Camp Reno wasn't just casinos and cheap buffets.
Every September the whole city did something completely out of character.
It got up before sunrise.
The Great Reno Balloon Race was one of those traditions everyone knew about, whether you went or not. Before dawn, volunteers were already out at Rancho San Rafael Park while pilots inflated balloons in the dark. Then, one by one, the burners roared to life, lighting the balloons from the inside like giant paper lanterns — Dawn Patrol, they called it. Even if you never made it to the launch field, you knew it was Balloon Race weekend. You could hear the burners echoing across town before the sun came up.
When the wind cooperated, it was beautiful.
When it didn't —
— well, that's where this one comes from.
This was the early '90s, while I was at the University of Nevada. I was living with my mom at East 6th and Valley, not far from campus and only a couple of miles from Rancho San Rafael, where the balloons launched every year.
I'd probably stayed out a little too late the night before. Let's just say my dedication to Reno's casinos occasionally competed with my dedication to higher education. I was dead asleep.
Then my bedroom door flew open.
"Brooks! Get up!"
My mom wasn't asking.
"There's a balloon over the house!"
Now, when you're twenty years old and someone wakes you up yelling that there's a balloon over your house, your first thought isn't exactly that seems plausible. My first thought was I was still dreaming.
Then she added:
"I think it's going to crash!"
Well. Now I was awake.
I stumbled outside just in time to see one of the more ridiculous things I've ever witnessed.
Hovering over our neighborhood — far lower than any balloon should ever be — was the Korbel Champagne bottle balloon. Not a balloon with a champagne logo on it. An actual giant champagne bottle, several hundred feet up, drifting over rooftops like someone had let a parade float escape.
At first it was almost peaceful.
Then you noticed something wasn't right.
The pilot kept firing the burners.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
But the balloon wasn't climbing. It kept getting lower.
People started coming out of every house on the block. Someone yelled. Someone else pointed. Dogs were barking. Kids were cheering because they thought this was the greatest thing they'd ever seen. The people up in the basket — several of them, from the sound of it, likely enjoying the champagne-toast part of the ride not twenty minutes earlier — were not nearly as excited.
Normally a balloon ride is about as relaxing as transportation gets. This one had become something else entirely.
You could hear the burners firing again and again as the pilot searched for just enough lift to clear one more row of houses. It wasn't happening. At some point everyone watching realized the same thing, all at once.
This wasn't a sightseeing tour anymore.
This was an emergency landing. And it was headed straight for the intersection of East 6th and Valley — right where we were standing.
Fortunately, balloon pilots are unbelievably good at what they do.
With almost no good options left, the pilot somehow threaded the giant bottle between power lines and trees before settling into the middle of the street, right near our corner. It wasn't graceful. But it was controlled.
The basket bumped. The bottle leaned over. Then, almost in slow motion, the whole balloon folded in on itself until it became a mountain of colorful fabric lying across East 6th.
The neighborhood erupted. People running toward it, yelling questions. My mom immediately went into full emergency mode, trying to figure out if anyone was hurt and what she was supposed to do about it — even though nobody grows up training for the possibility of a hot-air balloon landing in front of their house.
Everyone climbed out smiling. A little shaken. Very relieved. And more than ready for solid ground.
Within minutes the chase crew showed up in pickup trucks and trailers. If you've never watched ballooning up close, every balloon has a ground crew following it, because nobody — not even the pilot — knows exactly where the wind is going to end the trip. They just follow along and recover the balloon wherever it comes down.
This time, the wind had chosen our neighborhood.
One of the crew wandered over to the house.
"Mind if we use your phone real quick?"
This was before everybody carried a phone in their pocket. Of course my mom said yes. Pretty soon our kitchen had turned into balloon crash headquarters — a chase crew on the landline, my mom asking if anyone needed water, and me standing there in yesterday's clothes trying to process the fact that a champagne bottle the size of a house had just come down forty feet from our porch.
They explained what had happened — something with the burner not giving them the lift they needed — and how what looked like total chaos from the ground had actually been a pilot making one good decision after another until everybody was standing safely on East 6th Street.
After a few calls and a lot of thank-yous, the crew loaded the deflated bottle into the trucks and headed back up the hill toward Rancho San Rafael, like this sort of thing happened every day.
Maybe, in Reno, it kind of did.
The neighborhood slowly went back to normal. The street reopened. People drifted back inside. By lunchtime there wasn't much evidence that a giant flying champagne bottle had ever landed in front of our house.
If you'd driven by that afternoon, you never would've believed it.
But every September, when I hear about the Great Reno Balloon Race, I don't picture a hundred colorful balloons rising peacefully over the city at dawn.
I think about waking up half asleep to my mom yelling that there was a giant bottle of champagne trying to land in our front yard.
Because for a few unforgettable minutes on an ordinary Reno morning, there actually was.