WordKnot

Ok, enough bashing on my family.  It’s time now to bash on myself.  I am not special, I’ve done my fair share of stupid things.  I know, it’s a shock to us all but please, try to believe it.

This will be two stories in one, but they are related so…  enjoy.

Well, we really were cutting up a lot of bushes in our yard that year.  My dad had cut our bushes at the end of the yard back far enough to make them look nice and ratty.  Then, figuring a job well done decided to find an ingenious way to dispose of the branches and such.  Of course, the favorite method of destruction of anything flammable is what?….Fire of course.

So, we didn’t have a big 40 gallon drum like Uncle Pick Axe.  Though we did have a somewhat smaller laundry barrel from probably the 40’s when everything that could be made of metal was.  I think it originally contained laundry soap.  Little did the manufacturers know that years later it would contain fire from Hell.

So anyways, my dad is feeding bushes into the barrel for a while and is getting ready to light it.  I happen to be walking by at just the right moment to see him dump a tiny bit of gasoline into the barrel.

Now a normal child would thing, “huh, that doesn’t seem like such a great idea.”
My reaction was slightly different.  I hurried over to my dad and his barrel and asked, stupid little pyro child that I was, “Can I light it?”

Again we explore the norms of society and how far they miss my family.  A normal father would think to himself about the dangers a barrel full of wood and gasoline and his son combined might create.  He would then, undoubtedly, decide “No” that he could not light it.

However… “Sure!” came my dad’s pleasant reply.  Excited and eager I took the matches from his hand and got ready.

Now I wasn’t completely without sense here.  I lit the first match and tossed it into the barrel…..nothing.  I lit a second match, got a bit closer, and tossed it into the barrel….nothing, just sat and died out.

I lit the third match.  I reached closer to the barrel.  Before my hand even crossed the brim of the barrel an enormous fireball shot out of it.  It hit me right in the face, sucking the air out of my lungs.  Dizzy and stunned I reeled back, spinning.  I couldn’t tell which end was up and was stumbling toward a van in the driveway.  I decided that, instead of waiting till I was close enough to fall over and smack my head on the van, I’d better just drop on the grass right there, which is what I did.

I’m wheezing, coughing, trying to catch my breath.  My dad runs over.  “Can you see… Can you see!?!” he asked tensely.

“Yes” I reply through coughs and gags.

“OK” he says and continues about his day as though nothing had happened.  I suppose, in retrospect, that he assumed that because I wasn’t screaming I wasn’t seriously burned and when he found out that my eyes were ok, he didn’t much care about the rest.

I got a nasty cut on my knee from falling and lost my eyebrows, forearm hair, nosehair, bangs, and a bit of dignity with the ordeal.  No serious burns, but a more intense respect for the gasoline and fire relationship.

So, you would think that, years later when offered the opportunity to light more gasoline on fire that I might have shied away…

It turns out that quite the opposite happened.

I was at camp with a couple of friends and we had piled all the leaves from the yard in the fire pit.  A couple of splashes of gas on the top of the pile and we were ready to have us a grand ole’ time.  Again…I ask…. “Can I light it?”

My friends, who obviously had more sense than I gladly obliged… and backed away.

Now my previous encounter did not go without a lesson.  I learned that the vapors of gasoline were what you really had to watch out for.  So, I made myself a small trail of leaves to about four feet away from the mound where the gas had been splashed.  I lit the first match and moved to light the end of the first dried up leaf.  My theory was that the flame would move along the leaves until the vapors caught and then I would be far enough away not to suffer the wrath of hell on my face again.  I was wrong.  Unbeknown to me, the vapors were moving along the ground while I set up my trail of leaves.

I lit that match and reached for the first leaf…. “Whooosh” came an all too familiar sound of fire.  The only thing that was better about this particular encounter with my nemesis (gas+fire) was that, due to my last encounter, I thought to hold my breath and just wait instead of gasping and falling.

The burst quickly dissipated and again I lost the hair on the front of my body.  I stunk like burnt hair badly.  Smart group that we were, we decided to spray “Axe” body spray on my arms to try to get rid of the scent.  I smelled like a burnt rat who’d spilled crappy cologne on himself… I could hardly stand myself.

there you have it folks, proof that I too am a Fogle