Racks of candy next to grocery store checkout counters are the bane of parents everywhere. You can bet it wasn't a stupid person who realized that kids would help drive impulse candy purchases. You can also bet that it was a stupid person who bought the can of Bubble-Tape from such a rack in which Jeremiah would place entirely too much faith and subsequently cement his place firmly in the archives of my childhood memories. The can of Bubble-Tape cost me 50 cents. It cost Jeremiah significantly more.
Since the heart-wrenching burial of my unfortunate pants and my protective instincts of the tender bits that had so recently cowered within them, I wasn't interested in trying out another rocket right away. Instead, we decided that propulsion would be more fun if it happened all at once rather than over a period of time. It followed logically that we should see what would happen if we pounded all the propellant out of the little tubes with a hammer and lit the resulting pile of explosives on fire. I still had some cannon fuse after all.
Happily we made our way to the shed, where my dad kept his blacksmith tools. There's no place better to beat propellant out of cardboard tubes than on an anvil with a giant blacksmiths hammer. In seconds there was a neat little pile of propellant, mixed with chunks of the cement-like mixture that caps each end of a model rocket engine. It was a small pile, so we pounded out a few more tubes until it grew to sufficient proportions. It didn't occur to us to filter out the chunks. What did occur to us was that we needed some sort of a vessel to transport our little sulfur-smelling pile of powdered doom.
Luckily, I had just the thing: My can of Bubble Tape. There was still a good bit of gum in the can and I was loathe to throw it away, so Jeremiah and I each took half of the remaining roll and commenced gnawing on the resulting wad. Then, ever so carefully (not because we were concerned for our safety but because we didn't want to lose any), we scooped the pile into the can, checked our pockets for matches and cannon fuse, ducked under the electric fence and headed out to the big horse pasture behind the shed.
Jeremiah wanted to light it and I, feeling a bit like a mentor, was happy to let him. Very gently he stuck the fuse into the pile of powder. Gingerly he lit the strike-anywhere match and brought it to the fuse, which came to life triumphantly and began its sparkling march towards the powder. To our credit, we both ran away and hit the deck like two smart people with reasons to live. Peeking out from behind our bowl-cuts we saw the little tendrils of smoke from the fuse get closer and closer, over the lip of the can, into the powder and then.... nothing. Nothing happened at all.
We waited a while. That was a smart thing to do. When we were sure nothing was going to happen we investigated and found that the fuse had slipped out just short of the pile. We reloaded and tried again. Light, run, duck, cover, peek... nothing. We investigated again but this time we couldn't find a reason why it hadn't worked. It should have worked, and in hindsight it was probably just the universe preparing its own punishment after having let us soak up too much good luck for the day.
Jeremiah was fed up with the fuse not working so he lit a match, tossed it at the can, and bolted. I dropped to the ground in a ball, and laid there like a frozen moose turd. Nothing happened. I stood up. Jeremiah, in a display of abject stupidity and lack of self-preservation instinct, lit yet another match, leaned over, and dropped it directly into the can. I was probably some 10 feet away at this point, but I saw the match falling in close-up high-definition reality. I was unable to move, as if in a dream. When it hit the powder, a lot of things happened in about 1/10th of a second.
Had we left the powder on the ground it might not have been so bad, but since we'd contained it in the little plastic can the entire giant explosion was directed upwards in a sort of upside down cone of doom. Jeremiah took the blast full in the face like Yosemite Sam with his head in a cannon. Why he chose to lean directly over the pile I'll never know. The blast knocked him over backwards, pelting him with hot bits of cement even as it heated the air around him to temperatures rivaling that of the sun. His arms and legs waved wildly like ribbons in a tornado and the wave of heat smacked into me like a wall.
I opened my eyes to find Jeremiah rolling around on the ground. As he opened his mouth and commenced wailing like a banshee with a nail in its foot, the giant pink wad of bubble gum in his mouth contrasted dramatically with the sheer blackness of his face and I stared at the spectacle stupidly for a second before I did the logical thing and panicked.
Water! He needed water for his face. We were literally twenty feet from, and in plain sight of, a swampy area big enough to ice skate on in the winter. I overlooked that fact. We were also about 50 yards from a pond that I swam in almost every day. I overlooked that fact as well. As Jeremiah staggered around gnashing his teeth, I lit out to get a bucket of water from the shed.
I was in a full sprint when I came to the electric fence and I leaped over it like a gazelle. Almost. Instead of soaring gracefully to the other side, the knot in the lace of my sneaker caught on the fence and jerked me to a stop in midair. That wouldn't have been as much of a problem except that as soon as I face-planted into the dirt my body made a nice path to ground for all that electricity that was stored in the fence. There I lay, one leg strung up on the electric fence, thrashing around like a wounded beaver. My wad of gum went flying.
Somehow I got free, and I remember briefly wondering if I'd peed. I hadn't, which was lucky; that would have been embarrassing. I ran, dazed, to the shed where I searched around for a container. In my frazzled state I determined that the plastic bubble container from a package of disposable dust masks would do the trick. I took it to the hose, filled it up to capacity (which was about 10oz of water), and headed back to the pasture, walking quickly and trying desperately not to spill it.
When I got to the fence I couldn't jump, so I ducked under. Not far enough. In my hastiness and inability to multitask, the back of my neck grazed the fence and the resulting jolt struck me like a sucker-punch in the back of the head. It knocked me on my face on top of what little water remained, and by the time I struggled back up and made it to poor Jeremiah, I had about three drops of water in the container and a soggy shirt.
Maybe the jolt from the fence had helped clear my head, because I remembered the pond. I took off my shirt, put it over the soot covered smudge that I assumed was Jeremiahs face, and led him down to the edge. When he knelt down and plunged his head into the water a cloud of blackness spread out from him like an oil slick the likes of which causes Greenpeace to scrub penguins.
For a split second, I entertained the possibility that everything would be okay. That notion passed the instant Jeremiah pulled his head out of the water.
Previous: Part 4: The Pants Debacle
Next: Part 6: The Aftermath
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
The Jeremiah Saga Part 4: The Pants Debacle
After much deliberation, Jeremiah and I concluded that there was no reasonable explanation that my mother would believe for the condition of the Swiss cheese that I was pretending were pants. No roving hordes of starving moths had been spotted in the area, no acid rain of sufficient strength had fallen, and we had heard of no news headlines recalling pairs of rapidly evaporating denim pants, at least not in my size.
So instead of a cover story, we decided it would be best to hide it and pretend it never happened. I left Jeremiah on the porch and ninja-stalked my way into my room for a fresh pair. It wasn't easy. Every footstep and creaky board reminded me that it was one thing to be caught with abnormally breezy britches, it was another to be caught trying to sneak into the house to destroy all evidence of said britches right under my mothers nose.
There were two elements which played out in my favor: First, the rung'achik machine was working overtime, doing its very best to ensure that legions of little old ladies would remain conspicuously fashion impaired. This fact allowed me to time my steps, each one taking my weight exactly as the next line of doomed yarn was being knit into its predecessor. Second, almost all of my pants were pretty much exactly the same, which meant that I could slip into one of many convincing doppelgangers and be on my way, free and easy.
By my calculations it took me about an hour to weasel my way up the stairs into my room. My room, of course, was directly above the room my mother used as her knitting station. As such, my heart was gripped with a terror that only a kid who is guilty of heinous crimes against laundry, and who is exactly one creaky floor board away from being caught and ultimately destroyed, can feel.
Somehow, against all odds, I made it. I threw my holy pants out the window and got the attention of Jeremiah who had become preoccupied with a bucket of baseball bats on the porch waiting for me. He maneuvered over to where they had fallen and picked them up, trying in vain to hide in plain site by bobbing and weaving, all the while glancing furtively around like a chipmunk in a room full of hyenas. Once he had them, he didn't know what to do with them and stood there on the porch holding them out at arms length as if they were some sort of sorely injured poisonous snake. I motioned that he should run. He ran.
I listened. I didn't hear anything. The rung'achik machine was silent! Had my mother seen the passing shadow of flying pants graze her window and gone to investigate? Had she seen Jeremiah running like a guilty chicken around on the lawn, obviously up to something? I didn't know, and wasn't about to find out. Rather than risk the unknown dangers that lurked in the kitchen, I opted instead to tango with gravity. We had tangoed before, with mixed results. I'd won a few rounds, gravity had won a few rounds. I had never, on the other hand, won a round against my mother.
New pants in hand, I wormed my way out of the window and onto the roof of the little shed that was attached to the house. It's lucky that we were in rural Vermont instead of in some suburb somewhere, because the site of a skinny kid in his tighty-whities shimmying out of a second story window while waving a pair of pants around wildly probably wouldn't have gone unnoticed. I closed the screen behind me, scooted rather uncomfortably down the shingles and jumped down onto the lawn.
I landed in a crouch that I imagined was like that of a cat, but what was undoubtedly much more like a gangly, pale kid with a bad haircut, a serious wedgie, and shingle-grit in his butt squatting awkwardly on the grass. I donned the pants, rendezvoused with Jeremiah who hadn't gone far, and we bolted again into the relative safety of the woods where we'd left our remaining rocket engines.
We buried the pants in a shallow, unmarked grave in a sunlit clearing there in the woods. No words were spoken, but there was a sense of loss, of relief, and a sort of collective understanding that we must never speak of what had happened there. Only now some twenty years later am I secure enough to talk about it. Amazingly, as testament to just how unbelievably stupid we were, we continued to want to play with fire. Jeremiah had been formulating a new terrifically bad idea, and we decided to try it.
Previous: Part 3: The Second Mistake
Next: Part 5: The Final Mistake
So instead of a cover story, we decided it would be best to hide it and pretend it never happened. I left Jeremiah on the porch and ninja-stalked my way into my room for a fresh pair. It wasn't easy. Every footstep and creaky board reminded me that it was one thing to be caught with abnormally breezy britches, it was another to be caught trying to sneak into the house to destroy all evidence of said britches right under my mothers nose.
There were two elements which played out in my favor: First, the rung'achik machine was working overtime, doing its very best to ensure that legions of little old ladies would remain conspicuously fashion impaired. This fact allowed me to time my steps, each one taking my weight exactly as the next line of doomed yarn was being knit into its predecessor. Second, almost all of my pants were pretty much exactly the same, which meant that I could slip into one of many convincing doppelgangers and be on my way, free and easy.
By my calculations it took me about an hour to weasel my way up the stairs into my room. My room, of course, was directly above the room my mother used as her knitting station. As such, my heart was gripped with a terror that only a kid who is guilty of heinous crimes against laundry, and who is exactly one creaky floor board away from being caught and ultimately destroyed, can feel.
Somehow, against all odds, I made it. I threw my holy pants out the window and got the attention of Jeremiah who had become preoccupied with a bucket of baseball bats on the porch waiting for me. He maneuvered over to where they had fallen and picked them up, trying in vain to hide in plain site by bobbing and weaving, all the while glancing furtively around like a chipmunk in a room full of hyenas. Once he had them, he didn't know what to do with them and stood there on the porch holding them out at arms length as if they were some sort of sorely injured poisonous snake. I motioned that he should run. He ran.
I listened. I didn't hear anything. The rung'achik machine was silent! Had my mother seen the passing shadow of flying pants graze her window and gone to investigate? Had she seen Jeremiah running like a guilty chicken around on the lawn, obviously up to something? I didn't know, and wasn't about to find out. Rather than risk the unknown dangers that lurked in the kitchen, I opted instead to tango with gravity. We had tangoed before, with mixed results. I'd won a few rounds, gravity had won a few rounds. I had never, on the other hand, won a round against my mother.
New pants in hand, I wormed my way out of the window and onto the roof of the little shed that was attached to the house. It's lucky that we were in rural Vermont instead of in some suburb somewhere, because the site of a skinny kid in his tighty-whities shimmying out of a second story window while waving a pair of pants around wildly probably wouldn't have gone unnoticed. I closed the screen behind me, scooted rather uncomfortably down the shingles and jumped down onto the lawn.
I landed in a crouch that I imagined was like that of a cat, but what was undoubtedly much more like a gangly, pale kid with a bad haircut, a serious wedgie, and shingle-grit in his butt squatting awkwardly on the grass. I donned the pants, rendezvoused with Jeremiah who hadn't gone far, and we bolted again into the relative safety of the woods where we'd left our remaining rocket engines.
We buried the pants in a shallow, unmarked grave in a sunlit clearing there in the woods. No words were spoken, but there was a sense of loss, of relief, and a sort of collective understanding that we must never speak of what had happened there. Only now some twenty years later am I secure enough to talk about it. Amazingly, as testament to just how unbelievably stupid we were, we continued to want to play with fire. Jeremiah had been formulating a new terrifically bad idea, and we decided to try it.
Previous: Part 3: The Second Mistake
Next: Part 5: The Final Mistake
Saturday, November 10, 2012
The Jeremiah Saga Part 3: The Second Mistake
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
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
Friday, November 9, 2012
The Jeremiah Saga Part 2: The First Mistake
I can't speculate with any authority on the differences between the world in which boys live and the world which greets girls every morning. What I can say with certainty is that I was an idiot when I was a kid. My world was filled with stupid things that I was doing or had already done. As it happened Jeremiah was an idiot too, and when you put two idiots heads together, one plus one equals zero. Or less.
We hit it off just fine. My mom picked him up when she went to drop off a box of those godawful sweaters and I happily showed him around to all my favorite spots. Favorite trees to climb, favorite pile of old lumber to look for snakes under, favorite things to shoot with BB guns, favorite electric fence to try to jump over without getting electrocuted (hopefully), and many more.
It wasn't long until my carton of 10 million BBs was empty, so we put our heads together and decided it would be a good idea to ride bikes to the hardware store in town some 13 miles away to get some more, and that's what we did.
It's unfair to blame the marketing genius who put the bags of smoke bombs and model rocket engines next to the BBs in the aisle at the hardware store. It's unfair to blame the kindly old woman behind the counter who sold them to us without asking questions. Tempting, but ultimately unfair. This was still the pre-terrorist paranoia age of bliss and ignorance you see.
Armed with 10 million more BBs, an arsenal of smoke bombs, and enough model rocket engines to push the world out of orbit in a sack big enough to make Santa look twice, we arrived triumphantly back at the house on a mission for strike-anywhere matches, which hadn't yet been deemed the worst thing in the world to keep around the house by the department of "Holy Crap Whose Idea Was This?" We found them, and began joyfully filling pockets of the atmosphere with brightly colored smoke that reeked like sulfur and taco farts. That's when one of us (I'd like to believe it was him, but we'll never know...) had a brilliant idea.
It rarely gets above eighty in Vermont, and nobody had bothered to install air conditioning in the house. It was kept cool instead by placing a giant fan in the window on one side of the house blowing in, and another one upstairs in a window blowing out, resulting in a nice breeze of fresh air through the whole house. It was just beneath the downstairs fan that we, giggling, simultaneously lit every purple smoke bomb in the sack.
The little fuses burned quickly, and like every other time we'd lit them nothing happened for exactly one split second; just long enough for us to wonder if they hadn't all been duds. Then, tremendously, each unassuming little purple ball began to belch thick purple smoke in rich churning clouds, every one of which was sucked directly into the house by the giant window fan.
Seconds later we recognized the telltale silence that follows when the rungachik machine stops defiling the fashion world, and we were suddenly terrified. The silence was almost immediately broken by a screen door slamming on the other side of the house and the rapidly escalating air-raid siren that could only be my mother about to rip our skeletons out and beat us with them.
Somehow, miraculously, we survived. If I remember correctly we used the "I had no idea the fan would suck up all the smoke" defense. We were ordered with no small amount of gusto not to come anywhere near the house until our early twenties and had to relinquish our remaining smoke bombs. We failed to mention that we also had rocket engines.
Instead we ran to the hills. Behind us was the sound of windows being thrown open, and the odd sight of an entire house weeping stinky purple smoke in swirling tendrils up into the sky from every opening. It was a sight to behold, but we soon forgot about it and set about finding new and exciting ways to implement rocket propulsion into our daily lives.
We were, but would not long be, unscathed.
Previous: Part 1 The Setup
Next: Part 3: The Second Mistake
We hit it off just fine. My mom picked him up when she went to drop off a box of those godawful sweaters and I happily showed him around to all my favorite spots. Favorite trees to climb, favorite pile of old lumber to look for snakes under, favorite things to shoot with BB guns, favorite electric fence to try to jump over without getting electrocuted (hopefully), and many more.
It wasn't long until my carton of 10 million BBs was empty, so we put our heads together and decided it would be a good idea to ride bikes to the hardware store in town some 13 miles away to get some more, and that's what we did.
It's unfair to blame the marketing genius who put the bags of smoke bombs and model rocket engines next to the BBs in the aisle at the hardware store. It's unfair to blame the kindly old woman behind the counter who sold them to us without asking questions. Tempting, but ultimately unfair. This was still the pre-terrorist paranoia age of bliss and ignorance you see.
Armed with 10 million more BBs, an arsenal of smoke bombs, and enough model rocket engines to push the world out of orbit in a sack big enough to make Santa look twice, we arrived triumphantly back at the house on a mission for strike-anywhere matches, which hadn't yet been deemed the worst thing in the world to keep around the house by the department of "Holy Crap Whose Idea Was This?" We found them, and began joyfully filling pockets of the atmosphere with brightly colored smoke that reeked like sulfur and taco farts. That's when one of us (I'd like to believe it was him, but we'll never know...) had a brilliant idea.
It rarely gets above eighty in Vermont, and nobody had bothered to install air conditioning in the house. It was kept cool instead by placing a giant fan in the window on one side of the house blowing in, and another one upstairs in a window blowing out, resulting in a nice breeze of fresh air through the whole house. It was just beneath the downstairs fan that we, giggling, simultaneously lit every purple smoke bomb in the sack.
The little fuses burned quickly, and like every other time we'd lit them nothing happened for exactly one split second; just long enough for us to wonder if they hadn't all been duds. Then, tremendously, each unassuming little purple ball began to belch thick purple smoke in rich churning clouds, every one of which was sucked directly into the house by the giant window fan.
Seconds later we recognized the telltale silence that follows when the rungachik machine stops defiling the fashion world, and we were suddenly terrified. The silence was almost immediately broken by a screen door slamming on the other side of the house and the rapidly escalating air-raid siren that could only be my mother about to rip our skeletons out and beat us with them.
Somehow, miraculously, we survived. If I remember correctly we used the "I had no idea the fan would suck up all the smoke" defense. We were ordered with no small amount of gusto not to come anywhere near the house until our early twenties and had to relinquish our remaining smoke bombs. We failed to mention that we also had rocket engines.
Instead we ran to the hills. Behind us was the sound of windows being thrown open, and the odd sight of an entire house weeping stinky purple smoke in swirling tendrils up into the sky from every opening. It was a sight to behold, but we soon forgot about it and set about finding new and exciting ways to implement rocket propulsion into our daily lives.
We were, but would not long be, unscathed.
Previous: Part 1 The Setup
Next: Part 3: The Second Mistake
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