I’m not sure if everyone was as engrossed with the saga of balloon boy today as our little corner of the office was.
A short recap:
At approximately 11 AM, one of my co-workers informed us that there was something going on, that a six-year-old boy had somehow gotten into a homemade helium balloon and was flying through the Colorado air at a high altitude and at high speeds.
I checked Twitter and turned on a live video feed. The Internet was on fire with balloon boy. It was gut-wrenching to watch the live video: a small balloon whizzing through the air with a small enclosure at the bottom where the boy might be. We were all quite nervous when the balloon started to lose helium and to descend.
At around 12:30 PM, it landed relatively softly and rescue crews began deflating what was left and looking for the boy in the balloon. He wasn’t there.
And there was this moment, this second of absolute terror, because there were now two possibilities: that he had never gotten in the balloon at all or that he had fallen out of the balloon.
It turns out that it was the former. The boy (named Falcon) had been hiding in the family’s attic in a cardboard box for hours.
If you search for the story now, you’ll find cynical stories about it being a publicity stunt by the family. But putting all that aside, putting aside why Falcon hid in a cardboard box in the attic for hours when his family was looking for him, those two hours in the middle of the day today were emotional.
I didn’t know who this boy was, but it didn’t matter. It was happening right now and there were so many ways that it could have ended badly. It was a moment when we were all just frozen and helpless, watching a balloon fly through the air, armed with nothing but hope.
