another article, with
picture (UPI) LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Look, up in the sky. Is it a bird, a plane, the space shuttle? No, it's Larry Walters at 16,000 feet in his lawn chair. Walters, 33, a truck driver, spent nearly two hours in the air on Friday in an aluminum lawn chair suspended from a 50-foot cable attached to 45 helium-filled balloons. Among other things, he threw a scare into a couple of airline pilots who happened across the path of his weird flying contraption. "I know it sounds strange but it's true," said a Long Beach police officer. "The guy just filled up some balloons with helium, strapped on a parachute, grabbed a BB gun and took off." But everything didn't go as planned and Walters had a few dicey moments as he started getting numb in the cold atmosphere at 16,000 feet and decided to descend -- which he accomplished by popping some of the balloons with the BB gun. As he neared the ground he saw power lines. "That's when I got scared," he said. "Those things can fry you." He didn't get fried, the balloons draped themselves across the wires, leaving Walters dangling in his chair a few feet from the ground and he dropped earth. The landing knocked out power in the neighborhood for 20 minutes. "I have fulfilled my 20-year dream," said Walters, a truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground. I've proved to myself that the thing works." In addition to the BB gun and the parachute, Walter carried several one-gallon water jugs for ballast, a life vest and a CB radio. "But the best piece of equipment was the lawn chair," Walters said. "It was a Sears. It was extremely comfortable." Walters told authorities that he was trying to drift to the Mojave Desert, site of Sunday's schedules space shuttle Columbia landing, but the winds didn't cooperate. "I wasn't trying to upstage the space shuttle," Walters said. "I would have landed well away from there. I just wanted to lay back and enjoy it all, but I had to do something when my toes started getting numb." Police said they probably would not file charges against Walters. But the Federal Aviation Administration was investigating, mainly because of the scare Walters gave the airline pilots who came across him at 16,000 feet in his flying lawn chair.
and Robert Fulghum's take on the incident, from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Now let me tell you about Larry Walters, my hero. Walters is a truck driver, thirty-three years old. He is sitting in his lawn chair in his backyard, wishing he could fly. For as long as he could remember, he wanted to go /up/. To be able to just rise right up in the air and see for a long way. The time, money, education, and opportunity to be a pilot were not his. Hang gliding was too dangerous, and any good place for gliding was too far away. So he spent a lot of summer afternoons sitting in his backyard in his ordinary old aluminum lawn chair - the kind with the webbing and rivets. Just like the one you've got in your backyard. The next chapter in this story is carried by the newspapers and television. There's old Larry Walters up in the air over Los Angeles. Flying at last. Really getting UP there. Still sitting in his aluminum lawn chair, but it's hooked on to forty-five helium-filled surplus weather balloons. Larry has a parachute on, a CB radio, a six-pack of beer, some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a BB gun to pop some of the balloons to come down. And instead of being just a couple of hundred feet over his neighborhood, he shot up eleven thousand feet, right through the approach corridor to the Los Angeles International Airport. Walters is a taciturn man. When asked by the press why he did it, he said: "You can't just sit there." When asked if he was scared, he answered: "Wonderfully so." When asked if he would do it again, he said: "Nope." And asked if he was glad that he did it, he grinned from ear to ear and said: "Oh, yes." The human race sits in its chair. On the one hand is the message that says there's nothing left to do. And the Larry Walterses of the earth are busy tying balloons to their chairs, directed by dreams and imagination to do their thing. The human race sits in its chair. On the one hand is the message that the human situation is hopeless. And the Larry Walterses of the earth soar upward knowing anything is possible, sending back the message from eleven thousand feet: "I did it, I really did it. I'm FLYING!" It's the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible. But wait! Some cynic from the edge of the crowd insists that human beings still /can't really/ fly. Not like birds, anyway. True. But somewhere in some little garage, some maniac with a gleam in his eye is scarfing vitamins and mineral supplements, and practicing flapping his arms faster and faster.