Playing with fire
Back when I was a kid (age 6-11) we lived in Northbrook Illinois. We had an awesome neighborhood with lots of kids around, the street we lived on was a dead end and we were surrounded by forests. We spent a lot of time playing in the forest. In the big clearing at the end of the street all the kids built a BMX track (I was really into BMX back then), in the winter parts of the forest would often flood and then freeze over so we had an ice rink of sorts. I never personally learned how to ice skate but it was still a ball sliding around the ice. We also built lots of snow forts in the snow drifts and stuff. It was a great place to grow up and we had tons and tons of fun.
My neighbor who lived across the street from me was named Brendan, he was a few years older than me but we still hung out a lot. I am not sure how it started exactly but at some point we started making fires out in the forest. We were safe (or so we thought) and often would just hang out in the forest with a fire going burning weird random things. We found a mattress out in the forest one time and it was filled with foam. What we would do is break off a piece of foam a bit smaller than a tennis ball, attach it on the end of a stick, place the foam in the fire until it was burning good and then fling the foam off the stick watching this awesome fireball go screaming through the air. I can still remember clearly the sound that these balls of foam made as they went soaring through the air, it was a kind of floooop sound and it was really cool. We spent many afternoons flinging fireballs through the air. One day my older brother caught us doing it and I thought I was toast, I was sure he was going to tell our parents and get me in trouble. Luckily for me, he didn’t. He started flinging with us and a good time was had by all.
Eventually we burned all the foam from the mattress so we had to find other things to burn. We burned golf balls, that is how I learned that some golf balls have different stuff inside than others. My memory may be playing tricks on me here so I wouldn’t swear to it but I remember two things usually being inside the balls. The balls were either filled with a solid plastic like substance and they were kind of boring to burn. The cool golf balls were filled with what looked like really tightly wrapped rubber bands. Actually no that I think about it, I think some of them may have had a foamy liquid like substance. The rubber band ones were the cool ones to burn though, they made lots of cool noises when they burned and hitting them with a stick and sending them flying while they were burning made for a good light show.
Tennis balls were also a favorite thing to burn and then hit with a stick to go flying through the air. We obviously liked watching fireballs go flying through the sky.
We also used to stick glass bottles that we found out in the forest into the fire. I remember being totally shocked when we took a bottle out of the fire and through it in the creek near the fire and the bottle exploded. I learned that little physics lesson that day. After that first bottle exploded we repeated that experiment many times, waiting expectantly while the bottle got nice and hot and then watching in total fascination as we tossed the bottle in the water and it just shattering.
Like all stupid childhood games our fire playing did come to end. When we almost burned down the entire forest we decided it may be a good idea to stop playing with fire. What happened was this. We had found a tree that had fell over and it was old and rotting on the inside so it had a big hollow at the end of the fallen tree. We thought this would be a great place to start the fire so we did exactly that. Luckily for us we had also dragged over a big sheet of wood that happened to have a metal liner all the way around it. We played with our fire for awhile, the tree hollow making a great fireplace of sorts. When it was time to go home we poured water on our fire and covered it with dirt to put the fire out and went home. Unbeknownst to us the fire had worked its way up the fallen tree so when we thought we had put it all out the fire was actually still smoldering inside the tree.
We came back the next day to find a good chunk of the tree reduced to ash and the fire burning quite well. We about shit our pants. Thankfully, that metal lined piece of wood had done a surprisingly good job containing the fire. The wood was completely burned away but somehow the fire didn’t make it past the metal border. We hurried to try and contain the fire by trying to kick dirt on it and pour water onto it but we just couldn’t get it out. We ran back to Brendan’s house and got a couple buckets and doubled our efforts. We did eventually get the fire out but we had learned our lesson.
Looking back at what had happened it’s hard for me to believe that we didn’t start a major fire, we got incredibly lucky. I do sometimes miss the sound of the foam fireballs flying through the air though, they looked totally cool and sounded even better.
It amazes me more kids don’t die in childhood, myself included.
