Most of my childhood was spent outdoors. Running, riding, swimming and sailing, we were barely civilized during the school year, and if school was out, there was no barely about it.
One weekend, a bunch of my friends and I were out camping. Now this was at the difficult age between boy and man, when you know the end is coming, but you haven’t gotten there yet and you are doing what you can to hold on to your childhood, all the time railing about how you want to be an adult.
As evening came on, we settled down to cook us some dinner. We camped most of half of the weekends every year, as well as a couple full weeks during the summer, and had done so together for 4 or 5 years by this time. So dinner had long since passed from being hot dogs and beans.
On this particular Saturday night, dinner was going to be BBQ’d chicken halves, potatoes baked in the coals, garlic bread, roast ears of corn, and baked apples for desert. We were growing boys after all, and in all honesty, at 16 and 17, the menu sounded more like an afternoon snack to us than dinner. But you have to rough it some when camping, so there we were.
One member of our regular group had not been able to come out for the day as he had a real job in town. Yep, Kevin was making the transition to adulthood faster than the rest of us in some ways, slower in others. This story is more about the slower parts than the faster parts.
We all of us worked in one way or other. Myself, I had started throwing papers to fill in for my brothers when I was 8, getting my own full time route at 10, pushing broom in the local garage, mopping floors in the town bakery, and folding shirts in the drycleaners. Those jobs along with caring for the local car wash and mowing lawns and pulling weeds mostly kept me in spending money for ammunition, food for weekend trips, and used equipment from garage sales and flea markets.
In any case, Kevin was an ice cream jerk…or part of that anyway. He had a job at the local 31 flavors joint and had to work during the day on that Saturday, but on getting off of work he jumped on his little 125cc motor bike and raced out to where he knew he’d find the rest of us getting ready to eat.
Well the charcoal briquettes had been laid out and piled high, the charcoal lighter fluid had been poured on, soaked, and flamed just as we heard his motorcycle coming up the canyon. Kevin pulled up just after the visible yellow flames had snuffed out, but before the charcoal had started to really kick off heat.
Strolling up, filled with his ever-knowing-more-adult-than-you knowledge he immediately took stock of the situation and asked what we were doing. We told him we were waiting on the charcoal to kick in so that we could cook.
Now Kevin must of been starving, I mean after all, he had been forced to spend all day dipping and stacking ice cream cones and snacking whenever the boss wasn’t looking, so I am sure his stomach felt as if his throat had been cut. Given that over-riding hunger, waiting wasn’t gonna happen.
Kevin announced that we needed to pour some more lighter fluid on the charcoal and looked around for the bottle. We had finished it off however, so there wasn’t any left.
He promptly decided that he would drain some gasoline out of his motorcycle and use that to speed things along. We warned him that was a bad plan, me most vocally. In fact as the conversation drifted back and forth between he and I, it finally ended when I told him I’d thump him if he didn’t leave it alone. He quietly backed down and off. We thought he was going to wait it out with the rest of us.
But he was just about to graduate early in our senior year and so was of course better thinking and more educated than the rest of us were. So he scrounges up a small can, sneaks off to his motorcycle to drain some gas and comes up to us at the fire without telling us that he was going to go ahead and reenact the WWII Army Air Forces’ incendiary attacks on Tokyo.
Now I have to give him his due, Kevin had enough smarts to be scared of gasoline and fire together, but not enough to be wary of ‘em.
So he reaches out quick with the can until he has it right above the middle of the charcoal, then, ever so slowly tips the can. Proving his maturity by displaying care and deliberate slowness, he tips the can further and further until a thin stream of gasoline slips over the rim and free-falls in a continuous line down to the charcoal.
Kevin’s eyes light up just a fraction of a second after the open flame began climbing the stream back up towards the half-full can. He moved fast, a lot faster than he thought, but fast as he moved, he was slower than the flame by a full country mile and then some.
He whipped his hand back and to the right to throw the can away from himself before it could explode.
In the process he whipped a flaming liquid stream across the fire pit, the seating area, both of my thighs, and the knee high dry grass outside of the cleared fire circle.
I am not entirely sure of what everyone else was doing at that point, I was fair to middlin preoccupied right about then. I recall beating out the flames on my blue jeans, whipping off my jacket and using it to beat out the flames in the grass, and then just for the hell of it and cause I was just starting to limber up, I commenced to doing some beating on Kevin as well. Seemed like the natural course of action to me at the time.
I got to thinking about that Saturday a while back, it was a good 35 years ago now. Just a couple days ago Kevin came down to visit and we went out sailing on the ocean together. I resisted the temptation to throw him overboard; guess maybe I have finally grown up myself.
Copyright © 2011 - Marty Vandermolen - All Rights Reserved
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