Carnal Reason

The Dangerous Book for Boys is selling pretty well. I haven’t read it, but the title made me think of some of the dangerous stuff I did as a kid. Here are a few incidents that come to mind.

I grew up in Tampa, home of the torrential summer afternoon thunderstorm. The city has a system of storm drains to carry away runoff water. My friend Ruben and I found where a drain let into the Hillsborough River, near Lowry Park, about two miles from our houses. We went into the drains and managed to follow them back to our neighborhood. A hard rain might have drowned us.

Years later, when I was about sixteen, Ruben got a car, a small model called a Corvair. Our houses were side by side, in a cul de sac at the top of a very slight rise. We invented a game called Atlas. We would put the car in neutral, and start pushing it down the slope, backwards, with no one at the wheel. Whoever was not Atlas (we took turns) jumped on the hood. Atlas had to run around to the other side and stop the rolling car. The technique was to put both hands on the trunk and push with locked legs. The car’s momentum would cause the feet of Atlas break free of the road and slide for several dozen feet. It was hell on tennis shoes.

Another sport Ruben and I tried was jousting on bicycles, using trash can lids as shields and broomsticks as lances. We only tried this once; the results convinced us no further experiments would be necessary.

In third grade my friend Charlie introduced me to the sport of jumping of the roof of his house, repeatedly. We would climb a tree to get up there, then jump into some sand. Once Charlie’s little brother managed to hit a telephone wire with his face on the way down, resulting in much screaming.

Florida woods are filled with some vine that completely covers trees. As kids we discovered that you could climb the outside vine surface of these trees. My brothers invented what they called an elevator. You jumped up and down on a branch till it broke. The vines slowed the descent of the branch and branch breaker. Unless they didn’t.

In high school chemistry lab I made a point of saving all the left over chemicals from each experiment. In a single jar. Most of the time nothing happened when I poured in the latest stuff. One time was different. I poured in the new materials, and the whole thing started bubbling and emitting a rust colored gas. I managed to get the whole mess over to a hood and later dispose of it without Father May discovering what I had been doing. He would have killed me. My lab partner, who I called Igor during labs, may remember this.

A final episode. I was in college, hanging with a friend. We were bored, and decided to take some pictures. He had a pretty serious camera rig, and we decided to do some nature photography. Out on his second story balcony, near the ceiling, was a big wasp nest. We wanted close ups of the wasps. We wanted pictures of their faces. We immediately realized the ambient light would not suffice, so we brought out his spotlight and mounted it on a ladder about a foot from the wasps. Now we had enough light, but the heat from the light was making the wasps very restless, and they would not hold still. But we had a plan. It so happened that we had a bottle of ether; we decided to anaesthesize the wasps. We poured a bunch of ether into a sauce pan, and stood on the ladder holding it inches from the nest. This did not work. Thinking about it, we decided the ether was not vaporizing quickly enough, so we decided to heat it. Fortunately, we had a propane torch. Picture two guys standing on a ladder, one holding a pan of ether under a wasp nest, the other heating the pan with a huge open flame. What could possibly go wrong? As if to answer that very question, the ether burst into flame, causing the wasps to completely freak out. In response, we managed to spill the now flaming ether all over the wooden outside wall of the apartment, which briefly caught fire. The ether quickly burned out, leaving a nice scorch mark. We decided to call it a day.

So, what did you do as a kid?

Posted on May 20th, 2007 by pwyll
Filed under: personal observations