True stories from childhood - Vol. 3, "Smoke Bomb"

The summer after sixth grade was a very dry summer. It rarely rained and most people had grass that was a dark crispy brown throughout the summer months. During that year, I had a few friends that I would spend a lot of time with. One such friend was Aaron. Aaron and I built our friendship on the mutual interest of seeing things burn or explode.

I think Aaron had a paper route or something because he always seemed to have money. I had some money from working at my father's grocery store, but never as much as Aaron. When we could scrape a few dollars together to spare, we would head to the store to buy as many fireworks as we could. Then we would clean up on the complimentary matches.

One day, Aaron and I bought several bags of smoke bombs. We purchased a few of the standard round kind that send up plumes of colored smoke, as well as some of the plastic smoke grenades. Aaron had heard that if you put a lit smoke bomb in water, it makes a bunch of smoke bubbles. He suggested we try that, and I agreed.

At the time, I lived near the local high school. Bordering the school was a stream that would feed the Lackawanna River. We headed toward that stream and once we got there we tested Aaron's theory. It worked, but we grew bored with it. For no apparent reason, Aaron threw one smoke bomb up the bank and into the high school baseball field. Neither of us saw smoke, so we assumed it must have been a dud.

After a while, we ran out of smoke bombs and decided to go back to my house. As we climbed the bank toward level ground, we quickly discovered that the smoke bomb Aaron had thrown earlier wasn't a dud at all. Not only must it have gone off, but the dry, crispy outfield was on fire and a crowd of people was swarming to see what was going on.

Aaron and I ran as fast as we could to my house. When we got there, we called the fire department and then watched as they came and put out the fire. It was nearly a year before the outfield looked normal again.

Oops.