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The Byron Lane Forest Fire

The second in a series of near-death accidents in my life.

By Kerry WilliamsPublished 2 years ago 14 min read
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Byron Rd. Courtesy of Google Maps.

I was about nine or ten when my friend and I, almost started a forest fire. Stupid kids, I know, but my friends were always getting me into all sorts of trouble. Did I get them into trouble as much as they got me into trouble? I think not. But, I was the outcast, the geek, the ultimate failure in my father's eyes. I was weak, feminie looking (I think so). I sported a bowl cut and wore velvet shirts and courderoy pants. Oh, they're comfortable for sure, but when everyone else is cool, I'm just drool. Hence, I was always looking for ways to be part of the gang.

Brent Pollack was my first friend. My only friend for a very long time. He lived next door, before other houses were built inbetween our house and his. We rode our bikes up and down Byron Rd. It was our road. Byron was a dirt road that got super dusty in the summer and my dad convinced a few others that we would pay for a truck to "oil" the road to keep the dirt and dust down. I think they may still do that.

Anyways, Brent and I would do all sorts of stupid shit together. Polly-wogging, fishing, hanging out, making tree forts and shelters, and while Brent was older than me, he wasn't that much older. I remember skinny dipping in the creek by our house, Brent, me, my brother Alex and Brent's sister Christy. Oh man we did so much stupid shit, but that was life as a kid out in the country. You found ways to entertain yourself, and learned all about life while doing it.

So, one day, prior to Fourth of July, I got into my dad's fireworks haul and decided to take some fire crackers and "lady fingers" over to Brent's house. Brent proceeds to grab a lighter and, while his parents were away, he shows me how to make a bomb.

Brent's version of a bomb was closer to my seventh grade dummy bomb, than an actual bomb. Yeah, I brought a FAKE BOMB to school. No shit. I sat it on my science teachers desk and he about freaked, but I quickly told him it was not a real bomb. It was filled with sand, and I was going to teach the class about dynamite and the inner workings of it, for my school science project. Meh. There weren't a lot of rules back then. I didn't get in trouble. I got an A+. Anyways, Brent's bomb was a cool-whip container with WD-40 sprayed inside. He closed the lid, taped it shut with duck-(duct?)-tape, cut a hole in the top, and held the lighter to it. Suffice to say, nothing happened. He tried and tried and eventually gave up. He then grabbed a torch and melted the top of it, trying to get it to explode. Brent was a bit of a pyro. Shit, we all were.

So, with the cool-whip bomb not going off, with or without a hitch, we decided to take our mischief elsewhere. There was a boy in our school who's family lived back in the heart of a deep forest of pine trees that grew in perfect rows. Yeah. THAT was where we could go light foreworks in relative annonymity, right? That was safe, right? Heh. It's funny just how stupid you can be as a kid.

We rode our bikes deep into the forest, and about half way down a straight away portion of the road, we stopped. The "road" was nothing more than sand, skirted on both sides by, well, wouldn't you know it... PINE NEEDLES. Brown crusty dry pine needles. That's safe, right? The perfect fire insulator!

Brent bent to the task of accumulating a nice little stack of tinder in the middle of one of the wheelpaths, and then, like the geniuses we were, he pulled the lighter from his pocket, and lit the fire. Now, you might ask, why do we need a fire in the middle of the forest, just to light off some firecrackers? Well, the answer is simple. The lighter might go out, or run out of fuel. But pine needles, they burn for a good while so that was our logic.

We proceeded to light firecrackers and toss them around, and then Brent buried one, and when it went off, it threw dirt everywhere, including into my eyes, and I was about done. Brent however, was in the mood to show off, so he held a little pink lady finger firecracker in between his fingers and lit it. I watched as it blew up, and Brent just smiled, completely unscathed. It was as if he were Superman! I mean, that was some amazing shit!

Still, the sand in my eyes was prooving harder to simply just rub out than I had expected, and so I reiterated it was time to go. Brent reluctantly agreed, and so I slowly started nudging sand over the little six inch by six inch fire we'd made. Brent seemed to have other ideas on the proper way to put out a fire in the middle of a pine forest. He rushed in while I was slowly pushing the mound of sand forward, and KICKED his foot through it.

You would think that would just scatter flames and embers all over the forest, starting tens, if not hundreds of smaller fires that would quickly merge and burn into one large insanely intense and horrific forest fire, right? Hundreds of acre's burned, homes destroyed, lives lost... Yeah. Well, I guess Karma gives, and Karma takes. This time, Karma was a friend to me, rather than an enemy. Karma stepped in.

As the embers splashed their firey wave across the sides of the road, most of the smoking tendrils of flame, went out. Brent got on his bike and took off. Apparently he saw a car coming down the road and didn't want to get caught. I, on the other hand, felt it was better to stick around and make sure that none of the stray embers ignited anything else, and so I painstakingly wandered around, stepping on, and smothering, ever little spot where I saw smoke.

A few moments after I started, I'd completed the task. I was confident that there were no more embers, nothing that would rekindle a fire, or burn down the forest. I got on my bike and started on my way home. As I passed Brent's house, I saw he had went right home, dumped his bike in his garage and had gone inside. Okay, no big deal, so I went home as well.

Later that evening, way later, while my mother was making dinner, she received a phone call from Brent's mother. The phone call went down something like this...

"Hello. Oh, hi Carol. How are you doing? Yes. Yeah, he's here, why? What happened? No. No, he didn't. No. Uh-uh. What? WHAT! NO! Oh, I will get to the bottom of this. No. No, I'll send him right over." My mother glared at me and hung up the phone. Honestly, I had no idea what the issue could be because, NUMBER ONE... contrary to what Brent had thought, nobody ever came down the road. and NUMBER TWO... nothing had happened. I stuck around to make sure of it. So... other than Brent, and myself, how in the hell did anyone else know what had happened? There was NO WAY we could be in trouble for anything. I kept my child-like demeanor and innocnet face as blank as possible, while inside, my guts churned.

"So," my mother said as she slid a casserole or something into the oven. "You and Brent tried to start the forest on fire?" My jaw dropped. How in the FUCKING hell... "What did you use? Matches?"

I shook my head dumbly. Images of my dad swinging his belt, the buckle whistling through the air before it slammed into my flesh, over and over, petrified me. There was no fucking way I was admitting to anything.

"Brent's grounded for a year. If you wanna say anything to him, you better go down there because you won't be seeing him for a year."

I couldn't believe this shit. I hurried out the door and walked down to Brent's house, every footstep felt like a thousand miles. I got there and Brent was in his garage, just standing there like there was nothing wrong. It was... strange.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

"I... I just... I couldn't do it."

"Couldn't do what?" I asked.

"I know you said not to tell anyone but... I felt so guilty. I just couldn't do it."

My face screwed up for a moment and in that single moment, I realized many things. One, Brent had squealed. Two, Brent was a squealer. Three, Brent, was making it sound like I was the mastermind behind the whole thing. Like I was the one who told him, to not say anything to anyone. Sure that's what I wanted, but it was obvious I hadn't gotten my wish!

"I stayed behind and made sure the fire was out," I said quickly, "after you kicked it across the road." As Flick and Schwartz will tell you, there is no honor among friends when a Red Ryder BB-gun hangs in the balance. It was literally my ass though, that was on the line, which meant all bets were off.

As soon as the words left my lips, the door to the house behind Brent whipped open and his mother stormed out, her face and lips pinched like a 1970's horror flick starlet. She'd been standing there, listening, waiting for Brent to entice me into admitting my role in the whole thing. Now Brent wasn't just a squealer. He was a dirty backstabbing tricksy squealer.

"What did you use to start the fires?" his mother demanded.

Hmm, I thought. That would have been question numero uno, if it were my kid... and it had been the number one question on my mother's mind too. Strange that Brent's mother had saved that question to ask in front of me... Brent motioned towards my pant's pockets but I'd already gotten rid of anything I had on my person. I'd returned the matches, the lighter, and all unexploded fireworks, back to their original upright positions, where nobody other than Brent, myself, and the fairy tale pixies could know what had really went down. But Carol knew.

"I should have known," Carol said, narrowing her eyes at me.

No, you shouldn't have known, I thought. I turned and looked at Brent. Oh, he had the guilty look alright, but why he came home and immediately told his mother was beyond me... unless... unless he'd wanted to get me in trouble, all along. It was the only explanation I could think of. Somehow, I'd pissed him off, and this was his way of getting back at me. Fine, I thought. If he wanted to play dirty, I could play dirty too.

See, this is the problem with kids. So much imagination, so little actual experience. Maturity is building a fire in the back yard, all the while, taking the necessary safety precautions. Knowldge is having read about the mistakes that could go wrong and avoiding them. Wisdom is knowing that your mother knows everything. One look and she knows you did something wrong and no amount of whiddling around about it will save you. Brent had probably run inside to get a freezy pop or something, and had gotten caught by his all knowing mother... who squeezed the truth from him like a over ripened peach. I on the other hand... was a green peach. Hard and... not wanting to endure the whipping of a lifetime.

"Brent used his fire starter thingie," I said, casually nodding towards the work bench in the back corner of the garage where I'd seen it hanging. The torch is what I was referring to...

"What!?" Carol said, turning on Brent.

"Yeah, we tried to build a bomb, but it wouldn't blow up, so Brent said we should go into the woods and start it on fire."

The words sputtered from my mouth like verbal diarhea preparing to spread ebola across a nation. Vile, nasty, disgusting, and carrying so many unseen consequences that I'd probably die of old age before realizing he full raminfications of what I'd done. Brent looked defeated. His mother demanded he show her "the bomb", and after fifteen minutes of denying it, he led his mother to the trash can out back where the half melted coolwhip container with duct-tape and smelling of WD-40, lay buried deep, so nobody would fine it.

Brent was ordered to go get his fire stick, which I only then realized was an actual flint and steel thing he'd received at some point, probably as a present, and it looked like it was a prised posession of his as he handed it over to his mother. That sucked. I hadn't even known about that. I felt guilty about him loosing that... Apparently it showed, and that was enough for Brent's mom to send me home.

I was told to go stright home, Brent was grounded for EVER, and that was it.

Upon my return, I was cross examined by my mother who was the ultimate truth-sayer. Nothing could make it past this woman. The only option was to lie convincingly, which meant telling most of the truth, but leaving out specific pieces and parts. I would not fully condemn myself. I knew I was in for the flaying of a lifetime, but I wasn't stupid enough to admit it was all my fault, or that I played any role larger than what I'd really done.

My mother asked, and I gave her what she wanted to hear. Brent and I were hanging out. Brent wanted to show me something cool and he tried to make a bomb out of a cool-whip container and WD-40. That much was... truth. That's how it all started. I left out everything about fireworks, matches, lighters, and anything else up until that point, and continued on.

We went up to the forest at Byron Lane and hung out in the little school-bus shack that was there. We all envied that shack. It was sturdy, made of wood with little windows and benches. The shack provided the kids that lived in the forest, plenty of protection from the elements as they waited, sometimes for up to TWO HOURS in the freezing weather, for the bus to come by. Nobody else had a shack. Nobody. NOOOOBODY.

I told my mom that Brent used his fire starter "kit" (something I had no idea what it was or how it worked) to try and catch an old glove on fire, just something we'd found on the ground, and when it wouldn't burn, he threw it into the rafters. I added the part about Brent getting home and feeling guilty about it, and telling his mom, which, didn't make sense.

That last part, about Brent feeling "so guilty" he needed to voluntarily divulge any action on his part, to his mother, left a sour taste in my mother's mouth, and she immediately called Carol to confirm this. Suffice to say, Carol informed my mother that Brent had indeed felt so guilty about what he and I had done, that he had came right home and told her everything, including that he used his fire starting kit, and about the improvised bomb he had tried to make. Then the conversation went straight downhill.

I couldn;t hear Carols part of the conversation, only my mothers, but... I assume this is what happened. Carol blamed Brent's fascination with bomb making on something else. A movie he had just watched, or, something else... And everything else, was a result of MY BAD INFLUENCE on him. Ugh. And why? I was a perfect little angel, ALL THE TIME. (Tongue in cheek.)

But, as all mother's do, my mother flipped a switch. Ultimate investigator became mother of an angel, and newfound realist. She told Carol that Brent was older than I was, and if anything, he was a bad influence on me, not the other way around. My mother hung up the phone and that was... that was about it.

My mother sent me to the corner to "think" about what I'd done. This is where I'd perfected my ability to sleep standing straight up, and to wake and become fully alert in a fraction of a second. I have to say, this skill came in pretty useful during my years in the military. Thanks mom.

Even more amazing, my mother pulled one straight out of the Christmas Story, and never told my father what had happened. An hour before certain death was to arrive home, my mother sent me to my room and told me to never speak of this again. I'm sure the statue of limintations on motherly orders has experied so I'm blabbing about it now.

I got in plenty of trouble later on and my father actually grounded me from seeing Brent or Christy, ever again. But, that was beacuse of the time we got caught building a tree fort with materials we'd conveiniently found at a nearby house construction site... and the alcohol we'd stolen... and the vandalism... and... another fire.

In Loving Memory of my first friend, my best and dearest friend, Brent Pawlak. For so long as we had the universe to play in, we had fun together.

Childhood
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About the Creator

Kerry Williams

It's been ten days

The longest days. Dry, stinking, greasy days

I've been trying something new

The angels in white linens keep checking in

Is there anything you need?

No

Anything?

No

Thank you sir.

I sit

waiting

Tyler? Is that you?

No

I am... Cornelius.

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