I Started a Forest Fire
Fireworks. It doesn’t matter how old or mature one is, everybody loves fireworks. For me the passion was always there, just in a less destructive form. I have very fond memories of being allowed, by my parents, to light fireworks on the fourth of each July. Little did I know, this passion would soon turn into a disaster. Well, almost a disaster.
It was December of 2007 when I got the fateful call from a good friend, Sam, in the evening after dinner. He told me that he had a box of fireworks to get rid of, asking if I was able to help with his “predicament.”
“Of course!” was my default response, escaping my lips before I even had time to call it to question. So we made plans to meet up at the local WaWa gas station later that night.
Well, that time rolled around and with it—as would later come to my attention—came my old pal mischief. This may have been the night I began believing in Murphy’s Law. We met at the prearranged location along with some friends from our high school, Ian and Dan, much to my surprise. Once the usual chit-chat subsided we were off, in three separate cars—our first errata.
We pulled in to a neighborhood which had clearly just begun construction. The roads were finished, along with three or four houses, but there wasn’t much else. As Sam drove us through the residential streets looking for our citadel-de-mischief we encountered several round-a-bouts. Our second errata was not leaving to search out a different location as soon as we saw these obnoxious, law-enforcement-helping, European tragedies. Sam turned his minivan right, onto a dirt road, which we soon found out led to a path, which led to a pond. Not small nor large, this is the exact pond you would think of as the centerpiece of a nice (see: white) suburban neighborhood.
We parked the car next to the path and got out. Ian and Dan pulled up next to us. After grabbing all of the fireworks from the back seat we set out down the path. Arriving at the river, we set up shop. It was all fun and games at first; the typical teenager style of doing fireworks. You know, lighting bottle rockets in our hands and throwing them out over the river where, if we got lucky, they would plunge to their ultimate demise under the surface of this murky pond. We also discovered that if the fireworks were set off at a low enough angle relative to the surface of the water they would skip just like rocks over a lake. And so it went for, oh, about six fireworks or so, which I do realize is not many. It was that seventh rocket that sent our night into a frenzy.
