Monday, July 04, 2005
burnin’ down the house
Hey guess what: I’m back from Florida. Oh, did I give it away? I had a wonderful time full of good things to see and eat, some tropical weather and some damn fine relaxation, and I’ll bore each and every one of you to tears with all that soon enough. But for now, I promised a story about setting fire to things, and in honor of National Explosives Day and my recent visit with my mom, whose home I did not destroy at any point in the distant or recent past, I’ll share this little tale:
I was a pretty good kid. Apart from that one time I ran away from home in the second grade, I was very reliable. I made my own bed, did my own laundry, prepared my own lunches for school, and did as I was told even when it rankled. I paid attention in class and I never – ever – cut. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a kid anyway.
Turns out I was, like so many of my peers and cohorts, a bit of a pyro. Blue tip matches were my good buddies, and that space out behind the study - the four feet of bare dirt hidden from sight between the back of the garage and the wooden plank fence at the property line - was a perfect place for me to make my little firepits of bark and twigs and grass. I never hurt myself, or anything or anybody else; I didn’t destroy toys or household items – I did it because I liked the purity of the flame, not its destructive capacities. Also, I was askeered of thick columns of black smoke drawing unwanted attention to my behavior. I had a rep, after all, as a good kid, and I knew my folks wouldn’t have approved of this little hobby.
I was fortunate, or not, then, to live across the street from some dangerously creative incipient scientists. Steve was my best friend, and just about my age, but his big brothers Keith and Kevin had a whole different scene going. They were (are) all exceptionally bright and inventive guys, but K&K had four or five years on me and a scientific curiosity that led their dad to build and equip a backyard lab for them so well-stocked and puissant that, when they all finally vacated the house for good, a haz-mat team had to come in to clean the place out. Good stuff.
One thing K&K knew was how to blow stuff up. They sure talked a good game, anyway, and they did know a little something about the saltpeter. I could get the saltpeter at any drugstore, they taught me; it makes you pee if you eat it. But don’t. Instead, mix it 1 to 1 with sugar and see what happens when you drop in a match.
Well, what happens, it turns out, is caramel flambé, a sticky smoky conflagration that emits gallons of smoke and burns more furiously than a whole box of matches going off at once. I loved it. We soaked strings in a sugar-saltpeter solution and once they dried they turned into fuses wherewith to set off ever larger piles of powdery white crystals into ever more intoxicating eruptions of heat and light and billowing smoke. It was delightful.
For the record, we didn’t heat and compound the ingredients – that was too dangerous. We just mixed them together and they burned well enough. But it came to pass that “well enough” wasn’t good enough. I wanted more. More power, more flames. More pyrotechnic potential. And so Kevin, or perhaps it was Keith, told us how to make the black powder: you just keep using that same saltpeter, but you mix it in equal parts with sulfur and charcoal powder. Now, that stuff really goes off.
I won’t lead you through my whole tale of discovery here but we pulverized a lot of charcoal and god knows where we got the sulfur but we got it somehow; we mixed up a lot of black powder and built a fair number of black powder-burning platforms. At this point we were generating enough heat and power to require the use of an old tripod grill to keep the flames from spreading, or the residue from ruining my driveway or patio. We’d have big ol’ fireballs erupting from that rusty metal censer. I was starting to feel dangerously competent for a 12-year-old boy playing with explosives.
Steve and I began to experiment with containment devices. If we put the black powder in a tightly rolled ball of foil, for example, it would burn even more spectacularly. We weren’t stupid enough to try building a pipe bomb or any such thing, but we continued to explore new and exciting ways to make the flames shoot higher and with ever more fury. We were well along on this path when we realized that we only had about a third of a plastic jar of saltpeter left; this meant that we could actually fill the jar up completely if we used equal parts of carbon and sulfur, resulting in a tidy ten-ounce ramekin of combustibles ready for blast-off.
So we built our little powderkeg, punched a ¼ inch hole in the metal cap and screwed it back on, finally running a sugarpeter fuse up into it. Then we got a little nervous – though, in retrospect, not quite nervous enough. We figured this would be the biggest flamepot we’d ever orchestrated, so we decided to try to keep it on the DL, as neither of us were remotely cool enough to say: rather than igniting this particular pyrotechnical experiment out on my brick patio where we usually immolated stuff, we snuck the old rusty charcoal kettle grill into the garage and closed the door to keep the great event a secret.
The garage was a wood-frame and stucco building standing apart from my house and rising to a peaked roof about twenty feet above a concrete floor, with some bare wooden beams and planks at ceiling level but no actual ceiling to speak of – just the plywood sheets of the underroof overhead and wooden shingles nailed down above that.
You can see where this story is going, I’ll bet. It’s going to have me light the fuse that hung limply out of the ragged punchhole in the white metal lid of the translucent brown plastic saltpeter jar, all filled up with stinky dense black powder, sitting in the center of the grill in the center of that dark garage like a punchline waiting to be uttered for the first time. The cherry smoldered up the fuse, creeping along across the lid and into the insertion point. It slipped into the stoma and, for a moment, I thought our experiment was a failure, that the powder hadn’t ignited.
My fears were proven nigh-tragically unfounded, however, as with a sputter the powder caught and flames burst up out of the hole, orange and furious. They leapt a foot, 18 inches – and then the fire really got going. The interior of the plastic jar became a flaming maelstrom, a veritable firkin of purgatory. The flames shot out four feet tall. Then six feet. And still growing. White-orange flame reached far overhead, spraying like a garden hose. The jar was starting to melt, but not fast enough; a solid fist of fire began to approach the dry and unprotected roof.
Something had to be done immediately or the whole garage would go up. My mind fixated on the precious talmud and the library of other hebraica that my dad kept in the study that was attached to the garage, behind which I’d once hidden to light my little firepits. I couldn’t let it all burn down. My dad and god would gang up to kill me. Action had to be taken. Disaster had to be averted.
We used, I think, a shovel to knock the combustion chamber to its side. Though this pointed the flame at the still-closed garage door, the impact had fatally disturbed the now-molten plastic. The whole thing quickly dissolved in a mess of bubbling smoke and light, then swiftly and spectacularly burned itself out. No buildings were destroyed. The talmud was safe. And since that fateful afternoon, I’ve never set another fire. That last one seems to have served me pretty well. But the next time, I won’t be satisfied unless I get me some fifteen-foot flames again. I mean, if there is a next time. Till then, I think I’ll just leave the saltpeter to those who need it for purposes more aligned with dousing things than setting them ablaze.
