Growing up in the country gave me the opportunity to see a lot of things that most folks in urban dwellings don’t get to experience. The obvious things are all the farm animals—chickens, cows, pigs, ducks, horses, etc. There’s also all the freshly grown fruits and vegetables fresh out of the ground or off the vine.

However, I’m not writing about that stuff today. That’s the easy stuff to write about.

Growing up country also allowed me to enjoy seeing hot air balloons. Imagine living in a time before government regulations dictated when and how you could float around in a basket fastened to a bag of air. Among my most prominent childhood memories were seeing hot air balloons take to the skies in my neighborhood and add other colors to the blue skies.

On many Saturday and Sunday mornings, I would wake up on the family ranch in Chino Valley, Arizona, and go outside to play—seeing as children of the 1980s weren’t attached to cellphones and the internet. For some of those mornings, I would get to see hot air balloons floating over a community of about 1,000 people (The town isn’t that small anymore).

Many times, I would leave the front yard and go meander down the road in the hopes of getting a better look. In those days, old Road 4 North didn’t get much motor vehicle traffic, so a child of the age of 8, 9 or 10 could go running down the street without risk of becoming roadkill, especially on the weekends, when most folks were sleeping in, and the community had few activities to speak of.

Sometimes the winds would bring the balloons our way, but more often than not, the balloons would be off a mile or two in the distance. Granted, going about a quarter-mile in a flatland community didn’t bring me close to the balloons most of the time, but when you’re a child, you refuse to believe that chasing after something is futile.

There were some rare occasions when the balloons would head my way. That was an awesome treat to be able to see the dazzling colors up close, to be able to hear the hiss as the pilot released some hot air to make the balloon rise, descend or even stay level. While I wasn’t someone too thrilled with heights, the childhood Lee Pulaski couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to soar with the birds.

As I grew up and the town I lived in grew larger, the balloons did not grace the skies anymore, and at the time, I didn’t understand why. Maybe the balloon operators moved out of the community. Maybe they died. Maybe the town said they couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t know.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s and I took a job at a newspaper near Lake Powell that I got to see the balloons again. The city of Page started a balloon festival, boosted by the fact that the manager of the local electric utility was a pilot, and I was assigned to report on it. Imagine your childhood memories multiplied and on the big screen. I rarely saw the balloons close up when I was growing up, but here they were—in my face and 50 of them to boot.

Much of Page existed on a high mesa, and the balloons launched from the golf course below it, so anyone who trekked to the edge of the mesa would get to see large orbs of color rise up to greet them, fly over their heads and sometimes even land to say hello to onlookers. The only thing that disappointed me was that the city could only get a permit from the National Park Service to have up to 50 balloons, because I would have loved to see the sky filled with hundreds of balloons.

Covering the balloon festival also meant that the media got to go up in a couple of balloons, so I, eagerly remembering the days when balloons decorated the skies of Chino Valley, got to climb in the basket and finally ascend into the heavens. To be able to see the people below, not to mention other balloons at assorted altitudes nearby, would have been the icing on the cake for me when I was 10, but it was still pretty cool less than a month before my 27^th birthday.

While I’m perfectly happy living in Wisconsin—even with the winters—I do miss seeing hot air balloons float across the Arizona skies. Where I live, they tried to connect hot air balloons with a kite festival, but it fizzled out after a couple of years, and I haven’t seen a balloon live and in person since.

I yearn for the days when a little boy could step outside his family’s house in the country and run down the street hoping to catch a hot air balloon that was traversing the skies, enjoying pure freedom. Who knows? It could happen someday.