You might not think much about wind. Storms, sure, but you may not ponder the forces behind the soft, warm breezes that bend the switchgrass or the stiff, cold northers that sting the cheeks. You haven’t studied the physics of gases that yearn for stabilization and rush from high- to low-pressure areas. You don’t analyze the various wind currents flowing in different directions at different altitudes, moving like the traffic on some Dallas interchange in the sky.
And why would you? You’re not a competitive hot-air balloonist. You’re not someone who dreams of catching and riding the waves of the great invisible, swaying in a wicker basket thousands of feet in the air with only the heat of a propane flame to aid your lift. You’re not rated on your ability to toss a ribbon-tailed beanbag out of the basket and hit a large X on the ground below, as if you were playing an airborne game of cornhole.
Few balloonists in the world can maneuver their aircraft well enough to race in the World Hot Air Balloon Championship, held every other year in wide-open skies, where there are scant power lines that might ensnare these gossamer vehicles. About one hundred balloonists qualify. Only fifty or so—the best of the best—return frequently.
But even among that exclusive class, there are no competitors quite like the Heartsills. They are the first family of balloon racing—the Mannings of a sport with a tiny fraction of football’s fandom. Joe Heartsill, the clan’s 75-year-old patriarch, is built compact and lean, like a trail runner, with powder-white hair and tanned skin that betrays the years he spent working as a realtor beneath the West Texas sun. He tends to survey a room like an eagle at its perch, masking his killer instinct with a warm smile or an encouraging nod.
A recently inducted member of the U.S. Ballooning Hall of Fame, he has won five U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championships, six Honda World Grand Prix races, and the 1995 World Hot Air Balloon Championship. His older son, Lucas, who is 48, was once named the national rookie of the year. His younger son, 41-year-old Rhett, was the 2016 world champion and is a four-time winner of the U.S. nationals.
They’re a handsome and clean-cut trio, shockingly agile, able to vault into a gondola four feet tall in the time it takes to say, “All right, let’s go.” When they’re relaxing on their ranch near San Angelo, they may act like members of any other West Texas family—watching football games, taking a dip in the stock tank, or noting the natural springs where the axis deer have gathered. They may talk about work—Joe’s real estate investments, Rhett’s oil-and-gas ventures, or Lucas’s anesthesiology duties at the nearby Shannon Medical Center.
But then, looking out onto the horizon of live oak and brush, they can’t help but notice the cottonlike cumulus or flat, gray stratus clouds suspended above them. The vaporous drift brings to mind wind. Wind prompts thoughts of the next race: the navigable currents above a European mountain range or a Midwestern cornfield.
