How To Set The World On Fire (in three easy steps)
Step one: draft a compatriot.
In this case, it was Cort Benson. Cort was a little bit like me: suggestible, easily distracted, and without a whole lot of impulse control. Of course, when you’re seven years old, you don’t have a whole lot of impulse control.
Cort lived at the edge of the base, like I did. One little neighbourhood road separated our houses from the wide-open prairie. In the winter, the snow howled out of the west, right past our front door. In the summer, like now, the prairie was our playground. There were lots of other kids to play with, but more often than not, we found ourselves alone together, doing things that maybe we shouldn’t have been doing, like swiping chocolate milk from the delivery man, or even swearing.
“Go to hell.” Giggle.
“That’s a damn shame.” Something I heard my father say.
“Oh..” Cort’s eyes lit up with excitement, which fed my excitement. He dropped his voice. “‘Shit’,” he whispered.
He looked stricken, and both of us looked around to see if an adult was coming to haul us off to our parents for some straightening up. But no one heard us, and we had one more adventure under our belts.
Anyway, Cort and I were a team, not that we had any concept of a team. He was the kid I played with the most, until our parents would shout from the front steps to come in for dinner.
A team, a pair, a duo. Without impulse control.
Step two: plan an adventure.
“Hey, look what I got.”
I could tell from the tone of his voice that this was going to be good. We were beside Cort’s house, in that special place we had discovered that was hidden from any windows in the neighbourhood houses. No windows, no prying eyes. Still, we checked it out; you can’t be too careful when one of us ‘got something’.
Cort took one last look around, then dug into his pocket. He pulled out a small box and slid it open.
“Wow.”
Matches. I looked at Cort, he looked at me, and we knew the possibilities were endless. Didn’t know what they were, but they were endless. You couldn’t get much more adult than matches, unless it was cigarettes, but they were far too complicated to even consider. Matches were simple. And they were dangerous, which was the reason Cort and I grinned at each like 7 year-old fools.
“What’ll we do?”
And then, those words, that phrase: “Let’s start a fire.”
“Ya!! You couldn’t have asked for a purer form of joy. “But…where?”
We said it at the same time: “The slough!”
#
The prairies are not flat; they’re flat-ish. Scattered here and there throughout the slow-rolling landscape are sloughs, small depressions filled with water percolating up from aquifers. Out past the road leading to our street, the Big Slough was like an oasis in the wide-open prairie (the Little Slough had dried up the previous year).
The slough was perfect. No right-thinking adult ever just went for a walk to the slough. Kids did that, hanging out, looking for frogs or gophers. Lighting fires.
#
“Hi, Cort. Hi Tommy.”
“No,” I said. Why did she think we were doing anything wrong? Just walking to the slough, that was all.
Shelley: neighbour, liar, girl. We watched her pedal away, wondering if she was going to head home and tell her mother what we were up to. But she didn’t; something in the ditch caught her eye, and she lay her bike in the middle of the road and went to take a look, accusation forgotten.
We hadn’t been found out.
Cort and I pushed into the tall grass and headed for the slough. Took a few minutes to get there, our excitement bubbling. This was the best adventure since- well, last week. Matches! Imagine what you could do.
We had chosen the Big Slough because of the smoking pit, an area of trampled-down grass with a small ring of stone in the center. There were scorch marks and dried-up cigarette butts left behind where some of the older kids had tried smoking, so that was a natural place to set fire to… something.
Step three: combust something.
“What’ll we burn?”
“Don’t know. Hey- grass!”
“Ya!!”
Another feature of the prairie is grass. Not your short grab-grass and dandelion mix of the average household: this is big-time grass, taller than a 7 year old, blowing in the wind. The prairie is a sea of grass, great waves of grass sweeping across miles and miles of prairie.
Dry, dry grass.
End of July, and it hadn’t rained in weeks. The prairie was a dull, monotonous brown, so dry that the grass hissed when all those waves swept across all those endless miles. Didn’t take us long, because it was all within easy reach. We tore off a few fistfuls of grass, piled it in the small circle of stone. Looked at it critically.
“Is it enough?”
We added a few more handfuls, grinning like fools with poor impulse control. Cort pulled out the matches, his eyes shining.
“Here goes.”
I took him a couple of tries to actually light the match; it was a bit windy, and besides, they were complicated. We squatted down to get out of the breeze, and Cort tried again. Our eyes lit upon along with the match. Cort looked at me, I looked at Cort and we both watched as he leaned toward the circle of stone surrounded by dry, dry grass.
It caught, really easily, and we knew we didn’t have to worry about the wind blowing it out. We felt the heat almost immediately, because the little flame became a bigger flame. In fact, we had to stand up because the fire had grown so quickly, especially given all of the grass we had fed it. Stepped back, because it got even bigger. It was exciting, maybe even a little scary, but we had done it. We had set a fire.
Part of the burning pile of grass collapsed, and flames trickled out of the rock circle. We stamped it out, but then it crept around to the other side of the circle and we stamped that out, too. Then it leapt.
I didn’t think fire could jump, but it did, right in front of us, and right into the tall grass nearby. That’s when Cort’s eyes went white, because the fired leapt again, spreading outward from the circle of rock.
Holy…damn.
We stared, open mouthed, amazed that something so small could get so big, so quickly.
Didn’t even think; we tore off our shirts and started flailing away. When we looked up, the fire was even bigger, flames twice as tall as the grass that fed it. How had that happened? The wind was at our backs, pushing it away from us. Out onto the open prairie.
Holy… shit.
Cort and I did what any seven year-old would do: we turned and ran, away from the slough, away from the fire. Through the tall, dry grass and up onto the road by the edge of the base. A couple of the older kids had stopped their bikes.
“Wow! Tommy! Cort! You should see this!”
We turned and looked at ‘this’. A hundred yards away, a line of flame and smoke stretched across the prairie. Even as we watched, the flames got bigger and the line got longer. You could even hear it, a far-off crackle of burning grass.
Then we heard the sirens.
#
This is how it works on an Air Force base in the middle of the prairies: senior officers cycle through a position called OD, Officer of the Day. The OD is the go-to person for any problems that come up during the day-to-day running of the base. Security concerns, personnel issues. Massive prairie fires.
The OD that day was my father.
Here’s another reality on a base, at least for kids: everyone knows everyone else. Everyone knows the cry-babies, the quiet ones, the kids more… prone to get into trouble. So when Cort and I just stood there, tongues hanging out as we stared at the fire, both of us felt the two older kids looking at us.
Frowning.
Maybe it was the soot on our faces, or the smell of smoke from our clothes. Or maybe it was the fear in our eyes.
Whatever had given us away, their expressions changed. Even when you’re seven years old, you can read that expression. Their voices cracked with barely-concealed glee. “Oh, are you ever in trouble!”
And we were.
Took an hour or so to beat back the flames, teenagers and firefighters and off-duty airmen from all over the base running up and down the fire line as Cort and I stood on the road, watching. Every once in awhile we’d see heads swivel around and look at us; groups of adults, groups of other kids, all looking at us.
No investigation as such; what was there to investigate? A couple of kids hadn’t controlled their impulses.
Much to my surprise, there wasn’t a big-time blowout at home. No belt (which was almost always a threat, rather than a practice), no angry words. In fact, it was pretty quiet, which confused my brother and sisters to no end. They kept looking from me, to my father, to my mother, wondering how much trouble I was in, and who was going to say what, when.
Oh, there were consequences. No movies for a month. That was a big deal, because the base cinema had killer Saturday afternoon matinees. And no more Cort, which was a bit of a relief, because even at seven years old, I knew that sometimes we did things that neither of us would have done without the other, and that was a bit scary. Fun, but scary.
The look of disappointment on my father’s face stayed with me for a long time, but gradually, the shame of it all faded. The prairie recovered, even turning a fetching shade of green where the fire had burned off all the desiccated grass. I was allowed to play with Cort again, although I had the distinct impression we were always being watched – by everybody – when we were together.
But after awhile, we realized that we hadn’t really hurt anyone. It wasn’t as if we had done something really dangerous or anything.
That came later.
Tom New
v. 1743