Blogs

15/April/2025

In 1982 a man named Larry Walters strapped 45 weather balloons to a lawn chair and took off into the skies of Los Angeles. 1

Pictured above: not Larry Walters.

As Walters ascended into the sky, he ended up going much higher than expected. Californias highest peak is Mount Whitney at around 14.5 thousand feet. It's the highest point in the continental united states, and is famously one of 96 "Fourteeners", peaks higher than 14,000 ft. Larry Walters eventually reached a cruising altitude of 16,000 feet. Even more impressive considering that he took off from San Pedro, on the coast of LA.

After coming down from the big blue, Walters was fined $1,500 for FAA violations. In a quote from the New York times, Walters said "Since I was 13 years old, I've dreamed of going up into the clear blue sky in a weather balloon, ...By the grace of God, I fulfilled my dream. But I wouldn't do this again for anything."

While the overall story of Larry Walters doesn't have a happy ending, the central idea of flying in the air is seems to be a fairly common one. The ability to fly is a feature found in dreams, and our superheros stick out their arms like arrows and streak through the air anywhere people need help. In videogames, the ability to fly is only ever granted to developers, full sandbox games, or simulators where the player acts like a god who loves removing pool ladders and watching virtual people drown. The very idea of personal flight is one we associate with freedom, with self-actualization and power.

In the movie "UP", septuagenarian Carl Fredricksen fufills a childhood dream he and his dead wife had by attaching hundreds of helium balloons to the home they built together and flying away to distant lands for an adventure.

The album "Flight B741" by King Gizzard and the lizard wizard revolves heavily around flight and the idea of risk. The first song in the album tells of a child who lives with abusive parents, and wishes to fly away to a magical land called "Mirage City".

Another example I eventually thought of was peter pan: the children fly over london in the 1960s disney movie thanks to the help of lots of fairy dust, and follow peter pan t the fantastical land of neverland.

I can really only come up with more examples of flight as a dream of freedom. but this seems to be an old concept that people just, understand as a metaphor for freedom. in the story of icarus, he and his father escape from the labyrinth by just going "yeah, we're gling to make wings and fucking fly" and they do it. icarus dies cause he goes too high but he and his father both escape the labyrinth anyway.

Sometimes I think about pigs. The way that their skeleton is structured means they cant look up much further than a few degrees (they can get around this by sitting down but still). With the ironic statement "when pigs fly" meaning to do something impossible, I've noticed in art and stories lots of depictions of pigs managing to fly, or references to pigs wanting to fly

Porco rocco, flight b741...

ok look i cant come up with a lot of specific examples of pigs flying but i fucking love the idea of people feeling bad for out piggy friends and depicting them and achieving the impossible, just like we humans dream of doing.