heard that they are quiet.  Once the air is heated, and you are aloft, it is silent.  There isn’t a zoom to take off.  Just a rising, rising.

Cops and Robbers

Sunday afternoon, I heard the garage door open, and went down to find some former tenants carrying stuff out. “Hey, what’s up?”

“We’re just getting more of her stuff,” the guy said.

“Oh,” I said.  I gave him my look of complete dispassion, honed through years of giving students enough rope in case they want to hang themselves.  “Some people broke into the house and stole a bunch of stuff.  I’m going to go down and file a police report Tuesday.”  I have never been to the police station, so although the idea of another mansion-related errand irked me, at least it would be another adventure, too.

“Oh,” he said.  “Well that was going to happen, I guess, if the place is abandoned, I mean, who’s gonna care?”

This attitude I disliked.  “Well, the water was turned off, and I had to get a plumber in here to run a line for my place, so I saw what happened.”

“Well, you coulda called me.  I’m a plumber,” he said.  He smiled.  That was either the boldest shit ever, or he was truly innocent.  Who knows?

“Well, you have nice weather for moving,” I said.  And I shut my door.  I checked to make sure they weren’t in my space downstairs (nope), and watched out my window to see what they took with them: some old boards, and some glass bottles.  I wasn’t going to get riled up about that crap.  When they pulled out, I noted the color and shape of their car.  Maybe Lenny Briscoe would ask me about that later.

An hour later, as I started to back out the driveway, a former mansion tenant and the cops were pulling up.  Lenny wasn’t one of them.  Oh, well.

I told the cops my part of the story, and then the other former tenant (his Indian name is “Parks On The Lawn”) ranted and raved about how the culprits had stolen stuff from him.  I told POTL I had put his photo album in a kitchen cabinet so that it wouldn’t get lost with all the other junk in the mansion.  I wanted to set it on fire.  I wanted to punish him for taking off without bothering to mention to me that he had stopped paying the utilities and there were robbers about, but I hadn’t.

The four of us, two cops and POTL and I, went down into the mansion basement to inspect the damage.  Every time I go down there, I see something new.  Last time, I found a tiny bathroom.  This time, I saw a cutout of a mummy taped to the wall, like it’s a funhouse.  “Is this house haunted?” one cop said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.  “Definitely.”  Ghosts are just memories.  I see ghosts of myself all over.  And I remember, and imagine remembering, the history of the mansion.  The cops enjoyed shining their flashlights around just as much as the gas man and the plumbers.

“How old is this place?” one asked.

“1905,” I said.  Betweeen my knowledge of the house, my three-year tenure, and my utility payments, I think I looked more like a person who takes care of mansions than a person who busts them up to sell copper for crack.

We continued to walk through the mansion, floor by floor. “I’m glad you guys are looking around,” I told them.  “I looked through the place myself before, and my parents were like, whoa, don’t do that.  I teach in the inner city, so sometimes I think I can get away with stuff.”  Was I playing the teacher card?  Of course I was.  I mean, I earned that card with wrinkles and sweat and student loans.  Is my status as an inner city teacher evidence of my commitment to the community and its improvement?  Hell, yes, it is.

“Is it okay if I go?” I asked, finally.  One doesn’t like to give police officers the impression that one is running away.

“Oh, sure,” he said.  He asked me if I knew an old friend of his, another inner city teacher.  I didn’t.

“Also,” I said, “By the way, the owner said this was totally okay, so I’m having some friends over to see the place and drink a few beers in a couple of weeks.  I don’t want them to get arrested or anything.”

“Of course not,” the cop said.  I told him the date.  He told me I could ask for extra patrols that night if I wanted to.  And I left the visitors in the mansion.  When I got back, the cops were still hanging out, on the porch.  Did I mind?  Not a bit.

Drought Conquered

When we last left the mansion the score was: gas, on, furnace, blazing; water, off.  Drought conditions continued to plague the carriage house.  At times, they felt Biblical in proportion, although they were not.

Friend of a friend (let’s call him FOF) came by with his helper.  The door was locked.  Could I zoom away from work again to open it?  Well, goddamn it, of course I could.  I zoomed home and gave my millionth tour of the mansion to my millionth awed visitor.

Trouble: on our way to the basement to investigate the water situation, we see a wall busted out and plastic pipes sitting there like part of a tiny organ.  All the way down, we find more destruction.  Pipes ripped apart and the copper stripped away.  All the hot water heaters gone.  The air conditioner coil.  While this is distressing, the guys seem to be loving shining their flashlights about, following pipe after pipe.  This goes to one bathroom.  To another.  To another.  To another.  To the kitchen.  To the washing machine.

FOF educates his helper about how the house was built.  “We call this a balloon frame.  If one floor catches fire, the whole thing goes up.  The supports are all in a line, floor by floor, so there’s nothing to stop it from traveling up.”  (Upon further research, I learned that balloon framing came from “French Missouri,” and was one of the reasons Chicago burned, and it makes the mansion more expensive to heat.  It’s also one reason they were able to quickly build boom towns in the U.S.)

A cable across the ceiling, I am told, was probably installed to help hold up the living room floor.  Could a cable do that?  “It’s steel,” FOF said.  Ah.  Yeah.  Note to self: watch weight limit on dance floor.  This ship isn’t built for dancing!

FOF thought they could run a line from where water enters the house, bypass the mansion system, and attach the other end to where the water goes to my house.  This will cost me $100.  A trip to Home Depot later, they have hooked up my new pipeline, a white snake across the long cement floor of the mansion basement.  They turn the water on.  Hallelujah!  But, no.

Okay, FOF says, there are a few other things we can try, but it’s not looking promising.  I left them to additional tinkering, and went up to my quarters.  Despair.  Agony.  All was lost.  I snatched up a St. Jude candle and ran around looking for a lighter, one of the last remnants of me dating a smoker, and one of the best.  I said the prayer (emergencies are no time for freelance), lit the candle, and then I sat on my bed, very still, and felt my feelings, which is one of the great innovations my Buddhist friends have introduced to me.  It’s awful.  Only slightly less awful than acting out.

FOF called out.  I went back downstairs, glumly.  “Hey, I couldn’t see that without the flashlight,” someone was saying.  Then I heard my kitchen sink burst forth with streams of the beautiful pure water like the rock when Moses struck it.  I jumped up and down.  I would have cursed, but I was afraid FOF might be offended.

“I want to kiss you, but that doesn’t seem appropriate!”  I said.

“Well, he’s single,” FOF said, gesturing at his buddy.  The buddy didn’t take me up on my offer.  But, to be fair, would you want to kiss a girl who had been without water for a week?

NEXT on MANSION ADVENTURES: The Cavalry Arrives, or, Why That Cop Car Is In My Driveway.