Prairie View

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

A Normal Childhood

During last school year Holli had a message for me one day from her uncle LeRoy--because he thought I would enjoy it. It was a saying that I learned yesterday has become his axiom for the year: If you can't be a good example, you can at least serve as a horrible warning.

At our traditional Labor Day church picnic, LeRoy prefaced a story-telling session on the general subject of Dynamite and his experiences with it by quoting the above axiom. He also noted that he's discovered that A Normal Childhood is defined very subjectively. He always thought he had a normal childhood.

His experience with dynamite began the summer between kindergarten and first grade when his father got a temporary job with a road building crew that was working near their home. Limestone lay under the surface of the surrounding countryside and, to make the limestone available for the building project, workmen drilled 50-ft. deep holes into which they dropped sticks of dynamite with blasting caps fastened to them and wires leading from them. LeRoy went to work with his dad and dropped the sticks into the holes. Then the holes were filled with anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel. At the end of every day, the crew would gather off to the side and the person in charge of all this would send an electric charge through the bundle of wires connected to the blasting caps. An enormously gratifying boom and eruption of rocks and soil over the blasting area soon followed.

As a job perk his father got to keep some of the dynamite sticks after his employment ended. They used some of it to blast a drainage ditch through a low-lying field (although LeRoy is not sure the big holes ever quite got connected into a ditch), and later, when they encountered tough digging under their house in the process of installing a basement, they used dynamite to shake the dirt loose. True, the house above it shook when they did this, and a few pictures fell off the walls, but they got their basement dug.

Another time, when LeRoy was in third grade he and his little friend, when both sets of parents were gone, decided to experiment with some of the blasting caps LeRoy had discovered earlier in a small box in one of their outbuildings.They wisely dug a small hole and put the caps in the bottom of the hole. The first attempts to set off an explosion were not successful because the lighted matches kept going out and the friend had to go home before anything exciting had happened. (I'm confused now about why they were using matches instead of wires.) But LeRoy was persistent, and he decided that to solve the problem of the matches burning out while they waited some distance away, he needed to get that match to the cap fast, before it went out, so he stood nearly over it and threw the lighted match at the cap. There was a loud bang and he couldn't see anything except red and black for quite a while. He had numerous cuts on his forehead, and for weeks afterwards he had bits of black material embedded in his fingertips. That night he wasn't feeling so well, and he went to bed early. LeRoy finished by saying that he had almost been the horrible warning the axiom speaks of, and that if things in his head seem a little abnormal, perhaps we can understand why.

LeRoy's father and brothers were privy to the last incident. This involved a junk tractor that needed to be taken to the salvage yard. To make the job more manageable, they decided to disassemble the machine before taking it there, but not by the typical time-consuming, laborious means. They first took out the PTO apparatus and the shaft attached to it. Then they inserted dynamite into the hole left behind. After they had sheltered behind something nearby, they detonated the dynamite--except nothing happened. So they added more dynamite and tried again. This time it went off. LeRoy remembers peeking out from behind the tank where they were hiding, and the tractor was gone. But he didn't have long to marvel at this before tractor parts started raining out of the sky. It was a little scary there for a bit, dodging this shower of metal parts. But when things quieted down, all that was left was gathering up the small parts and loading them for the final trip to the salvage yard.

And that was part of LeRoy's normal childhood.

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