There is a moment before the day decides itself. A hush. The city holds its breath, streetlights humming like distant hymns, the Rio Grande moving somewhere you can’t quite see. You turn on the television and the anchors talk logistics—lift-off times, pilot briefings, winds at five hundred feet. They say Dawn Patrol the way a foreman says day shift, voice flat with utility. Experienced pilots rise before sunrise, sample the air, and radio the numbers so the rest can follow. It is a system, a safety net, a way to choreograph the sky.
All of that is true. None of it explains why you wake in the dark and put on layers you haven’t touched since last winter.
I went once—before dawn, coffee scalding my palm through a cheap lid, a breakfast burrito warming the other hand because the desert pretends it’s summer by day and remembers it’s a high plain by morning. I went expecting to watch balloons fill. Fabric, fire, lift. A diagram with flames.
What I got was a glow.
On the field, the balloons lay like sleeping animals, bright skins spread across the grass. Then the burners woke—one, then another, hissing like some prehistoric choir. A body of color rose where there had been only shadow. Then the flame cut, and the color collapsed back into the night. It was breath, not mechanism. Inhale. Exhale. Light. Dark. Over and over until the timing took on a pulse.
Some mornings, a dozen of them rise together, a Dawn Patrol show choreographed to music—since 1996, people say—as if we couldn’t admit that we’ve always wanted the night itself to have a soundtrack. You stand there with thousands of others, strangers knitted together by cold and a shared tilt of the head, and the field becomes a stained glass window lit from the inside. No sermon necessary. The windows preach in orange and blue.
I didn’t expect the characters. Darth Vader drifted up first, glossy black helm drinking fire. Then Yoda, ears like sails, face wise and ridiculous at the same time. I laughed out loud. Not a cynical laugh—something closer to relief. As if a muscle you didn’t know had tightened, it finally let go. Wonder snuck in wearing a costume. For a few beats, I was younger than the hour, the cold, the years I carry in my shoulders. I was just a person in a field, neck craned, mouth open.
I took too many pictures. Everyone does. You can feel how flimsy the phone is in your grip compared to what’s happening above you, but you try anyway. Later, you scroll those photos when the day turns officious and small, and they feel like contraband: proof that the sky once made room for joy before 6 a.m.
The news will always explain Dawn Patrol as a service to the Mass Ascension—pilots sampling the invisible, calling down the conditions so others can rise with some measure of certainty. That’s real. It’s also a poor translation. What happens on the field isn’t data; it’s discipline. Standing in the dark and waiting for light is an ancient ritual. We practice it for exams, for diagnoses, for shifts that start before dawn. Out on that grass, we rehearse it for a different reason: to remember that hope is not loud. Hope flickers. Hope needs tending. Hope is a burner you ignite again and again until the fabric holds its shape.
You eat while you wait. Eggs, potatoes, green chile tucked into a foil-wrapped cylinder—the kind of food that tastes better outdoors, better in the cold, better when you’ve decided to be awake with other people who have also decided to be awake. The coffee is almost too hot, and that’s the point. It scalds reality into you. It locates you in the body while the eye is busy chasing fire.
Balloons do not promise much. A canvas, a basket, a bottle of fuel, a willingness to negotiate with the wind. They are humble in that way. Honest. They rise when the air says yes. They bow when the air says no. That humility is part of the love here. The desert teaches it daily—no water without asking, no shade without planning, no shortcuts through noon. Dawn Patrol is the desert’s lesson painted in flame: attention first, then ascent.
I have returned since that first morning. I’ve stood through other shows, other glows, other crowds bundled into a single breath. But the first time is the one that lives in me. The shock of color against a sky that wasn’t ready for it. The burn of coffee and chile at the edge of my tongue. Vader and Yoda rising like jokes the universe told to remind us it still has a sense of humor. The way thousands of people could grow quiet together without being told.
What stays with me isn’t the scale—though hundreds of balloons carving a horizon is a kind of madness worth seeing. What remains is the practice: wake before there is a reason, bring your own heat, and stand still long enough to witness. Let the first light come from within something—within a balloon, within yourself—before the sun claims the credit. Accept that the work of rising begins in the dark, where the world can’t yet see you, where the radioed wind is just a voice naming what the invisible intends.
They’ll talk about the Box on other mornings, about the clever wind that carries you south low and north high so you can drift out and then come home again. But the Box is a later magic. Dawn Patrol is earlier, older. It’s the choice to step into the unproven, to measure a future with nothing but flame and nerve. It’s a handful of people going first, not with bravado but with care, so that when the mass ascension comes—and it always comes—the rest of us can rise with fewer doubts.
I still look at those photos from my first visit. They’re poorly framed. My thumb is in one. The exposure is wrong in three. It doesn’t matter. I keep them because they’re true. They remind me of what the day sometimes tries to make me forget: that awe is something you can work toward, that joy can be prepared like coffee, and that you can choose to show up for wonder before it becomes convenient.
On paper, Dawn Patrol is a safety protocol. In the body, it is a liturgy: fire, breath, lift, drift. In the soul, it is a compact you make with the morning—if I come to meet you, will you meet me back? Some days the answer is no. The wind turns, the field stays quiet, the burners never speak. But on the days it’s yes, the sky answers in lanterns. And for a few minutes, the world is what it could be: a chorus of small lights, rising.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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