Move over Jules Verne with your Around the World in Eighty Days and Five Weeks in a Balloon, here comes Barry Yourgrau with his high up in the sky adventure. But unlike those Victorian gents in Verne's tales, riding in a basket under a hot air balloon, Barry flies high, riding atop a bubble. Here's how Barry's six-pager begins:
BUBBLE
I take a ride on a bubble. I mount up on a leaf in the giant's garden. It's a young man's game, but I join the weekend daredevils who sneak in here while the giant snores in his tower of boulders. The wide breeze blows across the morning dew and the bubbles swell into being, and I wait my turn to clamber onto one, like a jockey, squeezing an iridescent perch between my knees. Then the breeze freshens, and I give a yelp of alarm and joy, and wobble aloft into the sunlight.
Around me the whooping, jostling flock of bubbles navigate the current. Most of us sport a honeysuckle trumpet-blossom as an airstreamed cap, and motorist's goggles and trailing white scarf, and the herringbone plus fours which are the bubble riders' from our earthbound cousins, thee bicyclists. We stream down pell-mell over the lawn and terraces, over the nodding treasuries of roses and the high stands of pink gladiolas in the flower beds.
A few calculating souls always try to outsmart the haphazardness of our flight - rigging themselves with strutted wings on their backs, or with thin airfoils strapped and cinched to their ankles. One of them comes suddenly scuttling up through the midst of us. Shouts and curses pursue him as others clamor out of his way. I watch another ambitious sort go slowly whirling down into the lily pads of the stone pool. The rotor blade of his elaborate headpiece bounces away on the flagstones. Over it comes drifting a newcomer who's somehow got himself astoundingly inside his bubble. He gapes out through the glossy membrane in a state of panic and idiotic laughter. A gust of breeze sends him flailing, like a fetus resisting birth, toward the epic tangled bulk of a greengage plum tree.
i lean into the same gust of air, steering with my knees and tugging hands. I rise, banking unsteadily, and make a wavering course for the towering eaves of the giant's house. Some fearless types are there already, hovering outside the giant's window for a glimpse of the monster abed. For the first time I myself bob beside them, and through their milling honeysuckle caps I claim my debut sight of the behemoth in his den. Yellow-check curtains form a proscenium on the scale of an opera set. I blink through in trepidation and awe at something like a haystack, which makes a rumbling like an iron cartwheel over cobblestones. It's the giant's snoring head, with its fearsome one eye closed in the center of its brow, and its blond nettle patch of beard.
Bubble is one of the many outlandish tales in Barry's book, Haunted Traveller.
The Writer as a Young Man, Barry Yourgrau, born 1949
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