EDITOR’S NOTE: The following story, the second by my friend David Rath, must come with a disclaimer. The pyrotechnic activities depicted are not necessarily normal, or recommended. Yes, the story is funny, but it’s the kind of funny that borders on something else. Something else like sledding off the shed roof or hunting for snapping turtles, or using sling shots in the house or any number of things that I did with my kids and later regretted only because we got caught by mom. Us dads are always getting caught by mom, and we always have to take the responsibility because we’re the ones who are “the grownups.” Just once I’d like one of my kids to have to take the fall for getting me into some kind of ridiculous (and ultimately harmless) trouble. Anyway, I’m sure that Dave and his kids learned a valuable lesson from this, and in the end I imagine all the Raths became BFFs with the traumatized neighbor, who appears out of the dispersing smoke at the end of the story. He’s really a decent guy, Dave is, and his kids are turning out fine. It’s just experiential learning, right? Of course, they’d all be lost without mom.
We moved into our house in the Adirondacks in 2008. Isaac my son was 10. He and I tend to be slightly adventurous, often crazy, and sometimes downright dangerous.
We had just moved in and there was lots of unpacking and tons of sorting to do. You know, the usual boxes of clothes knick-knacks, etc. Isaac and I were moving things out to the barn from the garage. (For some reason, my wife thought her car was supposed to go in the garage). As we moved box after box of tools, tent poles, roller blades, and what have you, Isaac found The Box. The one marked DAD’S STUFF. It weighed about 1,000 pounds and it took everything we had to move it out to the Barn.
“What’s in this Isaac asked?”
“No clue,” I said.
I believe I’d packed this box when we lived in New Hampshire and was left untouched for the last year as we were renting a house in New York before we purchased this one.
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
I grabbed a screwdriver and used it to cut the tape on the top of the box. As we opened it, it was like a bright light shown on both our faces.
“What are those?” Isaac asked.
“I forgot I had those,” I said.
There in front of us were three unused air-bag apparatuses from some vehicle that I had worked on at some point in my life as an auto mechanic. I explained to Isaac in a nutshell the theory of how they worked, and as soon as I mentioned how each device had an explosive charge to deploy the airbag, his face lit up.
“Let’s make them explode!” he said.
His eyes as big as hub caps.
That’s when I realized the day I had always hoped for had finally come. Me and the boy were going to make things go boom.
“Where is your mother?” I asked.
Isaac ran around the house looking as inconspicuous as possible, trying to scope out where his mother was. As he did this, I procured an old car battery and about 50 feet of wire. He came bounding back grinning a grin like he was about to do something slightly illegal, but his dad was there which made it okay.
“Well?” I asked.
“She is way up front talking to the neighbor,” he said.
“Perfect!” I exclaimed.
We took the airbag devices, the car battery, and the wire out behind the barn. I placed the first device on a barrel. I had to cut the wire in half to make two leads, which meant we only had 25 feet between us and the explosion. Should be fine right? I hooked up the wires and made Isaac hide behind me, just in case. I attached the first wire to the negative then quickly touched the positive. PFFFFT pop…. It was a dud. Isaac sighed.
“Well, that was exciting” he said, disappointingly.
“Let’s try the other one,” I said.
I hooked up the second air-bag device on the barrel and stretched the wires as far as I could, Isaac crouching behind me. Negative wire set. Ever so gently I touched the positive lead. KERPOW!!! A flame shot about four feet up off of the barrel and a shard of metal shot over my head. I felt my hair move. Isaac giggled with glee.
“Do the next one!” he shouted, neither of us realizing we had almost died.
“This is the big one,” I said “It came out of the steering wheel of a Cadillac. Hopefully it works.”
Boy did it! The air bag explosively inflated and launched about 30 feet in the air. It sounded like a shotgun blast. The concussion threw Isaac and I back a bit. Isaac’s younger sister, Emma, came running.
“What was that? She said.
“Nothing to see here,” Isaac shouted as he ran after the airbag, which had landed in the woods.
“Be careful! It might be hot,” I shouted after him.
“Sure is!” he yelled back. “I spit on it and it sizzled.”
He and Emma ran off, Isaac dragging the deflated bag behind him. I stood with pride at the destruction my son and I had wrought. I stood in the glow of this accomplishment for about two minutes, then I headed around to the front of the house.
As I turned the corner around our house I saw my wife looking very sternly at me, while holding the hand of our neighbor who was as white as a ghost and looked a little shaky. Apparently Isaac’s and my experiment caused her pacemaker to skip a beat and shortly after that Isaac and Emma ran up to both of them and spit on the chunk of molten metal in Isaac’s hand to show them how it sizzled.
“Uh Hi!” I said.
Grace, our new neighbor, clutching my wife’s hand and holding her chest, looked up at me with a haggard look.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said.