Boys Will Be Boys Boys Will Be Boys

That kind of reminds me of my youth. I was about 14 when we were dabbling in making our own black powder. Of course we were never happy with little bangs so things progressed to larger and larger booms. We did the customary garbage cans but that got old fast. Next, we started blowing up trees. we started with little 2 inchers. We got braver and braver and stopped that when we started blowing up 6 to 8 inch trees. The heat was getting a little heavy so we laid low for a while. Well one night we were talking and we decided to give it one last shot. One of the guys swiped this wooden 5 gallon barrel and we proceeded to fill it with the last of our powder. It was the middle of winter and the ice on the river was about 2 feet thick. We dragged the barrel out there and stuck our fuse wire in the little hole. (We were ahead of our time, we used electric current to set them off). We only had about 50 ft of wire so we went back that far, layed down and dug out the battery. One of us was stupid enough to touch the contacts, (I'm not going to say who). After the snow and ice finished raining down on us, we raised our heads and the edge of the hole which was full of ice cold water was only about 10 feet away. We quickly checked each other to make sure we were in one piece, got up and ran like hell. My ears rang for 2 days. After about an hour, there were flashing lights everywhere. We had long left the scene but we could see what was going on and laughing our butts off. We made the paper, not by name, but the story was that the cops were trying to find out the cause of the mysterious explosion. We kept our mouths shut of course. This was all fine until one of the guy's younger brother got a hold of one of our little gems and blew a couple of fingers off. We all paid for that with parts of our hide. One of the parents was able to put 2 and 2 together and we also caught it for the big explosion. Amazing that any of us ever got to grow up.

Jack