Maybe behavior has been instinctive from the beginning of time. I can just imagine a caveman’s excitement at the prospect of fire. Finally his wife could order meat well done; now they could have some late night entertainment – sitting around a fire telling scary stories and making shadow puppets. I don’t know if it’s instinctive or not but I love fire.
I think every kid loves to play with matches - probably because we know we aren’t suppose to. I don’t know how old I was when I found out I weren’t suppose to play with them, I was pretty young when I got hold of a pack and went to the middle of our block to play with them. There was an old barn there that had some hay or straw – but I don’t remember there ever being any animals. It was a great place to hide; I spent a lot of hours down there, as did a lot of kids in the neighborhood. I was hiding out that day because I didn’t want anyone to know I was playing with matches. Matches are pretty cool, you strike the side of the box, they smoke then a flame erupts. I just blew them out afterwards and throw the sticks away.
There were other times that I thought fire was cool – as a scout we use to go into the wilderness and we always had a campfire. Our scoutmaster was great, but he seemed to be mad at me all the time for burning all the firewood. I was constantly on wood detail – I guess it was only fair since I was the one always putting it on the fire, that he made me go find more. It was on one of these scouting trip that our scoutmasters made a huge mistake. One of the few givens of scout leadership is to never leave boy scouts unsupervised. We were camping on the foothills of the great Uinta Mountains about five miles for the nearest city. I guess we had left a few things home so our two scoutmasters decided to make a trip to town. Now if I were my scoutmaster I would have wanted to leave things home on purpose too, so i would have an excuse to get away for a while.
After they had gone we just were sitting around our small boring fire doing what twelve year old's do best – nothing. Well I wanted to make the fire bigger which was normal for me. We didn’t have a lot of wood so we spread out, now one scout had a great idea – sagebrush. There was tons of that stuff and man did it burn. As the fire got bigger and bigger the car on the highway a couple of miles down the road had a better view of what was going on. The fire had to be ten to fifteen feet high – and that was exactly what we wanted. This was way before everyone had cell phones, but I still think it didn’t take very long before the local fire department was called into action.
About this same time two scoutmasters had finished their shopping and started for camp – I can imagine their anxiety as two fire engines with sirens blaring passed them. I’m sure their anxiety increased the closer they came to camp and started to see what everyone else was concerned about. Thank goodness there wasn’t any wind, but we had no idea that we were stressing anyone else out – this was great. It wasn’t very great anymore when the fire trucks arrived with our scoutmasters right behind. There would be no entertainment and shadow puppets tonight – but the scary stories were still on.
After the fire was put out, the adults talked for quit a while. I don’t know what happened but I seemed to have a lot of duties for the next few days. This wasn’t the first time there were fire engines close to where I was. The same night I had been playing with matches in the barn in the middle of our block, we were all woken up by the sound of sirens. Man that great hiding place was going up in flame – good thing it didn’t happen earlier I could have been hurt. I wonder who was playing with matches so late?
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