The Raft Saga, Part 2: Maiden Voyage

Burning through the trunk of a giant tree in the middle of the woods was the plan, and it seemed logical.  We had only one problem:  Neither of us had any matches.  In hindsight it was an incredibly lucky turn of events; had we been packing a handful of strike any-wheres this story might have an even more horrible ending.

It's truly amazing how many close calls I've lived to reminisce about.

We briefly entertained the idea of rubbing sticks together, but both of us had sore arms already and it didn't sound too appealing.  Instead we did the honorable thing:  We gave up, decided that a raft made out of smaller logs would work even better, and went to look for some less stodgy trees.  We must have unconsciously realized that hauling logs through the woods without the help of a skidder, tractor, team of oxen, horses, sleds or even a rope would probably prove more daunting a task than we were prepared to endure, because the next tree we chose was much more reasonable.

At least our subconscious selves had an ounce of latent smarts.

My hatchet sang its joyful melody of destruction as we took turns slowly chipping through our new tree, and when it fell to the earth with a resounding "whoomp" it was both a glorious testament to our perseverance and a depressing reminder that we still had to cut it up into manageable lengths and haul it out of the woods. 

It was at this point that we decided that it would take more than one day to build our raft.  We adjourned, and re-convened a few days later.  Chip brought his bow-saw, which instantly rendered all our work with the hatchet completely irrelevant.  It took no time at all to saw that tree into oblivion. 

Soon limbs littered the area, all of which were miraculously from the tree.  Three logs of approximately equal length lay side by side, looking rather pleasingly like a raft, albeit a narrow, crooked one.  It looked enough like a raft for us to want to take it for a test drive.  Even as knuckle-headed as we were, we knew that it would be too heavy to lift once it was together, so we maneuvered the logs to the landing area down by the swamp.  

Attaching the logs together was no trouble at all.  I had in my possession a giant metal trash can filled with natural clay that Chip, Sean and I had hauled with great difficulty from a stream-bed some months ago, and when the stuff dried it was hard as cement.  We tied the logs together with bailing twine, then worked wet clay into the cracks.  Confident in our genius, we sat back triumphantly to watch the sun dry it from a soggy dark mess into a sturdy raft of unprecedented awesomeness.

It didn't take long to dry, maybe an hour or two, and we wasted no time once it had.  We pushed it into the swamp.  The wood was wet and heavy, and with the added weight of the clay the raft barely floated; the tops of the logs hovered about a quarter of an inch above the surface.  That was enough to satisfy me, and I promptly volunteered to climb aboard for the maiden voyage.  I was confident.  I didn't even take off my shoes.

When I stepped on the raft it immediately sank to the bottom of the swamp, leaving me standing up to my waist in water.  An army of recently hatched tadpoles scattered like a handful of marbles that had been dropped on a tile floor.  The clay, which had in no way been treated, fired, cured or even given a second thought, rapidly dissolved into a cloud of gray that spread as if trying to escape from me, leaving only a few bits of bailing twine holding the logs together.

I tried to retain my balance, which amounted to waving my arms and shuffling my feet like a lunatic as my foothold became increasingly tenuous.  The log in the middle, where both of my feet rested, stayed in the mud on the bottom of the swamp.  The two on the sides broke free of the clay, but not the twine.  They tried to float, but held down as they were, they came together and clamped around my legs like the claws of some giant fresh-water lobster from the Jurassic period.  I was completely unable to move my feet, which caused me to pitch unceremoniously face-first into the water.

Much thrashing around and underwater gymnastics were required before I came up, sputtering and covered in clay-saturated, slimy, gray water.  I felt like a booger covered in pigeon poop, and probably looked about as lovely. 

Chips look of concern was almost indistinguishable behind his maniacal laughter.     

We pulled the three logs, which had until so recently been a raft, from the bosom of the swamp and surveyed the scene.  Not so much as a scrap of clay had stayed stuck to the logs, it was as if we had only brought them swamp-side to wash them.  I, on the other hand, had wads of clay in my pockets and was slimy from bowl-cut to toe.

The clay, as we discovered, reeked like rotten fish and cucumber-farts when it became saturated with swamp water, and had seen fit to pass that smell along to me.  I showed up on the porch stinking like a car trunk full of catfish on a hot day.  My mother spotted me through the window and made it clear that I was not to enter the house on pain of death.  Instead I stood on the lawn while she hosed me off at full water pressure from a safe distance.  She threw me a pair of shorts with instructions to go find something constructive to do until I was dry.

I knew exactly what to do.  There was a ten or twenty year old junk pile next to the swamp that was absolutely riddled with rusty nails.  Somewhere in the depths of that pile was the carcass of an old television, with wires and circuit boards and all sorts of good stuff poking out of it.  Chip and I had eyed it hungrily on several occasions.

If ever there was a time to go investigate, this was it. 


Previous:  Part I

The Raft Saga, Part 1: I'm Your Huckleberry

Despite all my attempts to foil it, life continued to go on.  After the debacle with the airplane, a nice, relaxing, leisurely float down the length of the continental United States on a home made raft seemed like exactly what we needed.  We knew that no amount of meeting at recess would actually cause a raft to burst into existence, but we met every recess anyway, with our customary flurry of brain-lightening and the subsequent sketches.  

Our raft would be a fairly complicated construct, complete with a shelter and benches, a place for a cooler full of sandwiches and even little hooks to hang our sleeping bags and various other supplies.  The blueprint was a living document, and any time a better steering mechanism was envisioned, or measurement re-thought, the sound of erasers tearing through notebook paper would frighten the wildlife for miles around.

My hair eventually had overcome its fear of burdock bushes and slowly grew back.  Chips eagerness to get to Florida was rivaled only by my excitement to work on a project that wouldn't leave my head looking like a potato, so the project started to come together pretty quickly.  Chip had in his possession a map of the US, so once we got to the river we'd know which forks to take.

Pieces fell into place.  The plan was solid.  What remained was the construction of the raft.

Chip also had access to a bow-saw, which I imagine over the years has been responsible for thousands of acres of Vermont deforestation thanks to his prowess and enthusiasm in wielding it.  I had a hatchet, which I had never sharpened.  The handle was covered in pine-pitch, so I had a marketable grip advantage.

I invited Chip to the house with the stipulation that he bring the bow-saw, and when his mom pulled their blue van up into the driveway I was ready to rock and roll.  Chip got out of the van.  No bow saw.

"Where's the bow-saw?"
"What?"
"The bow-saw."
"I left it at home."
"I got a hatchet."
"Cool."

We headed for the woods.  Running with a hatchet is not advisable, but I did it anyway.  We chose our first victim and proceeded to whack at it unmercifully.  That tree had probably been standing there since before the Civil War, and was about as big around as a grain silo. 

I chopped until my arm was sore, switched arms and chopped until that one was sore, then let Chip have a go at it.  At first, bits of bark flew off in encouragingly large chunks, but just under the bark, that tree had no intention of letting the hatchet make much more than a frayed looking dent.

Since laziness is the mother of invention, we set our brains to work on figuring out a better way to get that tree down.  Neither of us considered how we'd move it once it was down, much less the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere, at least a mile from the nearest road.  What we did consider was that the smart thing to do would be to light the base of the tree on fire. 

Next: Part II: Maiden Voyage

The Airplane Saga, Part 5: Buzz Cut Envy

Our glider had transformed itself back into a pile of lumber.  Its passengers had been transformed as well, into walking burdock plants.  Except Chip.  He had a buzz cut, and the little Velcro balls didn't stick to his wind breaker, so he walked out of there pretty much unscathed.  Sean and I weren't so lucky.  We had both taken the plunge with the breeze blowing ever so gently through the flowing locks of our bowl cuts.

My mom knew what had happened immediately, and to her credit handled the situation like a true professional.  She had seen worse.  This time there were no broken bones, which was a relief considering I already had three broken arms under my belt and a friendly staff at the hospital who all knew me by name. 

Nobody was bleeding, which was a welcome but unusual occurrence.  Before the ice had melted I'd tried to skate down the frozen driveway on actual ice skates, neglecting to take into account that the driveway was crushed gravel, and despite the fact that it was frozen, it was not smooth at all.  I had road rash on every inch of my face except for my nose.  My nose got its come-uppins.  I came in the house another time with a blood pouring out of it, she'd tried to treat it like any other bloody nose until I informed her that there was actually a cut inside there.  I'd slipped while cutting grain bags to make a hang glider, and managed to jam a knife straight up my own nose. 

Accident prone does not even begin to describe me.

That afternoon found us out on the porch looking forlorn while my mom did her best to cut burdocks out of our hair.  There was only so much she could do, really.  Chip looked on, rubbing his head absently.  I can only imagine what he was thinking, and I imagine it was this:  Maybe the wings needed to be longer, I wonder if we were to somehow incorporate some nine-volt batteries...

And the sound of scissors echoed through the Vermont air. 

Chip, Sean and I all rocked matching buzz cuts for a while.  Thanks to the short memories of second graders, my embarrassment at school was limited to a few moments after Mrs. Belding made me take off my hat.  People laughed, she shut them down, and that was that.  Nobody messed with Mrs. Belding.  Sean was a year behind us in another class, I have no idea what happened to him.  He turned out alright in the end.  

Maybe it was the fact that our attention spans were generally on par with that of a hyperactive dog in a room full of squirrels, but our failure to conquer the skies did nothing to deter us from pursuing other ventures.  Summer vacation was rapidly approaching, and we decided we'd like to go to Florida.  The best way to get there, we determined, was to take a raft.  Anybody could build a raft, plus there was a river that went right through town which must eventually flow into the ocean.  All we had to do was get the raft to the river and ride it to the ocean, then we'd float down the coast to Florida.

We started drawing up the plans immediately.


Previous:  Part IV
Next:  You might enjoy The Raft Saga - Part I

The Airplane Saga, Part 4: Darn You, Sir Isaac Newton

I sat straddling the wooden glider that I'd built and gazed out at the horizon.  Behind me sat Chip.  Behind him sat Sean.  The horizon was a little lower than usual, maybe because in the past few months I'd grown a little taller.  Maybe it was because our would-be glider sat perched on the roof of the shed behind my house with a fuel tank full of ignorance and enough enthusiastic cargo to un-bummer North Korea.  

Around my neck hung a disposable camera on a piece of baling twine.  Sean sported a backpack full of sandwiches and a pair of binoculars.  Chip was wedged in between us like a wad of deli meat.  It was time to fly.  I had a sudden thought, and swiveled around to look at Chip.

"How will we steer?"  I asked.  Chip scrunched his face up one side at a time so that his cheeks would push his glasses further up on his nose.  I'd always admired his ability to do that.
"Lean"  he said.
"Oh yeah" I said.

Sean had weaseled his way onto the maiden voyage.  I'll never know why.  We couldn't argue with his logic that there was room for him in the back, and we were happy to have him along anyway to bear witness to our triumph.  Also we needed his help getting the thing onto the roof.  It had been no small task.

We had manhandled the heavy, awkward pile of lumber around to the back side of the shed, through the burdock bushes and onto the roof with remarkable force of will.  Negotiating the burdock bushes was the worst bit.

A burdock plant, for those who have not had the pleasure, has large broad leaves which are very cool and are good for any number of things.  Nestled inside the shadow of those leaves are the burdocks themselves:  Little marble-sized seed pods completely covered in tiny hooks.  They're like little Velcro balls.  Here's a picture I found online just now:

 

http://changingaging.org/blog/how-foraging-can-help-prepare-for-life-after-adulthood/burdock-burrs/
^^^Hey, that's the first time I've ever given credit for a picture I gribbled from another website! ^^^

It is physically impossible to walk anywhere near a burdock plant without later finding at least one of the sneaky bastards clinging to your clothes, shoelaces, or even directly to your skin.  Burdocks absolutely suck.  Testify. 

We managed to wrangle the aircraft onto the roof, and then managed to drag it all the way up the steep sheets of tin.  There, it rested comfortably between the ripples, denied the pull of gravity by three small pairs of double-knotted sneakers.  It was time to fly.   

With joy in our hearts and sausage gravy for brains, we started the countdown.  At "one", six sneakers lifted from the tin, and gravity took over with a vengeance.  We were fearless.  We knew as soon as we got up to speed we'd break free of the Earth in a volley of cheers, and we'd be wiping cloud-mist from our glasses alongside the eagles.

That's not what happened.  Seeds of doubt began to burrow into our collective psyche just as the nose of the craft ran out of tin.  But there was no time to bail out.

The seven-foot plummet into the burdock bushes was at once instantaneous and infinite.  Somewhere in that paradoxical pocket of space-time we became separated from the craft in a flying pile of elbows and binoculars.  The aircraft landed with a combination sound of thump and splinter.  We landed among it and ourselves like so much thrown spaghetti. 

We thrashed around in the pucker-brush for quite a while.  When we emerged, many things had changed.  Sean had an entire burdock-afro.  He had launched with a bowl-cut and emerged from the crash site looking like Richard Simmons.  Baseball-sized wads of burdocks clumped under my armpits until I couldn't put my hands on my sides, and thousands more clung tightly to every square inch of our clothes.  Chips shoes were nowhere to be seen.

Somehow, miraculously, perhaps thanks to youthful flexibility or perhaps because fate wasn't paying attention at just that moment, none of us was the least bit hurt.  The pile of boards that lay inches from our fragile selves, with nails protruding from every angle, had not injured us in the least.  Gravity had failed to destroy us.  My mother, on the other hand, no doubt would.

Previous: Part III
Next: Part V

The Airplane Saga, Part 3: Lawn-gistics

"Hey Chip" I said, just about every day "didja get the engine yet?"
"Not yet" Chip would say.  "Soon."  One day I asked him and he said "Yep."  It was the greatest day ever.

I made the necessary arrangements to go to his house to pick it up.  Mainly that entailed donning a backpack and getting on my bike.  Chips house was only a handful of miles from mine from a satellite perspective, but from behind the handlebars it was significantly longer.  I had to take the dreaded "Wilson road" which was basically impassable for any vehicle not equipped with chains, and the result of every bike trip down it resulted in the tell-tale streak of mud, spattered in a speckly line up the back of whatever I happened to be wearing.

On the day the engine was ready, most of the mud hit the backpack.  The rest of it hit the back of my head.  I knew enough not to smear it around when it was still wet, it was easier just to just let it dry and then shake it out.  To the untrained eye, however, I was a kid with a muddy head who didn't seem to mind it.  Chip's brother Sean thought it was hilarious, but his mom wouldn't let me in the house that day. 

I didn't blame her.  I'm surprised she ever let me in the house at all, given my nearly perfect record of managing to wreak some sort of havoc every time I visited.  I was a force of nature. Somehow I would end up in the brook and came back in the house completely soaked, or I'd get covered in pine-pitch, or I'd crash the dirt bike.  Once, while being towed behind the snow-mobile on an inner tube by Chip, I'd been rocketed into a patch of trees and wound up with very little skin remaining on my left side.  Another time, while flailing around in the throes of story-telling, I knocked a lit candle off the shelf and blasted hot wax all over her freshly-swept kitchen floor.  Still, she kept letting me in the house.  Michele, if you're reading this, thanks for that!  You sure put up with a lot out of me over the years.

"Where's the engine?" I asked.
"We gotta get it out."  Chip said.
"Out of where?"
"The lawnmower."

This sent up a few red flags, even for me, but that wasn't enough to stop us.  The lawnmower was out in the shed, where lawnmowers belong.  We set upon it with wrenches and hammers, but our operation was shut down prematurely by Chip's dad, who wasn't the least bit amused by the fact that we were attempting to unceremoniously gut his perfectly good lawnmower.  We hadn't made much progress; it is remarkably difficult to remove a lawnmower engine without the appropriate tools.  That's probably why we were allowed to continue being alive.

It was a major setback; our aircraft would remain grounded until we could come up with a new means of propulsion.  Our brains, powered as they were by youthful enthusiasm, churned out idea after bad idea.  Finally we settled on the most obvious solution:  The craft was now a glider!  Given the right wind conditions, we could sail around like autumn leaves on a gentle breeze.   

All we had to do was launch it off the roof.

Previous: Part II
Next: Part IV

The Airplane Saga, Part 2: Some Assembly Required

Chip was not immediately forthcoming with the lawnmower engine, but as I understood that such delicate equipment surgeries must not be rushed, I pressed on with my construction of the aircraft without hesitation or doubt.  As it happens, an airplane isn't as difficult to build as one might imagine.

I kept it simple.  The fuselage came together quite nicely, and in about half an hour.  It consisted of four long 1x10s, nailed together into a long hollow box.  I cut pieces to fit into the holes in the front and the back, and drilled a hole in the front piece so the drive shaft from the lawnmower engine could fit through.  That's where I would attach the propeller.

Across the top, near the middle, I nailed another 1x10 which became the wings.  My fixed-wing aircraft was nearly complete.  Last, I nailed a smaller board across the back end, and stepped back.  I pushed my giant, plastic, tape-wadded glasses higher up on my nose, brushed the sawdust out of my bowl-cut and stood proudly surveying my handiwork.

It looked vaguely like an airplane, and I was overjoyed with how well it had turned out.  Here's an artists conception, and by that I mean here's a picture I just made in MS Paint.

Having done it once and since hindsight is 20/20, I feel I can safely point out a few mistakes which, should I build it again, I might consider re-thinking.  I made no measurements whatsoever.  In almost contemptuous disregard for Boyle's law, I didn't even bother to bevel the edges of the wing.  I didn't take into account that the craft would need a fuel tank of some sort, and I didn't leave enough room for the lawnmower engine.  I didn't add a rear vertical stabilizer, or rudder of any kind.  Also it had no landing gear, and no seats.  That's about it for mistakes, actually.

Not too bad. 

The propeller was a little more challenging.  I shaped it easily enough, but the hole in the middle was round and kept slipping on the test drive-shaft I'd whipped up.  A round peg in a round hole.  I whittled several iterations, tried wedging in bits of tree bark, bike tire rubber, wood shavings and everything else I could find  before my dad came to my rescue and suggested I file a square hole and a square peg.  That solved everything.  My finished propeller was about eight inches across.  Plenty. 

So far Chips contributions had been fairly minimal, but I was convinced that in a day or two we'd be doing loops and barrel rolls around the property.  My folks asked me to take a camera up with me to get some pictures of the house, and I happily agreed.  They had no idea the depth of my conviction to actually follow through on the project and make the thing fly.  


Previous:  Part I
Next:  Part III

The Airplane Saga, Part 1: One Head is Better Than Two

Somewhere during second grade I got a new kid in my class.  He told us his name was Gary, but that his family called him Chip; not because he looked like a chipmunk, but because he was a "chip off the ol' block."  I still don't believe him about that, but either way I can't remember ever calling him Gary.  To me he's been Chip the whole time.

I've never had to be the new kid in class but I imagine it's pretty traumatic.  I remember the teacher, Mrs. Belding, bringing him up in front of the class like you see in movies and introducing him while he stood there looking terrified and uncomfortable in his red wind-breaker.  On the playground later that day I kicked a soccer ball around with him for a few minutes, learned that he had enough nine volt batteries in his possession to build a life-sized replica of the Kremlin, and that was all she wrote.   

We shared a passion for building things and enjoyed many brain-storming sessions where we tossed around our potentially world-altering ideas for new inventions.  Maybe brain-storm isn't the right term.  It was more like a brain-shower, or a brain-drizzle.  Who am I kidding, it was a brain-barely-perceptible-spritz.

After one such session, in flurry of sketches, schematics, and crumpled up notebook paper complete with edge frizz, one of us hatched a terrible idea.  Unfortunately we both latched onto it like two brain-damaged snapping turtles.  It soon became the sole focus of our collective existence.

We would build an airplane.  Oh yes.  

It made sense.  We both wanted to fly, and since no amount of jumping from the tops of fence poles armed with garbage-bag parachutes had done the trick so far, what better way than to build our very own flying machine, and conquer the skies once and for all?

All the pieces fell into place.  I prided myself on my ability to whittle, so the propeller became my responsibility. It would turn under motor power, and Chip claimed to have just the lawnmower engine for the job.  Both of us had immediate access to hundreds of acres of Vermont forests where we could gather raw materials.  The plan couldn't have been more perfect.  All that remained was to build it.  


Next:  Part II

The Jeremiah Saga Part 6: The Aftermath

The face that came out of the water dripped black lines of soot and was a good deal more pink than it should have been.  His eyes looked strange too.  It took me a second to figure out why.

Jeremiah had no eyebrows.  None.  They'd been blown clean off.  I imagine that at this point they hadn't yet floated back down to earth and that a flock of geese was passing them around, laughing and pretending they were mustaches.  His forehead was too big too.  It was more like a five (or even a six) head.  Where once had lived the front half of Jeremiahs proud bowl cut was now bare skin, his locks singed back almost to the middle of the top of his still smoldering dome.

My youthful mind scrambled with possible avenues of escape from the doom I knew we were about to face, but the reality of the situation set in quickly.  In Manchu China, it was all the rage to sport a six-head around town, but the style had somehow not caught on yet in Vermont, and no amount of wearing a hat would cover up that glistening pink melon.  Jeremiah would have to face the world with a hairless (yet strangely radiant) moon-face for quite a while.  

Truth be told, in the ten or fifteen seconds I spent staring stupidly at him, I entertained quite a few ridiculous ideas about how I could get away with all this.  Swamp gas, drive-by shavings, fire breathing dragonflies, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, bullies, acid rain... nothing seemed to fit the bill.  I might have come up with something better but Jeremiah was rapidly realizing that burns hurt.  The only relief for him was to stick his head back in the water for as long as possible.  Each time he did, the black cloud was less and less thick and the shiny pinkness of his head stood out more and more.

I felt my own head and was terrified when my hand came back black as night and stinking to high heaven like burnt hair.  The wave of heat had been enough to singe my hair even from where I had stood quite a few feet away.  It reeked the way only burnt hair can reek.

Even as stupid as we were, we knew that eventually we'd have to go back to the house and face the music.  I soaked my shirt in the pond, wrapped Jeremiahs head in it and we beat feet back to the house.  
I think my mom smelled the odor of singed head and shame long before we ever got to the house, me wild-eyed and shirtless with poor Jeremiah in tow, lurching along with a poorly-wrapped, soggy turban covering his entire head.  I don't remember the run back, to be honest.  I remember being at the pond, and then standing with a permanent wince in front of my mother as wave after wave of unflattering words poured over us.

It felt as if someone had replaced the water in Niagara with disgrace, and we were standing at the bottom looking up as it pounded us endlessly in our faces.  I'm not sure how long the initial berating lasted before my mother decided it was a good time to take Jeremiah home, but it seemed like forever.  In the end, she filled up a bowl of water for him to stick his face in and I watched them pull out of the driveway with a heavy dread in my heart.

When his father asked, the father of my country was honest about cutting down the cherry tree.  That was mighty good of him, but then again I'm no George Washington.  In the end it boiled down to this: "Blame Jeremiah".

The fact that I still had hair on my face and head was a testament to my innocence, and I played to that thin fact with the expertise of a career politician.  I still caught hell, don't get me wrong, but it was tempered I think by parents subconscious (but understandable) desire to remain oblivious to the sheer force of my rampant stupidity.  The important thing was that I learned my lesson.  In fact I learned a few lessons from it all that I still carry with me.  Among them are these:  Filter the chunks out of explosive powder, don't give up on the fuse, keep water handy, and don't push your luck.   

I don't know if Jeremiah learned any lessons that day.  It was the last time I would ever see him; hunched over in the passengers seat of my moms car with his head in a bowl of water.  Our friendship, however brief, had been memorable.

Jeremiah, wherever you are, here's to you:  May your eagerness never dwindle, and may the bushiness of your eyebrows forever be an inspiration.  


Previous: The Final Mistake
Next - If you enjoyed this, you might also like:  The Airplane Saga - Part 1

The Jeremiah Saga Part 5: The Final Mistake

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

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

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
 

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 

 

The Jeremiah Saga, Part 1: The Setup

There's such a thing as a "knitting machine", if you can believe that.  My mom used to run one.  She made sweaters as per customer orders for some lady out in a nearby town who distributed them.  They were godawful.  The machine was mounted on a bench and had a million little switches and knobs which required constant adjustment, depending on the pattern to be knit. 

There ought to have been some kind of four year degree requirement before letting a person operate a knitting machine... I'm fairly certain an incorrect switch position could result in the fabric of space-time being torn and our reality hurled into the brink of destruction.

Once everything was set, the handle had to be swept back and forth, back and forth, for hours.  It made a sound every time, something like this:  Rnnnn'gachik, rrrnnn'gachik.  Hence, I grew up referring to it as the "run'gachik machine", and it was the soundtrack for a long time around the house.

I'm not sure how old I was then.  Ten, or thirteen or something like that.  We lived in rural Vermont, dirt road, woods, BB guns, giant snow drifts and shaded swimming holes.  All the good stuff.  There weren't a lot of people around, and I think I tended to be more of a bother around the house than a help, so when my mom realized that the woman for whom she knit endless sweaters had a son my age, she jumped on the opportunity to keep me occupied for an afternoon and arranged for us to hang out.  

History has endeavored to teach us that no matter what, chaos reigns.  It has presented us with a smorgasbord of examples of innocent decisions, made in good conscience, which nevertheless spiraled into catastrophe.  The arrangement for me to meet Jeremiah was one such decision.

Next:  Part 2:  The First Mistake