Kids, please don't try this at home

I swear, it all seamed relatively normal when I was a kid. Even in retrospect I don't think it was that bad.

What happens when you mix a bunch of 13 year olds, no parental supervision, and a can of gasoline? Out of control fire? Danger? Hilarity? All of the above? On this day we were hanging out at B's house*. Through the normal course of the afternoon we discovered a can of gas in his garage that they used for the lawnmower. Well, it didn't take too much thought before we started "drawing" things with gas (crosses, circles, etc) and lighting them on fire.

If that were the extent of the activities this would be a pretty uneventful story in my eyes. It wasn't. This was around the time of the 1984 Olympics, so B decided to wrap an old rag or shirt around a stick, douse it with gas, and create his own "Olympic Torch". So now we have B running around his yard waving a flaming shirt on a stick, which still wouldn't be all that eventful. Until, of course, the shirt comes flying off the stick and lands in a tree. Even that wouldn't be too out of control. But then again I failed to mention what was going on at the same time...you see I was pouring more gas on one of the many fires we had burning in the yard when the fire backtracked into the gas can. I then threw the gas can (or it might have been kicked by B's brother) and it exploded all over the yard. At this point things turned from funny to "this could be a problem".

Ok, lets step back and set the scene for you. B's house was on a corner lot of a mildly busy street with a pretty open yard. There are now multiple out of control fires, including one in a tree, and a handful of teenagers running around really not knowing what to do next. At this point there are almost multiple traffic accidents because people driving by are taken aback a bit by what's going on. So how does it all end? Well, lucky for us after the gas can exploded and we got over the initial shock the fires in the yard burned themselves out. Once the gas burned off we learned a valuable lesson -grass and asphalt aren't the best fuel for fires. That just left the fire in the tree. My memory is a bit hazy (it was 25 years ago), but I think that the rag/shirt just wasn't big enough to ignite the tree.

When you're a kid from your perspective it's always better to get away with things rather than to be caught. Lucky for us, aside from a few scorch marks on B's driveway and a few burned patches of grass there wasn't really any evidence of the towering inferno that engulfed the yard that afternoon.


Note: I think I'm going to use initials for my friends as to not incriminate anyone.