Dynamite

My mother's side of the family has traditionally held a family reunion on the Fourth of July every year. I have always enjoyed getting together with the relatives I don't see the rest of the year and see what everyone has been doing. Not the same people show up every year, so there is always someone different to talk to. It is always potluck, with everyone bringing something they make especially well or are proud of (not necessarily the same thing). It is pretty much a traditional Fourth of July.
Except for the dynamite.
My Aunt and Uncle live on the South end of Vashon Island, where they have a sizeable chunk of property. It is a very rural setting. The land is mostly second growth timber and brush. At the time, because they were clearing land, they could but dynamite (for agricultural purposes only) at the Co-op. Anyone who has spent time on the business end of a muck stick and prybar trying to get a stubborn stump out of the ground can really appreciate the pristine beauty of a couple of well placed sticks of dynamite. Not to mention the fact that it is a heck of a lot of fun to make things go BOOM. Both the relatives on Vashon and my family in Idaho had obtained and used dynamite for a number of years.
For the family get-together, people would usually start arriving around noon, and start out with the veggies-and-dip, and chips and snacks. Around the same time the first fireworks would show up. The policy towards fireworks has never been consistent in the State of Washington. Heck, it is not even consistent from block to block. It is literally possible to buy fireworks, walk a couple of blocks and be arrested for setting them off. It is not a policy designed to to build a great deal of respect for the law and its enforcement. To complicate matters, the Indian Reservations are only subject to Federal Law, so you can get a lot more of "The Good Stuff" from the Indians, including some stuff that is outside Federal guidelines.
Every year, McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma holds an Airshow to celebrate the Fourth. They generally flew North out of the base and turned around at the North end of Vashon. During the day we would see all kinds of Aircraft from fighters to cargo carriers, to bombers. We would hear them coming and rush outside to see if we could identify the type and model of the plane.
The fireworks would typically start with the younger kids lighting snakes and smoke bombs, then progress through lady fingers, regular firecrackers, bottle rockets and the usual small fireworks. Since we had to take the last ferry back to the mainland at around 7:00 we never got into the more elaborate airborne displays. We spent the afternoon and early evening, when not occupied eating, inventing new and more elaborate ways of blowing things up.
Firecrackers were placed under tin cans.
Holes were punched in tin cans to pass the fuse through, and then the cans pushed down into mud or soft sand. The idea is to see how high in the air you can blow the can. My personal favorite was an Old El Paso chilies can inside a regular soup can partly filled with water. If you didn't get the fuse wet, it was good for at least a hundred feet of altitude.
I suppose that it was inevitable that we would someday come to the conclusion that since we had dynamite, and there were stumps to be blown, there was no reason we couldn't blow stumps an the Fourth of July. We didn't do this every year, just when the urge was irresistible.
One year after sending cans flying as high as possible, we started speculating how high in the air we could send something if dynamite provided the propulsive force and we could find something sturdy enough to not disintegrate. First we took an old wellhead, dropped a lit stick of dynamite down it, followed by a section of madrona. It made a satisfactory BOOM, but the wood disappeared completely. We never saw it after it left the pipe.
Next we saw a car wheel laying out by the barn. Perfect!
We put the car wheel on a flat place over the top of a stick of dynamite, lit the fuse and got back.
BOOM!
Totally unsatisfactory. The wheel, spinning madly went about thirty feet in the air. Heck we could blow tin cans a lot higher than that. The problem seemed to be that the force of the explosion needed to be focused. Not an insurmountable problem. Having experienced the benefits of the fact that water is not compressible, we decided to dig a pit slightly larger than the wheel about a foot deep, fill it with water and try again. And since one stick of dynamite didn't provide enough propulsive force, three ought to do the job!
We finished digging our pit and filling it with water. Actually, but the time it soaked in, it was more like thin mud than water, but we were pretty sure it would do the job. We had waterproof fuse, so we didn't have to worry about the fuse going out. We set three sticks of dynamite equally spaced in the pit, and dropped in the wheel. We lit the fuse and got the heck out of there.
Just as we lit the fuse ad retreated, we heard a thumping noise on the horizon. It was a flight of six helicopter. Surely they wouldn't be coming anywhere near us! But they kept on a course that would bring them right overhead.
OH SHIT!
We looked at the wheel with the dynamite under it. The fuse got shorter. No one was willing to go near it to pull the fuse. A mistake would probably be fatal.
The helicopters came closer.
The fuse got shorter
Closer
Shorter
BOOM!!!
We had succeeded in our plans, for the wheel flew a couple of hundred feet in the air.
Right into the view of the helicopters. They must have seen it, because the formation split apart and headed away.
We figured we were in huge trouble. The first thing we did was put the dynamite back in the powder shed. Then we all went in and watched some sporting event on TV and prayed nothing came of it. Every time a car went by, we figured it was going to turn in the driveway, filled with guys in grey trenchcoats and black fedoras, but we never heard a thing.
I always wondered what the Flight Leader reported. I don't think he would want to report that they were under attack by car wheels. Maybe they never said a thing and that's why we never heard anything.
The only thing I know for sure is that the next time we went to the Co-op to buy dynamite, they wouldn't sell us any.