There is much to be said about the merits of curiosity... but... as cats will tell you, in any act of discovery there is a decent potential to be railroaded by the unfettered forces of chaos and mayhem, and tossed headlong into the annals of miserable statistics.
Our youthful confidence bolstered by misleading evidence about the nature of our indestructibility, Jeremiah and I continued to make the sort of decisions that stupid kids make. We were, after all, still packing a cubic mile of model rocket engines in every conceivable size. The lopsided wheels in our heads turning enthusiastically and our home-trimmed bowl-cuts bobbing in unison, we happily considered the wondrous possibilities that lay before us in each tightly packed cardboard tube of explosive powder.
I wasn't new to the science. I'd built some hundreds of model rockets in my lifetime, and in that capacity I'd taken part in countless carefully executed rocket launches, each more glorious than the last. Jeremiah had not. I prided myself on my ability to make a rocket out of anything. Jeremiah, despite the only evidence he had, trusted me.
Ordinarily I would have used the official rocket engine igniter, a 9 volt battery, and 25 feet of wire. This time however, for reasons that would take too long to explain here (innocent though they were), I had in my possession a good bit of cannon fuse. I imagine for the average 10-13 year old kid it is much more difficult to get cannon fuse these days than it was for me. That's probably a good thing. The fuse was a lovely green color, and once lit would burn slowly enough to give smart people a head start, and hot enough to continue burning underwater. It was good stuff.
Rather than assemble all the parts for the legitimate igniter, I decided it would be easier just to jam a piece of cannon fuse into the little hole in the bottom of the engine. I also decided that a nose-cone on a rocket was unnecessary, as were the fins. Basically I'd revolutionized the established rocket building industry and simplified the entire operation to a cardboard tube filled with explosive powder with a bit of fuse poking out the bottom. For some reason this setup didn't conjure up images of Wile-E Coyote at all, but rather seemed quite logical.
For a launch platform; I dug a little hole. I was pretty sure it would work. Jeremiah continued to trust me. He was even excited about doing the honors of lighting the fuse. He lit it, and we backed up a little. Not a lot, but a little, which in hindsight was not a safe distance.
The propellant did what propellant does: It sent that little tube on an adventure. Unfortunately, the scientists who design rockets had been right all along: It IS important to put a nose-cone and fins on a rocket after all, and without them my little would-be spaceship was about as aerodynamic as Fat Albert.
Rather than going up in a glorious 300 foot arc of smoke, it instead opted against thousands of alternate angles and fired itself directly at my unprotected crotch. With reflexes only someone with a threatened crotch can have, I twisted away in such a manner that the flaming projectile skipped like a well tossed pebble down the length of my jeans instead of lodging itself directly into my groin. It left a little trail of burnt denim in its wake.
There, all the while presenting very real danger of obliteration to my tender naughty-bits, is where the fireball stayed until the propellant burned out; bouncing around between my flailing legs like a super-ball on its way over Niagara falls in a barrel. It burned everything it touched. Jeremiah had jumped bravely into the bushes and was peeking out like a frightened squirrel at the spectacle. I would have done the same.
At long last, the smoke cleared and the dust I'd kicked up flopping around like a mackerel in a canoe finally settled. I surveyed the damage. My pants were destroyed. Holes the size of quarters riddled the inner thighs on both sides, but through some miracle the thighs themselves were intact! I was, in fact, entirely unhurt, which is by all logical reasoning theoretically impossible and I couldn't even believe it. I checked and rechecked myself over and over, but it soon became clear that only thing I really had to worry about was the fact that I'd destroyed a pair of pants, and my mom was not likely to be particularly understanding given the purple smoke debacle.
We had already pushed our luck quite a lot. It's obvious now that even marginally intelligent people would have found something better to do with their time at this juncture, but again we would endeavor to prove that "idiot proof" is a myth. The minute somebody makes something idiot proof, somebody else builds a better idiot.
Previous: Part 2: The First Mistake
Next: Part 4: The Pants Debacle
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