by "Buck"

June 20, 2005

I hate to "copy" other people's material.  Plagiarism really pisses me
off—especially if I'm the victim, therefore I don't want to sound like
I'm copying….but the theme on an update recently was Jarts.  Well, I
have my own Jarts story—if you'll indulge me, I think you'll find it to be the height of hillbilly entertainment and stupidity.  My neighbor had a set of those lethal weapons when I was in middle school.  Keep in mind—the nearest neighbor during my early years lived a mile and a half away.  One afternoon he was over and brought them.  I'd never seen such glorious missiles—but I was immediately intrigued.  We played them in the approved fashion, tossing them across the yard a safe distance at a ring target.  We did that about…once.  From there—mischief took over.  I decided putting more velocity behind these bad boys, and leveling out their trajectory would be far more entertaining and purposeful.  We hung the target—sort of a small version of a hula-hoop on a bail of hay.  We then got a homemade spud gun and loaded it.  Before I continue—I must explain to city folks what a "spud gun" actually is.

Spud gun – use a piece of PVC pipe, capped with a small hole at the
end for ignition   Propellant—any kind of explosive gas.  Ordinance –
usually a potato, hence the name "spud" gun, but on this occasion
Jart.

Our propellant on this particular day was butane from an old torch my
dad had laying around.  We filled the chamber with the gas—packed the back end of the Jart with a paper towel to form a seal—aimed and used a lighter to ignite.  Translation—we had no fucking idea what we were doing.

The gas exploded—propelling the Jart at a rapid rate across the yard,
into the target, through the bail of hay, through my dad's camper
parked on the opposite side, and embedded in the wall of the barn so deeply that some of the plastic was actually stuck in the wood. Long story short—I got in a shitload of trouble for that nasty hole through my dad's camper and the Jart was cut off flush with the barn and the tip remains embedded in the wall to this day.

I've often relayed to you the fact that it's a miracle I survived
childhood.  Another incident that reinforces that notion was the
time we found dynamite caps in an old building.  Years ago, my
grandfather would use nitroglycerin and dynamite to blast stumps out
of a field after clearing the land for farming.  In those days you
could buy such materials as easily as we buy bread and milk today.
Imagine what would happen today if you went to the Home Depot and
requested a truck load of explosives from the Orange Apron Cult.
Yeah, Tom Ridge and the boys would be ON YOUR ASS.  But I digress… we found the caps in an old shed in a remote part of our
farm.  They had obviously been there for almost a generation.  Their
age alone probably made them VERY unstable—and it's amazing they
didn't blow up when we touched them, but they didn't.

At first, we were tossing rocks at them on the ground and watching
them explode, but that wasn't good enough we moved on to blowing
things up with them…starting with pieces of wood, milk jugs, etch.
All of this had been fairly harmless, until we put SEVERAL of the
camps in a stump and I LAID A HUGE FLAT ROCK OVER THEM.  We ignited the caps and they went off….the rock, roughly the size of my mom's kitchen table went flying at least 100 feet into the air, end over end.  We watched in a trance as the thing appeared to be moving in slow motion—it finally arched and began its dissent….right through the roof to the shit and driving a full foot into the dirt floor of the said shed.  We stared at the rock, standing oddly on its end in the floor—illuminated by the dusty sunbeams bleeding through a gaping hole in the roof.  A few "holy shits" were emitted and we figured that was probably enough fun for one day.

Buck Out

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