water balloons

“Water is a-flowin!” shouts a man hanging from a rope to the pilot above. The wind rushes through his beard splitting it in two, like devilish horns curving defiantly away from one another as he races through the sky. “Water is a-flowin!” he rounds again nearly laughing this time whilst dashing his hand across a large sheet of saturated fabric, swollen with water, as he swings down a short length of it; splashing in jubilant celebration. His shirt billows as he sings among the enrapturing clouds. He anchors himself firmly with time earned skill; one hand grips like iron on the rope and one foot pushes hard in a stirrup beneath him while the other two free limbs flourish with the merriment of his song. The sharp wind digs tears from his eyes and dries them on his face as he swings, suspended in the lee of the large sheet. It is called a water net, and it is porous like cheesecloth and stretches over a mile and a half in length and more than 800 feet high. He is one of many suspended on ropes monitoring the water net along its length. Dangling by the hundreds, staggered like the keys of a piano, large blue glass bottles, the smallest of which is as tall as a horse and nearly as big around as an oak tree trunk, line the bottom of the sheet tied to the end of long tassels. As the dew gets trapped on the fabric, it collects and runs down the tassels and finally into the delicate fluted spouts of the bottles as a water harvest. High above and spread along the length of the water net, a fleet of a hundred enormous balloons like leviathans plough their way through an ocean of blue kept aloft by nervous helmsman. The balloons, made up of a patchwork of dull fabrics, stitched together in aged multicolor, tug the sheet along as a fishnet through the sea, laboring with roaring puffs of their torches. They’ll float the clouds early morning until midday dragging the sky for water. Day after day, while the season lasts, the tradesmen of the water harvest will revel in their work.