It's time for another episode of "Growing Up Calvin", although this time, I am fast forwarding through time, when I was a bit older. Lets just say I was in high school. (If you are wondering what this "growing up" thing is all about, click here to read what this whole series is about, so you'll be up to speed.)Like always, the story begins with "One day when I was bored..." This particular story takes place at a time of celebration. My friends and I had just finished our final day of school before spring break was to begin. I was very happy to have time away from home as we were getting ready to spend spring break driving over to Utah to spend time with my Grandmother and Aunt in Provo. But there was a small gap of time in between when the bus dropped us off and when my mom would be home to make us start packing to leave the following morning. What to do... what to do... Sadly, the solution came with one of my secret favorite activities: lighting things on fire. I was a huge pyromaniac, legend for what I was crazy enough to do with fire and explosives. Good thing I grew up back in the 80's where none of this stuff was considered a "warning sign". In today's world I would have been arrested long before this little episode.
My friend Alan was visiting and it didn't take us long to come up with an evil plan. It all started out so simply.. We decided we wanted to play with fire... you know, like when you take a little black powder, scoop it into a pile and light it up so you can see that little fireball jump into the air. We wanted to do that... just bigger.
We began by digging a hole in the driveway. Yes, you read the correctly. Back in these days, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, we didn't yet have paved roads or driveways. So it was nice and easy to dig holes, and just make sure they were filled in by the time my Dad got home, so as not to raise questions. It didn't have to be deep, just a few inches down to be safe (safety... ha ha!), and to make room for our... ingredients.
With that done, it was time to raid my Dad's explosives storage, the one he never dreamed would be used this way. First things first, we filled the hole with, not one, but two full cans of gun powder, the more the merrier, right? But that didn't seem like a lot, so suddenly our brains vanished. We added everything we could find that had the potential of burning... Anything that had the "WARNING: FLAMABLE" label on it was fair game from the garage.. paint remover, paint thinner, flares from the back of the car, fireworks from my secret stash in my bedroom, a few bullets from my Dad's ammo case (that one really gets me today.. man, were we stupid). All of this stuff went into the hole, all mixed up like a giant stew. Then to top it all off, we grabbed the spare gas can, and added enough gasoline to the hole to turn this whole concoction into thin mud. Yes, a black powder, gasoline, bullet mud.
Now we had to have a way to ignite this thing and turned to the gasoline as the simple solution. We just drew a line with the gas from the hole, back into the garage, so that we could hide out behind the car. (Yet another thing in retrospect that makes me shake my head... It never dawned on me that the line of gasoline burning INSDIE the garage, next to a vehicle could be an issue.. luckily this wasn't an issue that day)
The plan was now all in place, 20 yards away was our mud pit, and there we were, matches in hand ready to light off our little explosion to revel in the wall of flames. I struck the match, set it to the ground and watched in awe as things were about to get really exciting. The end result? Let me just say...
It was amazing! Wall of fire to the sky!!!! Fireworks erupting, noises everywhere from the fireworks.. flames in different colors thanks to things like the flares.. it was brilliant.
Now to a few other.. issues we had not even considered. First, we had just finished a rather dry winter. Not much snow and things were nice and dry.. key word there, dry. Second, this was not a calm day, it was actually rather gusty outside. So there we were for that split second rejoicing that our plan had worked, our fire ball reaching to the sky. But that excitement turned quickly to panic, as a wind gust picked up that wall of fire, and set it back down just over the driveways edge, into the dry brush of the yard. As you can imagine, it quickly ignited, spreading fire all over the place. It became instantly obvious that if we didn't put this out, the fire would quickly spread.. up the giant trees, to neighboring homes... this could get bad.
I lunged for the fire extinguisher, as Alan ran for the hose. Meanwhile, all my poor sister could hear as she was down in her room packing, was the two of us running around upstairs in a panic. I am sure she was rolling her eyes as she came up the stairs to see what the commotion was about. At this point we had used up the extinguisher, the hose wasn't long enough to reach around the house, and so we were lugging tubs of water in and out of the kitchen at a high rate of speed.
She immediately joined the fire fighting effort, and eventually (thank goodness before we had to call the fire department) we got the fire out, just was it was reaching the tree bases. Upon surveying the scene, a nice portion of my Dad's precious land, was black and torched.. and I knew that I was dead meat, yet very lucky as it could have been so much worse.
Amazing for me, a little ray of light shown down on me that day, or rather... dark. By the time my folks got home that night, it had already gotten dark, therefor no need to confess anything... heck, what they couldn't see couldn't hurt them, right. And we (My Mom, sister and I) left early the next morning for Utah, before it was light. And as my Dad was working long hours that year, he left in the wee hours of the morning for his job, and got home late at night. It wasn't until 6 days later that I saw my mom, talking on the phone to my Dad, get a puzzled look on her face, suddenly look at me, and said "Ummmm, your Father has a question for you..."
Gulp.
Amazingly all I heard was "would you like to explain to me why my yard is all black?" To which I simply replied "No... I'd rather not.. trust me, you probably don't want to know." He agreed he didn't want to know. I think it helped that we were a state away for several more days, so that by the time we got home, he no longer had the urge to kill me.
Now.. to the part of the story where I tend to get the hardest time from people: Most people hear this and say "so what.. you were in 7th, or 8th grade? A Freshman?" Nope.... I was a senior." Yup, I lit my little fireball 2 months prior to graduation.
Sadly, this was not the last of my pyromaniac experiences, they do continue on, but those are stories for different times. But, this is one I especially shake my head on now that I have learned better. We were so stupid.. it could have been so much worse... I guess it's all a part of growing up Calvin.
By the way.. the bullets in our little mixture.... we never found a single trace of them. They vanished, not even the casings to be found. Yikes!
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