The back yard was much smaller than I remembered—barely ten yards by thirty. The birdbath, stark white on its pedestal, was still there, under a pine tree, just as it had been during my last visit, more than ten years before. Beyond the roofs of the neighboring houses I could see the distant gaunt cranes of the Long Beach naval facility, now idle.
“Mrs. Van Deusen, wasn’t there a strawberry patch over here?” I called out.
I winced. Margaret Van Deusen has been blind since last August—first in one eye, then in the other. Her daughter, Carol, was leading her down the steps of the back porch, guiding her step by step. Mrs. Van Deusen was worried about her cat, Precious, who had fled into the innards of a standup organ upon my arrival: “Where’s Precious? She didn’t get out, did she?”
Carol calmed her fears, and my question about the strawberry patch hung in the air. Both women wore T-shirts with cat motifs on the front; Mrs. Van Deusen’s had a cat head on hers, with ruby eyes and a leather tongue.
We had lunch in a fast-food restaurant in San Pedro, a couple of miles down the hill. Mrs. Van Deusen ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and French fries. “I can’t believe Larry’s flight happened out of such a small space,” I said.
Mrs. Van Deusen stirred. “Two weeks before, Larry came to me and said he was going to take off from my back yard. I said no way. Illegal. I didn’t want to be stuck with a big fine. So the idea was he was going to take off from the desert. He couldn’t get all his equipment out there, so he pulls a sneaker on me. He turns up at the house and says, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to take off from your back yard.’ ”
“I was terrified, but I wanted to be with him,” said Carol, who was Larry’s girlfriend at the time.
“And sit on his lap?” I asked incredulously.
“Two chairs, side by side,” Carol said. “But it meant more equipment than we had. I know one thing—that if I’d gone up with him we would have come down sooner.”
“What happened to the chair?” I asked.
Carol talked in a rush of words. “He gave it away to some kid on the street where he landed, about ten miles from here. That chair should be in the Smithsonian. Larry always felt just terrible about that.”
“And the balloons?”
“You remember, Mom? The firemen tied some of the balloons to the end of their truck, and they went off with these things waving in the air as if they were coming from a birthday party.”
“Where are my fries?”
“They’re in front of you, Mom,” Carol said. She guided her mother’s hand to the sticks of French fries in a cardboard container.
Mrs. Van Deusen said, “Larry knocked some prominent person off the front page of the L.A. Times, didn’t he, Carol? Who was the prominent person he knocked off?”
Carol shook her head. “I don’t know. But that Times cartoonist Paul Conrad did one of Ronald Reagan in a lawn chair, with some sort of caption like ‘Another nut from California.’ Larry’s mother was upset by this and wrote a letter to the Times. You know how mothers are.”
I asked Mrs. Van Deusen, “What do you remember best about the flight?”
She paused, and then said she remembered hearing afterward about her five-year-old granddaughter, Julie Pine, standing in her front yard in Long Beach and waving gaily as Larry took off. “Yes. She kept waving until Larry and his chair were barely a dot in the sky.”
It was in all the papers at the time—how on Friday, July 2, 1982, a young man named Larry Walters, who had served as an Army cook in Vietnam, had settled himself into a Sears, Roebuck lawn chair to which were attached four clusters of helium-filled weather balloons, forty-two of them in all. His intent was to drift northeast in the prevailing winds over the San Gabriel Mountains to the Mojave Desert. With him he carried an air pistol, with which to pop the balloons and thus regulate his altitude. It was an ingenious solution, but in a gust of wind, three miles up, the chair tipped, horrifyingly, and the gun fell out of his lap to the ground, far below. Larry, in his chair, coasted to a height of sixteen thousand five hundred feet. He was spotted by Delta and T.W.A. pilots taking off from Los Angeles Airport. One of them was reported to have radioed to the traffic controllers, “This is T.W.A. 231, level at sixteen thousand feet. We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our ten-o’clock position, range five miles.” Subsequently, I read that Walters had been fined fifteen hundred dollars by the Federal Aviation Administration for flying an “unairworthy machine.”
Some time later, my curiosity got the better of me, and I arranged to meet Larry Walters, in the hope of writing a story about him. “I was always fascinated by balloons,” Larry began. “When I was about eight or nine, I was taken to Disneyland. The first thing when we walked in, there was a lady holding what seemed like a zillion Mickey Mouse balloons, and I went, ‘Wow!’ I know that’s when the idea developed. I mean, you get enough of those and they’re going to lift you up! Then, when I was about thirteen, I saw a weather balloon in an Army-Navy-surplus store, and I realized that was the way to go—that I had to get some of those big suckers. All this time, I was experimenting with hydrogen gas, making my own hydrogen generators and inflating little balloons.”
“What did you do with the balloons?” I asked.
“I sent them up with notes I’d written attached. None of them ever came back. At Hollywood High School, I did a science project on ‘Hydrogen and Balloons.’ I got a D on it.”
“How did your family react to all this?”
“My mother worried a lot. Especially when I was making rocket fuel, and it was always blowing up on me or catching fire. It’s a good thing I never really got into rocketry, or I’d have probably shot myself off somewhere.”
“Did you ever think of just going up in a small airplane—a glider, maybe—or doing a parachute jump to—”
“Absolutely not. I mean no, no, no. It had to be something I put together myself. I thought about it all through Vietnam.”
“What about the chair?”
“It was an ordinary lawn chair—waffle-iron webbing in the seat, tubular aluminum armrests. Darn sturdy little chair! Cost me a hundred and nine dollars. In fact, afterward my mother went out and bought two of them. They were on sale.”
I asked what Carol had thought of his flight plans.
“I was honest with her. When I met her, in 1972, I told her, ‘Carol, I have this dream about flight,’ and this and that, and she said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t need to do that.’ So I put it on the back burner. Then, ten years later, I got a revelation: ‘It’s now or never, got to do it.’ It was at the Holiday Inn in Victorville, which is on the way from San Bernardino to Las Vegas. We were having Cokes and hamburgers. I’m a McDonald’s man: hamburgers, French fries, and Coca-Cola, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—that’s it! Anyway, I pulled out a quarter and began to draw the balloons on the placemats.”
“What about Carol?”
“She knew then that I was committed. She said, ‘Well, it’s best you do it and get it out of your system.’ ”
A few months before the flight, Larry drove up to the Elsinore Flight School, in Perris, California. He had agreed, at Carol’s insistence, to wear a parachute, and after a single jump he bought one for nine hundred dollars.
“Didn’t that parachute jump satisfy your urge to fly on your own?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” he said.
Other essentials were purchased: a two-way radio; an altimeter; a hand compass; a flashlight; extra batteries; a medical kit; a pocketknife; eight plastic bottles of water to be placed on the sides of the chair, for ballast; a package of beef jerky; a road map of California; a camera; two litres of Coca-Cola; and a B.B. gun, for popping the balloons.
“The air pistol was an inspired idea,” I said. “Did you ever think that if you popped one, the balloon next to it would pop, too?”
“We did all these tests. I wasn’t even sure a B.B. shot would work, because the weather balloon’s rubber is fairly thick. But you can pop it with a pin.”
“Did your mother intervene at all?”
“My mother thought maybe I was possessed by the Devil, or perhaps post-Vietnam stress syndrome. She wanted me to see a psychiatrist. We started inflating the day before, at sundown—one balloon at a time, from fifty-five helium cylinders. Each balloon, inflated to about seven feet in diameter, gets a lift of about twelve pounds—the balloons would have lifted about a quarter of a ton. Around midnight, a couple of sheriff’s deputies put their heads over the back wall and yelled, ‘What’s going on here?’ I told them we were getting ready for a commercial in the morning. When the sun came up the next morning, a lot of police cars slowed down. No wonder. The thing was a hundred and fifty feet high—a heck of an advertising promotion! But they didn’t bother us.”
The flight was delayed for forty-five minutes while one of Larry’s friends ran down to the local marine-supply store and bought a life jacket in case there was a wind shift and he was taken out to sea. At ten-thirty, Larry got into his lawn chair.
I asked whether he had worn a safety belt—a silly question, I thought. But, to my surprise, Larry said he hadn’t bothered. “The chair was tilted back about ten degrees,” he said, illustrating with his hands.
The original idea was that Larry would rise to approximately a hundred feet above the Van Deusen house and hold there, tethered by a length of rope wrapped around a friend’s car—a 1962 Chevrolet Bonneville, down on the lawn—to get his bearings and to check everything out before moving on. But, rising at about eight hundred feet per minute, Inspiration—as Larry called his flying machine—reached the end of the tethering rope and snapped it; the chair pitched forward so violently that Larry’s glasses flew off, along with some of the equipment hanging from the chair.
That was quite enough for Carol. Larry had a tape of the conversation between the two of them on the two-way radio. He put it on a tape deck and we sat and listened.
Her voice rises in anguish: “Larry, come down. You’ve got to come down if you can’t see. Come down!”
Larry reports that he has a backup pair of glasses. His voice is calm, reassuring: “I’m A-O.K. I’m going through a dense fog layer.”
Predictably, this news dismays Carol: “Oh, God! Keep talking, Larry. We’ve got airplanes. They can’t see you. You’re heading for the ocean. You’re going to have to come down!”
When Larry reaches twenty-five hundred feet, she continues to cry into the radio set, “Larry, everybody down here says to cut ’em and get down now. Cut your balloons and come down now. Come down, please!”
The tape deck clicked off.
I asked Larry how he had reacted to this desperate plea.
“I wasn’t going to hassle with her,” Larry said, “because no way in heck, you know, after all this—my life, the money we’d sunk into this thing—and just come down. No way in heck. I was just going to have—have a good time up there.”
“What was it like?”
“The higher I went, the more I could see, and it was awesome. Sitting in this little chair, and, you know, Look! Wow! Man! Unreal! I could see the orange funnels of the Queen Mary. I could see that big seaplane of Howard Hughes’s, the Spruce Goose, with two commercial tugs alongside. Then, higher up, the oil tanks of the naval station, like little dots. Catalina Island in the distance. The sea was blue and opaque. I could look up the coast, like, forever. At one point, I caught sight of a little private plane below me. I could hear the ‘bzzz’ of its propeller—the only sound. I had this camera, but I didn’t take any pictures. This was something personal. I wanted only the memory of it—that was vivid enough.
“When I got to fifteen thousand feet, the air was getting thin. Enough of the ride, I thought. I’d better go into a descent and level off. My cruising altitude was supposed to be eight or nine thousand feet, to take me over the Angeles National Forest, past Mt. Wilson, and out toward Mojave. I figured I needed to pop seven of the balloons. So I took out the air pistol, pointed up, and I went, ‘pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow,’ and the balloons made these lovely little bangs, like a muffled ‘pop,’ and they fell down and dangled below my chair. I put the gun in my lap to check the altimeter. Then this gust of wind came up and blew me sideways. The chair tilted forward, and the gun fell out of my lap! To this day, I can see it falling—getting smaller and smaller, down toward the houses, three miles down—and I thought, ‘I hope there’s no one standing down there.’
“It was a terrifying sight. I thought, Oh-oh, you’ve done it now. Why didn’t you tie it on? I had backups for most everything. I even had backup B.Bs. in case I ran out, backup Co2 cylinders for the gun. It never dawned on me that I’d actually lose the gun itself.”
I asked if the gun had ever been found.
Larry shook his head. “At least, no one got hit.”
“Imagine that,” I said. “To be hit in the head with a B.B. gun dropped from three miles up.”
“That’s what the F.A.A. talked about,” Larry said. “They told me I could have killed someone.”
“Well, what happened after you dropped the gun?”
“I went up to about sixteen thousand five hundred feet. The air was very thin. I was breathing very deeply for air. I was about fifteen seconds away from hauling myself out of the chair and dropping down and hoping I could use the parachute properly.”
I asked how high he would have gone if he hadn’t popped the seven balloons before he dropped the gun.
Larry grimaced, and said, “At the F.A.A hearings, it was estimated that I would have been carried up to fifty thousand feet and been a Popsicle.”
“Was that the word they used?”
“No. Mine. But it was cold up where I was. The temperature at two miles up is about five to ten degrees. My toes got numb. But then, the helium slowly leaking, I gradually began to descend. I knew I was going to have to land, since I didn’t have the pistol to regulate my altitude.”
At thirteen thousand feet, Larry got into a conversation on his radio set with an operator from an emergency-rescue unit.
He put on the tape deck again. The operator is insistent: “What airport did you take off from?” He asks it again and again.
Larry finally gives Carol’s mother’s street address: “My point of departure was 1633 West Seventh Street, San Pedro.”
“Say again the name of the airport. Could you please repeat?”
Eventually, Larry says, “The difficulty is, this is an unauthorized balloon launch. I know I am interfering with general airspace. I’m sure my ground crew has alerted the proper authorities, but could you just call them and tell them I’m O.K.?”
A ground-control official breaks in on another frequency. He wants to know the color of the balloons.
“The balloons are beige in color. I’m in bright-blue sky. They should be highly visible.”
The official wants to know not only the color of the balloons but their size.
“Size? Approximately seven feet in diameter each. And I probably have thirty-five left. Over.”
The official is astonished: “Did you say you have a cluster of thirty-five balloons?” His voice squeaks over the static.
Just before his landing, Larry says into the radio set, “Just tell Carol that I love her, and I’m doing fine. Please do. Over.”
Larry clicked off the tape machine.
“It was close to noon. I’d been up—oh, about an hour and a half. As I got nearer the ground, I could hear dogs barking, automobiles, horns—even voices, you know, in calm, casual conversation.”
At about two thousand feet, Inspiration suddenly began to descend quite quickly. Larry took his penknife and slashed the water-filled plastic bottles alongside his chair. About thirty-five gallons started cascading down.
“You released everything?”
“Everything. I looked down at the ground getting closer and closer, about three hundred feet, and, Lord, you know, the water’s all gone, right? And I could see the rooftops coming up, and then these power lines. The chair went over this guy’s house, and I nestled into these power lines, hanging about eight feet under the bottom strand! If I’d come in a little higher, the chair would have hit the wires, and I could have been electrocuted. I could have been dead, and Lord knows what!”
“Wow!”
Larry laughed. “It’s ironic, because the guy that owned the house, he was out reading his morning paper on a chaise longue next to his swimming pool, and, you know, just the look on this guy’s face—like he hears the noise as I scraped across his roof, and he looks up and he sees this pair of boots and the chair floating right over him, under the power lines, right? He sat there mesmerized, just looking at me. After about fifteen seconds, he got out of his chair. He said, ‘Hey, do you need any help?’ And guess what? It turns out he was a pilot. An airline pilot on his day off.”
“Wow!” I said again.
“There was a big commotion on the street, getting me down with a stepladder and everything, and they had to turn off the power for that neighborhood. I sat in a police car, and this guy keeps looking at me, and he finally says, ‘Can I see your driving license?’ I gave it to him, and he punches in the information in his computer. When they get back to him, he says, ‘There’s nothing. You haven’t done anything.’ He said I’d be hearing from the F.A.A., and I was free to go. I autographed some pieces of the balloons for people who came up. Later, I got a big hug and a kiss from Carol, and everything. All the way home, she kept criticizing me for giving away the chair, which I did, to a kid on the street, without really thinking what I was doing.”
“So what was your feeling after it was all over?”
Larry looked down at his hands. After a pause he said, “Life seems a little empty, because I always had this thing to look forward to—to strive for and dream about, you know. It got me through the Army and Vietnam—just dreaming about it, you know, ‘One of these days . . . ’ ”
Not long after our meeting, Larry telephoned and asked me not to write about his flight. He explained that the story was his, after all, and that my publishing it would lessen his chances of lecturing at what he called “aviation clubs.” I felt I had no choice but to comply.
I asked him what he was up to. He said that his passion was hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. “Some people take drugs to get high. I literally get high when I’m in the mountains. I feel alive. I’ve got my whole world right there—the food, my sleeping bag, my tent, everything.”
Larry’s mother, Hazel Dunham, lives in a residential community in Mission Viejo, California, forty miles southeast of San Pedro. The day before seeing the Van Deusens, I dropped in on her and Larry’s younger sister, Kathy. We sat around a table. A photograph album was brought out and leafed through. There were pictures of Larry’s father when he was a bomber pilot flying Liberators in the Pacific. He had spent five years in a hospital, slowly dying of emphysema. Larry was close to him, and twice the Red Cross had brought Larry back from Vietnam to see him. After his father’s death—Larry was twenty-four at the time—his mother had remarried.
“Do you know Larry’s favorite film—‘Somewhere in Time’?” Kathy asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, one entire wall of his little apartment in North Hollywood was covered with stills from that picture.”
“An entire wall?”
Both of them nodded.
“It’s a romantic film starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour,” Kathy said. “It’s about time travel.”
She went on to describe it—how Christopher Reeve falls in love with a picture of a young actress he sees in the Hall of History at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. From a college professor, he learns how to go back in time to 1912 to meet her, which he does, and they fall in love. But then he’s returned to the present. He decides he can’t live without her and at the end they’re together in Heaven.
Kathy turned back to the photograph album. “Look, this is a picture of Larry’s favorite camping spot, up in Eaton Canyon. A tree crosses the stream. I’ll bet Larry put his Cokes there. He’d have a backpack weighing sixty pounds to carry up into the canyon, and I’ll bet half of that was Coca-Cola six-packs.”
“I bought cases of it when he took the train down here to visit,” his mother said.
“Here’s a picture of Larry in his forest-ranger uniform,” Kathy said. “He was always a volunteer, because you have to have a college degree to be a regular ranger. He loved nature.”
“And Carol?”
“They sort of drifted apart. They were always in touch, though.”
She turned to another page of the album. “Here’s the campsite again. See this big locker here, by the side of the trail? It was always locked. But this time it wasn’t. They found his Bible in there.”
“He fell in love with God,” his mother said. “He was always reading the Bible. When he was here last, he smiled, and said I should read the Bible more. He marked passages. He marked this one in red ink in a little Bible I found by his bed: ‘And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’ ”
She looked at her daughter. Her voice changed, quite anguished, but low, as if she didn’t want me to overhear. “Drug smugglers were in the area, Kathy. Larry was left-handed, and they found the gun in his right hand.”
“Are you sure, Mom?”
“That’s what I think, Kathy. And so does Carol.”
“There were powder burns on his hand, Mom.”
“I guess so,” Mrs. Dunham said softly.
Kathy looked at me. “It’s O.K. for Mom to believe someone else did it. I think Larry never wanted to give anyone pain. He left these hints. He stopped making appointments in his calendar.”
Her mother stared down at the photo album. “Why didn’t I pick up on things when he came down here to visit me? I just never did.”
Not long ago, I spoke over the telephone to Joyce Rios, who had been a volunteer forest ranger with Larry. “I turned sixty last year,” she told me. “I started hiking with Larry into the San Gabriel Mountains about eight years ago. He was always talking about Carol when I first met him. ‘My girlfriend and I did this’ and ‘My girlfriend and I did that.’ But after a while that died down. Still, he was obsessed with her. He felt he was responsible for their drifting apart. He felt terribly guilty about it.”
Joyce went on, “We had long talks about religion, two- or three-hour sessions, in the campsites, talking about the Bible. I am a Jehovah’s Witness, and we accept the Bible as the Word of God—that we sleep in death until God has planned for the Resurrection. I think he was planning what he did for a long time. He left hints. He often talked about this campsite above Idlehour, in a canyon below Mt. Wilson, and how he would die there. He spent hours reading Jack Finney’s ‘Time and Again.’ Do you know the book? It’s about a man who is transported back into the winter of 1882. They tell him, ‘Sleep. And when you wake up everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone.’ Larry read this book over and over again. In the copy I have he had marked a sentence, from a suicide note that was partly burnt. Here it is: ‘The Fault and the Guilt [are] mine, and can never be denied or escaped. . . . I now end the life which should have ended then.’ ”
After a silence, she said in a quiet voice, “Larry never called the dispatcher that day. We knew something was wrong. I hiked up to the campsite with a friend. The search-and-rescue people had already found him. I never went across the stream to look. I couldn’t bear to. I was told he was inside the tent in his sleeping bag. Everything was very neat. His shoes were neatly placed outside. The camp trash was hanging in a tree, so the bears and the raccoons couldn’t get to it. He had shot himself in the heart with a pistol. His nose had dripped some blood on the ground. His head was turned, very composed, and his eyes were closed, and if it hadn’t been for the blood he could have been sleeping.”
Back in New York, I rented a video of “Somewhere in Time.” It was a tearjerker, but what I will remember from it is Christopher Reeve’s suicide. He wants to join Jane Seymour in heaven. Sitting in a chair in his room in the Grand Hotel on Mackinac, where in 1912 his love affair with Jane Seymour was consummated, he stares fixedly out the window for a week. Finally, the hotel people unlock the door. Too late. Dying of a broken heart or starvation (or possibly both), Reeve gets his wish. Heaven turns out to be the surface of a lake that stretches to the horizon. In the distance, Seymour stands smiling as Reeve walks slowly toward her; he doffs his hat and their hands touch as the music swells. No one else seems to be around—just the two of them standing alone in the vastness. ♦
