Disclaimer:

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DO ANY OF THE THINGS DESCRIBED BELOW.  DON'T PLAY WITH MATCHES!  DON'T PLAY WITH LIGHTERS.  DON'T PLAY WITH FIRE AT ALL!  OF ALL THE "PRANKS" I TOOK PART IN AS A CHILD, MESSING WITH FIRE WAS THE DUMBEST AND MOST DANGEROUS!  I HAVE SCARS FROM SOME OF THESE INCIDENTS - AND I WAS LUCKY.  YOU MIGHT NOT BE SO LUCKY.

Fire

Why are so many people fascinated with fire?  It almost always starts during childhood.  Most kids outgrow it at some point, often after they suffer some kind of painful burns.

When we first moved to Raton, NM, all the houses had incinerators in their backyards.  At least that was the case in our neighborhood.  That was how you disposed of your garbage.  You tossed it into the incinerator and then burned it.  The incinerators were constructed of cinderblocks and concrete.  There was an opening in top where you tossed in the trash and where the smoke could escape when the trash was burning.  There was a sliding metal door on the side facing the alley.  Every week or so the city garbage department would come by and open the metal door rake out all the ashes and carry them off.  The incinerators made great hiding places for hide-and-seek (assuming they weren't full of garbage - burning or otherwise).  We often used them for forts when playing army.  The stinky soot didn't seem to bother us, but I'm sure our moms wondered why we often came home covered in soot from head to foot.

I don't remember if my parents assigned this job to me or if I volunteered for it, but I was often the one who had trash burning detail.  I spent many hours poking sticks into the burning garbage, making sure it burned evenly.  It was a great way to learn how various materials reacted to fire.  One of the most interesting materials was plastic.  It burned quite vigorously and usually turned into a viscous dripping blob of fire.  I once managed to get a big blob to adhere to the end of a stick.  Wow, I had myself a torch!  I held the torch over my head and started running, pretending to be the Olympic Torch Bearer.  Bad idea!  The burning blob of plastic dripped right on my hand at the base of my index finger.  The plastic quickly solidified, but it burned like it was still on fire.  What did I do?  What would you do?  Your first reaction is to rip the plastic off your hand, of course.  Another bad idea!  Oh, it came off easily enough.  But so did a few layers of skin!  I still have a scar at the base of my index finger to this day.

What else did I do?  Let's see.  I had a chemistry set that included an alcohol lamp.  It burned denatured alcohol and was used for experiments such as making smoke powder, rotten-egg smelling stink bombs, and my favorite - the chemical volcano!  I don't remember all the ingredients, but I do remember that sulfer was one of them.  That one cleared the house!  I also remember the smell of the denatured alcohol and the smell of burning hair when I singed my eyelashes off by holding a match over the "empty" can of denatured alcohol.  I remember doing some dumb things that could have resulted in disaster, but didn't.  Like carrying several ounces of gasoline in a Mason jar in my backpack on a hike.  My friends and I hiked to the sandstone formations that were located at the north end of town, and we wanted to cook hotdogs over a campfire.  But none of us were boy scouts.  So the only surefire way (and I mean that literally) that we knew to start a fire was with gasoline.  It's a wonder we didn't set Bartlett Mesa on fire, although we weren't technically quite on Bartlett Mesa.

Older and Wiser in Charlotte?

Once again, this story jumps a few years and across the country to Charlotte, NC.  By the time I entered 7th grade, I had a little more sense.  But fire was still a part of my life.  My buddy Philip and I used to walk a couple of blocks up the road to a 7-11, where we would buy slurpees and such.  We used to eye the shiny metal Zippo lighters and we both eventually bought lighters, extra flints and lighter fluid.  This was before the advent of disposable plastic butane lighters.  If you wanted to light something, it required a Zippo or a match.  Funny thing was, neither of us smoked.  I don't know why we thought we needed lighters.  I guess there was always the chance we'd get our hands on some firecrackers or bottle rockets (and we often did).  But maybe it was more likely that we thought we could avoid getting beat up on the bus if we could lend our lighters to the bigger, older kids when they asked for a light.  Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember them smoking on the bus back then.  I'm not sure if the school system condoned it, but then we almost never rode an actual school bus.  We usually rode a City Coach bus that was chartered by the school system.  That meant the driver worked for Charlotte Transit and not the school system.  It also meant that our bus was almost always late.   We used to freeze waiting for that dang bus during the winter!  Which leads us to the our final fire event: