...ya know??? After reading here for awhile.....most of us are really just pyro people. I know I am. At 6yrs old, I burned my hands playing w/the stir stick on the tar bucket when my dad was doing the garage roof. I got a good whipping for playing w/lighter fluid at 8. Burned my eye brows/lashes and a lot of the hair on my head playing w/gas in the burn barrel. Build plastic models and then blew them up w/M80s and black cats. .....then burned the pieces. During my climbing days, we never carried stoves. Always cooked on an open fire. I was the keeper of the fire. When I built the house in Alaska, we had a massive fire to burn the cleared stumps. Burned black spruce and stumps all day and had a giant beer drinking fire that night. Loved the huge bonfires we built on the beach. ....oh...and we just love all the toys associated w/burning stuff. Anyone else identify with this?
I think he takes the cake on his childhood experience. Kinda surprised he still has his skin still attached.
I once sat fire to a neighbors yard that had a whole lot of dry sycamore leaves. I think around age 6? I've never burned myself, though I do consider myself a bit of a fire bug. The weekly brush piles keep me placated these days. I remember when WD40 and a bic was a portable flame thrower. Heck, I think ALL aerosols were flammable back in the 80s. Edit: Also, contrary to the old saying...playing with fire will not make you wet the bed. If that were the case I'd have had to sleep outside growing up.
x2, you have me beat a little on childhood experiences, but I was known to learn a lesson at the expense of my eyebrows.
I think the fire bug is in a lot of us. I played with matches when I was a kid and also got my azz whupped for playing with lighter fluid. Ironically, when I burned our trailer home to the ground in '72 it wasn't because of matches or lighter fluid. I simply turned on the gas burner under a pot of cooking oil with the intention of making some french fries then walked away and forgot all about it until I opened the bedroom door to see flames flowing down the ceiling. My older brother and I got out okay but it was a total loss. Mom wasn't too happy when she got the call at work. The fire dept. said it was a bad exhaust pipe in the gas furnace which was right behind the gas stove (this was in the winter in Ohio). I fessed up to her in later years. Thankfully my own kids weren't like me when they were younger but then fire has been a way of life for them since they were born. We heated with wood 100% then just like we do now and always had lots of fires outside in the firepit or burning brush piles. Maybe that gave them their fill and had no desire to try it themselves.
For me, it's more of a hoarding thing than a pyro thing. Hunting and gathering seems to be hard-wired into my genetics! I do love feeding the stove, but only played with fire at the instigation of my uncle, who showed us how to run our finger through a candle flame. My brother was a pyro of the gunpowder variety. He could launch a metal trash can a hundred feet in the air, have it flip over, and land right side up. He got into casting metal, and now runs a 3D printing company, no fire there.
I am hoping to have a story soon, but as of this date I can't say much. That being said, my Grandfather liked his dynamite for sure. Right where my house is now, was a potato field and for years him and my Great Uncle farmed around this rock. Well one night they got into the sauce pretty hard (Apple Jack) and decided they were in fine, fit state to work with dynamite. So they set about to get rid of this rock that plagued them in farming. They grabbed their dynamite, packed a few sticks under it and touched it off. Whoof...the dirt blew out the sides, but no shattered rock. So they did it again, and it happened again. Whoof, out blew the dirt, but the rock stayed put and did not shatter. So the third time they decided to get serious. So they dug and dug, and pounded the sticks of dynamite to the rock, then touched everything off. All was good except the rock was not a boulder, it was a rather flat rock and caught the full force of the massive charge. So I barreled skyward instead of shattering, made a graceful arc in the air, and then came back down to earth. All would have just been a run of the mill, too-much-dynamite-for-a-rock story except the rock swept through the powerlines on its way down. Now with the power out, all they could do was wait, so when the linesman showed up and asked what happened, my Grandfather and Great Uncle pointed to the still smouldering rock and said with slurred speech, "Meteorite".
