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Special delivery: Balloon message found 30 miles from Springfield
By Lynn A. Wade
Nevada Daily Mail
A message from a balloon launched by 4-year-old Ryken Butler on Aug. 17 was found three days later. caught in a fence on Eric Weiden's farm, about 30 miles east of Springfield.
Weiden said it's a hilly area, along the Wright-Webster county line, "about 6 miles north of Highway 60, as the crow flies."
Eric Weiden's father, Jack, was checking the fences when he discovered the note; but there was no balloon in sight -- just the card that included a picture drawn by Ryken and this message:
We sent this message by balloon,
In hopes that it would get to you.
Whoever you are, please let us know.
We were wondering how far it'd go.
Part of an annual project undertaken by all the children at Bright Beginnings Preschool in Nevada, the notes are put into a zipper-closure plastic back and attached to a balloon. Usually, it's two balloons, because one isn't necessarily enough to carry the payload of note and bag. The note asks the finder to contact the Bright Beginnings Preschool in Nevada with news of the balloon mail's discovery.
That's what Eric Weiden did; and Bright Beginnings teacher and owner Tracy Sewell said all of the kids -- Ryken, Covy Confer, Blake Diehl, Gracyn Hallam, Connor Irwin, Baylee Marushin, Corbin Murrow, Jacob Potter, Lucas Turowski and Declan Washburn -- were excited by the news.
"Ryken's face just lit up. Then the others started talking about how they hoped their balloon mail would be found. too," Sewell said, adding that many of the children said they wanted to find their own balloon messages in their own back yards.
So far, none of the other balloon messages launched by the children this year have been found, but that doesn't mean they won't be -- Ryken's message is the 10th one that's been found since the Bright Beginnings tradition began; and it's believed to be the one found the farthest from the launch site so far. One of the balloons was discovered in a field near Moundville last year; and on another occasion, a balloon launched in late summer was recovered the following spring by a man who was mushroom hunting the the Stockton area.
The students at Bright Beginnings have been sending the homemade air mail every summer since 2000; sometimes no one responds, so there's no evidence any of the balloons are found; but in other years, one is discovered, much to the delight of the senders.
Sewell noted in 2011 that the flight path the balloons take is sometimes surprising. One year, for example, the balloons drifted to the south when released in Nevada, but the one that was found and reported had ended up in the Schell City area.
Weiden said finding a stray balloon's nothing new to him. Each year he finds four or five balloons on his property from the Ozark Empire Fair, and he's found two weather balloons as well.
"I have a lot of fun finding them," Weiden said, but he doesn't know why they end up in that area. "I don't know if we've got a downdraft that brings them down or what."
Interestingly, Ryken was absent the day of the launch. He had prepared his note earlier and the group launched it for him.