Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Bottle Rocket (Owen Wilson not Included)

Mississippi sells these incredible (illegal in Utah) fireworks. Bottle rockets the length of my forearm and roman candles as long as my whole arm. Around here I don’t think you could even get the kind of stuff they sell there by driving half a day to Wyoming. Way fun for certain pyromaniac people in my family. Yes, I’m looking in your direction, Lucas.

While we were ushering in the New Year with explosives, I marveled at A) how cheap M-70s were (.20¢/each) and B) the fact that you could be sixteen and dumb (yes, I’m looking in a mirror to the past here) and waltz up to your local Black Cat stand and buy enough firepower to blow up a car and no one would look askew at you. Hell, in MS, they’d just say “git r dun” and send you on your way.

When I was a lad they used to sell M-80s. I asked at the local Black Cat stand and the dude behind the fold up table told me that “them things is illegal now.” I think they just changed the name. M-70s look quite similar to how I remember M-80s. And I’m pretty sure they have the same explosive force. Those firework manufacturers certainly are a crafty bunch. If you ask me, you could just as easily blow up your friend’s scale model ‘57 Chevy Bel-Air with a strategically placed load of M-70s and yeah, we did that once, which was quite a bit of fun. Though I say in all honesty that it is pretty much impossible to blow up a Tonka truck with conventional fireworks, even the nasty kind they sell at every wayside in MS this time of year. They make those bad boy toy dump trucks out of steel — as God intended.

“Dad, did you used to shoot off fireworks like this when you were a kid?”

“Well, sort of. We used to buy bottle rockets and roman candles and then have small territorial disputes.”

“What’s that mean? Did you shoot bottle rockets at each other?”

My lovely and rational significant other looks completely chagrined and is sending a look that says, “Now is a perfect time to lie to our sons about your abhorrent behavior as a teenager, Jon.”

“Well, yeah, we kind of did shoot them at each other.” I add, in order to try and mitigate that statement, “But that was really dumb, LUCAS. And once Mark almost put Todd’s eye out with a bottle rocket that went awry.” I’m sure that helped.

“What did you guys do??”

What we did was buy one roman candle and then enough bottle rockets to last an entire evening. Usually one or two packs (twelve rockets in twelve packages = 144 chances to put an eye out) would do us nicely.

We’d first shoot off the roman candle, but that was always pretty uneventful, except that one time we all dared Phillip to hold one in his hand while it went off and he accepted, and found out that it wasn’t that big a deal, though the cardboard did get REALLY HOT by the end and how glad he was to have been wearing beefy gloves. Once he’d done it we all started firing off the roman candles that way.

Once the roman candles were done we’d be left with the hollow tubes. These made nice hand held launch platforms for the bottle rockets. Helped loads with aiming later. We’d separate into teams and begin lobbing and launching projectiles at one another, fortunately with horrible accuracy. It was a basically a team game of Hide and Seek with small explosives.

I can’t remember whether it was me or Philip who thought up using a piece of 2” PVC pipe as a launch platform. Probably Philip. He was always more prone to thinking up ways to blow himself up. Like the time he put about an inch of gasoline in a five gallon glass tank. Like the kind that these days are plastic and they use on water coolers. He then proceeded to light a gas soaked cloth that he’d stuffed into the mouth of the bottle. He didn’t run far enough away and the resulting explosion detached one of his ears (later found and re-atached) and carved a nice divot down his left forearm. When he came back to school our Chemistry teacher was so angry at Philip for not remembering about the volatility of oxygen and gas that he yelled at him for twenty minutes in front of the whole class. Philip was pretty bright, but most of the time you could hardly tell.

The PVC pipe had the effect that the blown out roman candles could not give; it gave direction and attitude to the bottle rockets such as our merry band of miscreants had never seen. The setup was simple: I would take the five foot long section of pipe and place it gingerly on my shoulder, Phillip would stand behind me and light the rockets, then tap me on the shoulder to let me know that a launch was immanent. I’d pop out from behind a tree and track my prey. Mostly my target was our friend Monte, because he’d scream the loudest. Nailed him right in the booty once. BOOM! Yelp! “You OK, man?”

All was well with our plan until our opposites figured that I was a sitting duck while I was targeting and waiting for the actual launch of the bottle rocket. We tried to mitigate the danger a bit with cover fire from another roman candle armed teammate and by waiting until the very last second for me to pop out, but targeting was far too difficult to do when you also have to scamper about because bottle rockets are exploding all around you.

I’m pretty sure Lucas would have traded in his new Nintendo DS for a chance to smuggle a few of those contraband fireworks back to Utah. When he talked to his friend about his vacation, the FIRST thing out of his mouth was, “You can buy these amazing and cool fireworks in Mississippi. You can’t buy them here at all. It’s soooo cool!” All I can say is that we don’t have enough homeowner’s insurance if he starts to turn out like Philip.

Jon scribbled this mess on 01/03/06 at 07:27 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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