The old man who lived behind us when I was a growing up was fond of reminding me that I was two drams short of having an ounce of common sense. I imagine this all started when my best friend Chuck and I were camping in the woods behind his house.
We had quite a campfire going and while searching through my bag of food, which I had commandeered from our house, I found two small cans of corn. Without a pot to dump the contents into, I tossed the cans onto the hot coals to heat up. Not understanding the laws of imperfect timing, the old man, whose name was Swede, came stumbling through the trees towards us with his flashlight. He was smelling strong of Canadian Mist. Obviously concerned that two teenage boys might be up to no good and about to burn his woods down, he staggered up to the fire.
“What are you two rascals up to and why are you throwing cans in the fire? Don’t you know that they will…”?
Boom! Boom!
And so, we all returned to our homes covered in yellow cream corn.
Swede should have understood the call of “blowing things up.” When he was a young man living on the Olympic peninsula in a town called Home, he offered to use stumping powder to blow an old maple stump out of what was to be a ball field at the school. The school sat on a small hill overlooking a saltwater cove. When he had sufficiently dug under the roots, he packed what he thought to be an appropriate amount of dynamite in the holes. He then called for all clear, lit the fuse and ran. The explosion did indeed raise the stump out of the ground but the concussion from the blast rolled across the small bay, bounced off the far shore and returned to from whence it started and broke every window in the school.
When I was in elementary school, I would see him with his dynamite and detonator out in his side yard blowing up old fruit trees. Even though he was cantankerous, he would let me help dig the root holes. Then he would pack in the dynamite and blasting caps and we would string wire behind his house and hook up the igniter. With all the precision of the NASA Command Center, we would count down from ten and blow the tree sky high.
When I was in high school it was easy to obtain all the necessary ingredients to blow things up. We lived just a mile from the reservation. Weeks before the Fourth of July and a week after, we could buy all the explosives we needed to last the year. The 1½” firecracker was the explosion of choice.
Did I mention that mom wasn’t fond of fireworks? When we were in elementary school and the rest of the kids got sparklers, she gave us a smoldering punk and told us to have fun. (Like she thought we would get hurt.)
After Chuck and I tired of blowing things up we creatively came up with competitions. We would stand on the train tracks and slide an 1½” firecracker under the laces of one of our tennis shoes. Once the fuse was lit, the competition was to see how many railroad ties you could run down before the firecracker blew up. This continued until either you blew your shoe laces off, or you went lame.
Our final experience with explosion came when Chuck found a 30-06 shell casing on the shelf where his dad did gunsmithing. The shell was in the process of being reloaded and didn’t have gunpowder or a slug yet but did have a live primer installed. Coincidently, the 1½” firecracker fit very snuggly in the casing.
We took it out to the driveway, set it upright with the fuse on top, lit it and started running. For some inexplicable reason, the shell fell on its side with the primer aimed at Chuck. The firecracker blew up and he grabbed the back by of his thigh and dropped to the ground.
The explosion in the shell had blown the live primer out of the casing which then shot across the driveway, hit Chuck in the thigh and exploded. The result was a nice hole in the back of his pants and a radiating welt on his back side. I believe that his dad made mention that we were both about two drams short of an ounce of common sense.
In the old west, bank robbers blew up safes. In the military, soldiers are trained in multiple techniques of blowing things up. When a whale washed up on the beach in Florence Oregon, the Department of Transportation blew it up. When the Kingdome in Seattle had to come down, they blew it up. On the 4th of July, families from all over America lie on blankets in parks and watch rockets blow up in the night sky.
So, to answer the question of why boys blow things up – it’s cool!
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