Editor’s note: Reporter Cameron Levasseur got a firsthand look at the Crown of Maine Balloon Festival Friday morning as a passenger aboard a hot air balloon flight.
Just as the sun summited the horizon, Marian Deeney heaved Hemisphere Dancer into place.
She pulled a rope this way and that, wrangling the 47-foot-tall hot-air balloon like a veteran balloon cowboy.
Her crew chief manned the crown line. She jetted flames into the behemoth’s vast envelope. A volunteer crew kept everything straight.
Giant swaths of pink, purple, yellow and blue enveloped the sky as it rose, 77,000 cubic feet of air itching to leave the ground. Being a good steward, Deeney obliged.
Her passengers climbed into the basket. Bill Howard, the crew chief, released the tether and Hemisphere Dancer quickly cleared the treetops surrounding a field on the outskirts of Presque Isle.
It’s a dance they’ve done a thousand times before. It has never gotten old. Around them rose nearly a dozen other balloons, dotting the early morning sky with splashes of color and officially kicking off the 2025 Crown of Maine Balloon Festival.
Deeney’s love for ballooning started when she joined a chase crew while in college in 1980.
“I said, ‘If I don’t get a balloon after I get out of college, I won’t be happy,’” she said.
Forty-five years later, she and Howard have piloted balloons across the globe. They’ve flown in the shadow of the French Alps in Italy, amid the Fairy Chimneys of Turkey’s Cappadocia region and beside 700 other balloons in New Mexico at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the world’s biggest hot air balloon festival.
The pair, who hail from Tallahassee, Florida, have made the trip to northern Maine for the Presque Isle festival in most of the last 15 years. The event — and the ballooning community overall — are a “very large extended family,” they said.
They visit the area even when they’re not flying. The relationships that they’ve built through the festival are a big part of what makes it special. That, and the large stretches of open fields that are hard to find in other places.
Many of those fields lay below as the altitude gauge climbed to 400, 500, then 600 feet. Deeney explained to what extent she can control the aircraft.
“Up and down, very well. Left and right, it depends on the wind. If the winds are going that way,” she said pointing in one direction, “there’s no way I’m going that way,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction.
Its unpredictability is part of the fun for her.
“Each flight is a different adventure,” Deeney said. “Same landing spot, same launch spot, completely different flight.”
Hemisphere Dancer, along with DogOnIt, Heaven Sent, Whirled Peace and other cleverly named balloons, floated east toward the Aroostook River away from Presque Isle. Flying higher than most drones and much lower than planes, the position gives a unique perspective on The County’s largest city.
“You get a different view of the scenery from the balloon than anywhere else,” Howard said after the flight.
The balloon caught the top of a cold-air bubble rising above the river and bounced to the other side, soaring over Northeast Paving and skimming a harvested broccoli field. Deeney put it down in a field near the Reach Road, roughly 40 minutes and three miles as the crow flies — or rather, as the balloon flies — from where it took off.
Once the chase crew arrived, the choreographed disassembly began. Every piece of the balloon was neatly packed away in the trailer, and everyone on board was whisked back to the Northern Maine Fairgrounds for a toast with sparkling grape juice and a lesson in ballooning history.
Hot air balloons, Deeney explained, are the world’s oldest flying machines. The first manned flights date back to the late 18th century. They have been raced, used for leisure and to drop bombs. They were used extensively in the American Civil War and both world wars. The CIA once devised a plan to overthrow Cuba via hot air balloon.
And somewhere along the way, balloonists adopted a prayer, thought to be of Irish or Italian origin. It celebrates a successful flight and safe return to the ground.
As Deeney raised her glass, she recited:
“The winds have welcomed you with softness.
The sun has blessed you with its warm hands.
You have flown so high and so well,
that God has joined you in your laughter,
and set you gently back again,
into the loving arms of Mother Earth.”
Nine hours later, she and her crew would do it all again.
