Kids Will Light Stuff On Fire, Just Because

Did I mention the time I almost destroyed my family’s livelihood with one careless match? We were living in Safford, Arizona. My grandfather started a fish farm, and my mom, one uncle, and their families joined him in the venture. I didn’t yet hate Safford. It was still new, I was 13, and we’d moved around enough that my only friends were family members.

There were cattails dotted around the 40-acre property where the artesian water flowed. If you’ve ever seen these things in the fall, they burst into a shower of fluffy white fuzz at the slightest touch. We used to cut off stalks, throw them in the air, and watch them explode like mortars when they hit the ground. I discovered that if you broke open one of the heads and spread the fuzz out, they’d burn in a flash, like gunpowder, almost. One evening in late fall, like an idiot, I broke a cattail open amongst the stalks and lit it. The ensuing flames spread further into the swampy pond, and started to burn some of the reedy stalks that were dry at the onset of the cold weather. I panicked, and tried to stomp it out, pushing over more stalks against the low flame. Instead of smothering the fire, I had fed it more fuel, and it jumped up, hungrily. I tried to throw a few pathetic handfuls of dirt on the growing fire, but it was already out of hand. I ran to get my grandfather, and he notified the rest of the adults. Everyone spent a harrowing couple of hours fighting the blaze.

After the fire was under control again, my uncle confronted me.
“Are you responsible for this?” he asked. I had a lump in my throat and couldn’t speak, but I nodded my assent. His eyes narrowed.
“Come with me,” he said, crooking his finger at me, and strode away. I followed. He led me to the big pipe that channeled fresh water into the fish tanks. It was charred and swollen along the bottom where the fire had touched it.
“You see this? If this thing had burst, we’d have no way to repair it. We would have lost all the fish,” he said.
He didn’t have to explain further. The system depended on a constant flow of water as it drained out of the middle of the tanks. I knew that would have made me responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in losses, not to mention no prospect of viable future income for a long time. My uncle watched this notion sink deep into my brain and nodded.
“You got lucky,” he said. I was too scared and ashamed to say anything, and too afraid to look anywhere but my shoes.

After that, I was never quite so careless with fire. But that’s not to say I didn’t play with it. Hey, our little eastern Arizona town bored the bejeezus out of us. My brother, cousins, and I still did plenty of dumb stunts now and again. But I stopped well short of endangering anything other than us. Remind me someday and I’ll tell you how my cousin Adam gave himself a virtual leg wax with a bicycle and a flaming gallon milk jug.

But watching others’ stupidity and laughing over it kept Jackass on the air for quite a while, and I couldn’t do anything but howl with laughter at the following fiasco: