Cousin Gary's Balloons

The concept of holiday meals around intricately set tables with neatly served, perfectly presented plates is entirely foreign to me. That’s just not the world I grew up in. For the first 18 years of my life, I spent every Thanksgiving and Easter at The Farm. The Farm was different from all of the other farms in my life, including the one that I essentially lived on, with buffalo across the road and crops that ran right up to the property lines. The Farm was the home of my Dad’s aunt and uncle. Each year Aunt Dee Dee - who had the voice of Leslie Jordan and purple tattooed-on eyebrows that gave her a look of being perpetually surprised - hosted 15-20 relatives for a loud, raucous, foul-mouthed good ol’ time. By the time we arrived, the house would be overflowing with aunts, uncles, and cousins of all varieties. I never did figure out exactly how we were all related.

One fateful Easter morning in the early 00s, we left church and changed into our farm clothes to pile into the van for the long drive over to The Farm. As we drove through the twisting mountain roads the sights began to feel familiar. Some of the dense forest we’d been driving through began to open up into cow pastures.

As we gazed out the windows in boredom, my siblings and I saw something that caught our eye. A few hundred feet above us was a bundle of balloons, drifting slowly in the same direction we were headed. This was by far the most exciting thing we’d seen during the drive. We all craned our necks to keep them in our sights. They followed us for the rest of the ride, right up until we had to turn into the driveway.

Now, getting into this driveway was quite the feat. The first thing you need to know about this driveway is that it was situated on a blind mountain curve, and we had to make a left-hand turn to get into it. The second thing you need to know is that once we got across the lane of traffic to reach the actual driveway we would immediately encounter a steep hill that started with a sharp drop. A series of hairpin turns would get slightly more level as you progressed down the switchback carved out of the side of the mountain, ending in the valley below. And, of course, the entire thing was just plain old dirt - no paving to be found anywhere. Making the turn into The Farm was exhilarating and terrifying. I still to this day have literally not a single goddamn clue how the massive tanker trucks that came to collect the milk a few times a week managed it. Whoever those drivers are should probably be hired as stunt drivers by Hollywood immediately. Or, at the very least, they should get a raise.

After we made it safely to the yard below and parked, the adrenaline from our semi-annual brush with death began to wear off. As we climbed out of the van and stretched our stiff legs, we looked up and saw the balloons once more. They had gotten closer in the time we’d been distracted by our death-defying drive down the lane. Now they were sinking down over the other side of the mountain.

As we stood there watching the progression of the balloons, my dad’s cousin Gary, a backwoods lumberjack by trade who looked every bit the part, came out and stared up at them with us. “Whachy’all lookin’ et?”

We pointed as the balloons continued their descent. Gary’s face lit up with his big, bright delighted grin. Gary’s the kind of guy who smiles with his entire face and laughs with his entire body, so it didn’t much matter that he was missing about half his teeth.

“Well shit, I bet I know where they’re goin’. Maybe there's a note from a purtty girl tied to ‘em. Imma go git ‘em.” We weren’t sure what to make of this, and while we stood there laughing - either with or at him, we weren’t sure - he ran inside and returned quickly with another cousin, Scott. Apparently he was entirely serious about going to track down the balloons. They hopped on a four-wheeler, and off they drove.

We ascended the structurally questionable stairs of the back porch, passed by the small herd of feral cats eating scraps from tin baking sheets, and opened the screen door to let ourselves in the kitchen. We were greeted by the usual sight of five people seated around a table built for two and a half, the table itself overflowing with food of all kinds. Aunt Dee Dee was in her usual state of fluttering between the stove and the table and the living room, where another eight or nine people were scattered anywhere they could find a seat. Over the course of nearly 2 decades of holidays, I don’t recall ever once seeing Aunt Dee Dee sitting down.

We made our way through the kitchen (not always an easy task - it was a tight squeeze) to drop our coats on the pile atop the staircase banister in a living room overflowing with relatives, taxidermied animals, and tattered furniture from the 70s. Then we’d pile our plates full of food - wild turkey and venison hunted by Gary or Scott, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, rolls, and gravy - and go find somewhere to sit. When we were little (and even when we were not-so-little) we’d often end up grabbing a seat on the stairs in the living room, one of the last open ass-sized places available.

The small-talk conversation usually didn’t amount to much, but on this day the talk was all about Gary and his balloons: his unbridled joy, his hope for a note from a purtty girl, the fool’s errand of trying to track them down that he had embarked on. Of course, my bookishly intelligent family all had a good laugh at our dumb redneck cousins on a regular basis. But this day took it to a new level.

Forty-five minutes later, we were contentedly stuffed with carbs and turkey, and some of us were ready to embark on our traditional walk up to the barn to visit that year’s calves and see how many new stray cats were around. The burst of cool air as we stepped onto the porch was a welcome interruption to the stuffy heat of the house, progressively warmed by human bodies and an oven and stove top that had been running nonstop for hours. We slowly ambled down the stairs, waiting for stragglers to make their way through the kitchen obstacle-course.

As we waited, there came a sound from the death-driveway. We walked around the corner of the house to investigate, and were greeted by an incredible, hilarious, shocking sight.

There was Scott driving the four-wheeler across the dirt with Gary perched on the back, grinning wildly in triumph as he tightly clutched a bundle of about a dozen half-deflated mylar balloons.

There was no note from a purtty girl tied to them, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t call his shot about knowing where they would land and come through with results.

I still can’t fathom how the hell he knew where those balloons were going to be. But he did. This 40-something year old man who had spent his entire life living off the land, farming in the valleys, and logging in the mountains had a kind of intelligence I had never witnessed so clearly displayed. Whether I want to admit it or not, being raised half-redneck taught me some important life lessons that I still carry with me. Today, I think about this memory, and I am still filled with the same mix of surprise, joy, confusion, and humility that I felt as I watched him return from his quest, proudly showing off his prize.