Tales from a rural youth

I am going to try but probably cant do the story justice as I am not much of a writer.

When the wife and I were first married we rented this little POS house from a family member...seriously it was 650 sqaure feet and didnt have heat or air...humble beginnings. Just off the back porch was a MASSIVE oak tree. A burr oak to be exact, if that matters. It was probably (no exaggeration) 48" in diameter and 60' tall. A Huge limb fell down one night and barely missed the house so my uncle decided to have the tree removed before it crushed the house. Tree guy came cut tree and hauled logs for days but he left a stump about mid chest high....and I wanted it gone. Oh yeah this stump was hollow in the midddle the hole was probably about 18" long.

Trucks, Tractors, Chains were employed but this stump "werent pulling up"

Obviously fire is the only choice. I had 4 or 5 gallons of old diesel fuel so we dumped that down in the stump along with some used motor oil some ATF...and anything else that would burn long and slow we could come up with. We got this concotion lit but it soon smoked itself out. So I dumped "a little" gas down the hole, lit a paper towel and tossed her in....NOTHING.

At this point it was personal....this stump had to light.

A little more gas....and a safe way to light. I had an old shop jacket that didnt fit me anymore...so I doused it good in Kerosene and lit the sleeve and quickly shoved her down in the hole. Now a 3XL Shop jacket pretty well fills up a 18" diameter hole...but my fire went out. So a little more gasoline was added....and with a stick my brother in law (RIP) pushed the jacket down in the hole until only the end of the sleeve was sticking out and then only barely.

I re applied some fossil fuel accelerant. Gas and Kero mixed...

Im not sure how much gas was left in the 5 gallon jug when I started but there was none left when I finished. We were no dummieswe poured a tracer trail of gaas to safely light. We also realize this 4' deep stump hole would need oxygen to keep a fire going so using a 1" diameter 24" long auger bit (the kind used by electricians to drill studs) I proceeded to make about 12 vents around the circumference of this massive stump.

HEY YALL WATCH THIS...
I sat my beer down and lit the gas tracer trail....the gas ran across the grass, up the stump down the sstump...and nothing.

FAWK! SHit! Damn!

WAIT?!?! Is that smoke....

3
2
KA BOOOOOOM....it sounded like a gosh darn cannon.

HOLE E SHIT...

Fire belched from the tree stump...and suddenly my BIL got tickled.
He had a great infectious laugh..it was contagious. His wholee torso shook when he laughed and his shoulders had this funny deal where they shrugged up and down when he laughed....he was laughing good now. Nearly giggling. Even school girlish you might say.

He pointed up...then I saw it and cracked up as well..
ABout 40' in the air wa that old shop jacket....spread out catching air and drifting towards earth way to slowly..holes burned in it and still ablaze as the kero burned off. I am not sure if it was hanging on the thermal winds of the stump fire or if a shop jacket would just make a great parachute in a pinch but I SWEAR it took a solid minute for that ole jacket to float to the ground, on fire the entire way.

The tree was burning now...and boy did that stump burn. I shit you not that stump smoldered for 4 days....just a glow in the yard.


It was a formidable foe but we whipped her.

My Bro In Law was my bets friend..he introduced me to my wife. We had lots of good times. LOTS...Lucky we both survived many of them.

But this one is in the top few and I always remember it anytime I see a hollow stump.

RIP Bubba.
 
Beer can Bazooka anyone? Don't remember which friend discovered these lighter fluid noisemaker/tennis ball cannons but soon we all were making them bigger and louder and driving people nuts w the boom, boom, booms almost nightly while we ran around neighborhoods in the dark laughing hysterically and hiding from the police for weeks. The loudest ones seemed to be the ones made of 5 tallboy beercans. One friend made a larger one out of soup cans and it was even louder. He was showing it off and fired it about 5 times and then it apparently flooded as they were prone to do if too much fuel was squirted in the small hole in the bottom of the bazooka and it refused to fire after 3 or 5 attempts at lighting it. For some dumb reason ( maybe the booze he stole out of his dad's liquor cabinet that we had enjoyed that night ) he lowered the can cannon and peered straight down the barrel....................then there was loud woooooOOOOOOF as a large orange/blue flame blew out of the barrel maybe 5 foot high and engulfed his face and head as he dropped and turned away from the cannon turned flamethrower slapping his face and burning hair. He burned his eyebrows and eyelashes clean off but patches of his mustache remained, otherwise he was pretty lucky his eyes were not burned bad and just some minor skin burns, mostly arround his mouth and eyebrows. It was pretty embarrasing when he went to school w a naked face afterward and it took about a year for his eyebrows to grow back. We got caught and the police confiscated our cannons weeks later and warned us if they caught us again, we'd be in real trouble.......................
 
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