For Purvis, every balloon flight
is a ‘Tigger adventure’
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
HOT AIR BALLOON PILOT Wendell Purvis, of Tallahassee, ignites the burner to heat up the air already inside the envelope of his balloon, Tracer, prior to a Monday evening flight. Purvis and passengers Darren West and Scott Mitchell Johnson launched from a hayfield on the Reach Road and landed at the Skyway Mobile Home Park. The flight lasted nearly an hour. Purvis and 11 other pilots are in Presque Isle for the seventh annual Crown of Maine Balloon Fest, which will be held Aug. 26-29.
PRESQUE ISLE – Wendell Purvis, of Tallahassee, will be participating in his sixth annual Crown of Maine Balloon Fest this week. He arrived in the Star City in late July and has flown several times in the area since then, as well as in a festival in Quebec.
“I love the people here, the flying area, and the friendliness of the landowners,” said Purvis. “People are very warm and receptive and what I consider ‘my kind of people’ because I grew up on a farm. I’ve never gone west of Louisiana, but have flown throughout New England, into Canada and in the Southeast, and of all the places I’ve ever flown, this has become my favorite place to fly.
“I’m a farmer by background, so when I get up in the air here the first thing that comes to mind is, ‘Look at all those fields. They’re all different colors and contours.’ You’ve got potatoes, broccoli, canola, sunflowers, wheat, barley, oats and hay. This whole place is amazing and I’m drinking in the countryside when I’m here,” he said. “Our flying area in Florida is trees and very few fields because it’s become urbanized. Coming here is wonderful because it’s open, easy to fly, there are friendly and helpful people, and you have the colored collage of countryside. I take pictures of it, but it doesn’t do it justice. It’s almost like this is a different part of the world.”
Purvis has become great friends with Delores and Bruce Roope of Presque Isle, and has been staying with them since arriving earlier this summer. He said he started ballooning in 1985 after a balloon landed in his backyard.
“The weird thing about it is I was not even there when he landed in my yard; I was out of town working,” said Purvis. “When I got back into town, my son, Anthony, dragged me kicking and screaming, ‘Take me over to meet this pilot!’ I figured by doing that it would get it out of his system. I had no interest in it whatsoever because I am afraid of heights.
“I took him to meet the pilot. It was about 4:30 a.m. and I thought, ‘He’ll get over this real quick.’ I took him, and the pilot said he’d bring him back later that night. I thought, ‘Wow, this ballooning thing must be really big to do it all day long.’ It turned out this was the very first balloon festival they had in Tallahassee,” he said. “When Anthony came back home at 11 p.m., he came dragging into the house and I thought he was done with this. He then said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to take me back in the morning.”
Knowing his son wasn’t fond of getting up early, Purvis thought the second early morning would curb his son’s enthusiasm.
“Sure enough, he was ready to go,” said Purvis. “I took him to meet the same pilot who asked me, ‘I don’t suppose you could drive a truck and trailer could you?’ I said, ‘I’d lose my farmer’s license if I couldn’t,’ so from that point on I drove the chase vehicle for him. I had no interest in flying. For about eight years I basically went with him to different festivals all over the Southeast just chasing the balloon.
“The pilot had twisted my arm enough so I’d help hitch up the balloon, and one day he said, ‘You’re doing everything. Why don’t you go ahead and get your own balloon?’ I kept telling him, ‘No,’” Purvis said. “The year they launched the Florida lottery we were supposed to fly some balloons over the capitol building. As I was bringing the rope in and the balloon was launching – I was helping this guy from South Florida – and he grabbed me by the shirt and said, ‘Get in!’ I kept saying, ‘No!’ and the next thing I knew my feet were four feet off the ground, so I crawled in and the first thought that went through my head was, ‘What is your mother going to say?’”
Despite being “ghostly afraid of heights,” Purvis said his first flight was remarkable.
“Once you physically clear the top of the trees, your eyes go right to the horizon and you absolutely forget how high you are,” he said. “It’s an amazing thing. I have people that I fly who are afraid of heights or have motion sickness, but once we get up in the air, they say, ‘This is great.’ I’m still afraid of heights. The way I justify it is, the world is rotating very fast. If we’re on top of a building that’s sitting on the world, we have a heightened sense of motion that’s going on. When you’re in a balloon, you’re suspended above the world and you don’t have that motion; the world is rotating below you.”
Purvis got his pilot’s license in the early ‘90s, and bought his first balloon, Tracer, in Illinois.
“Someone bought it for a promotion involving a daycare center,” he said. “After the promotion was over, the guy decided to sell it. He bought it new and only had about 10-15 hours in it. He pointed it out to me in the sky and the colors were such that it stuck out like a sore thumb. Out of 120 balloons or so that were in the air that I could see, there it was just sticking out. It reminded me of the military – they’re firing rounds and they’ve got the tracer bullet which you can see going, so that’s where the name Tracer came from.”
In a given year, Purvis flies anywhere from 70 to 100 times. He said he had a few interesting flights over the years.
“My Dad once managed a hunting plantation owned by Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. It’s used for game development,” he said. “I flew them right after they got married. Ted Turner’s an interesting character; I enjoyed talking to him. They thought the flight was amazing. We saw wild hogs, deer, turkeys and even a bear.”
A computer software engineer by trade, Purvis is able to work from the road.
“Have work, will travel,” he said. “As long as I can get to the Internet, I’m good. I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to do that.”
From Aug. 14-22, Purvis participated in Quebec’s International Balloon Festival of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the biggest gathering of balloons in Canada. He will also fly in this week’s Crown of Maine Balloon Fest and will leave Presque Isle Sept. 6 to head to the Atlantic International Balloon Fiesta in Sussex, N.B. Sept. 10-12.
“I’ll probably stop back in Presque Isle after the Sussex festival to say goodbye to Bruce and Delores, and then drive straight to Florida,” he said. “It’s about a 30-hour drive. It will be good to get home, but I love being here.
“I enjoy seeing God’s world from a different point of view. The way I refer to it is every flight is a Tigger adventure. Tigger from ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is always going exploring and bouncing, so every flight is like that … you never really 100 percent for certain know where you’re going because you’re interacting with nature which has its own mind,” said Purvis. “You have to adjust; every flight’s unique which makes it fun. Ballooning has become a part of me.”
