Kids, Never Play With Matches
The summer following The Infamous Flood was hot and dry. The roar of logging trucks down the highway dwindled as successive cut blocks were closed by the Ministry of Forestry, and the radio was filled with reminders not to toss your lit cigarette butts out the car window.
For us the heat and sun were joyous, building rafts and bullheading for hours on end. It was nirvana to be a kid and probably for my Mother, knowing she simply had to open the back door about 8AM and not expect to have kids underfoot until lunchtime!
As per normal we moved into the big tents in the backyard on Victoria Day weekend, one tent for the three boys and the other for the girls! This added an extra dimension of joy to our summers, able to sneak out in the middle of the night to play ‘knocky-knocky-nine-doors’ or raid Old Lady Davidson’s garden. By the way Old Lady Davidson was not really old. She was in fact Clay’s Mom, with a healthy dislike for children and the Law children in particular. It might have all stemmed from the roman candles that consumed her mailbox on Halloween every year, but not sure. Later on we stopped raiding her garden as she fell victim to the same plundering as our plum tree.
One day, Clay having gone shopping with his Mother, Martin and I explored the woods across the highway. In particular the same woods that had provided the pine boats. Where the pine trees had been cut down a number of stumps remained. One in particular, an especially large and rotten stump in the middle of the lot attracted our attention.
Now that summer I carried around a GI Joe figurine, a gift from Steve on one of his trips up from California. Molded from khaki green plastic ‘Joe’ had had many adventures, swinging a few times from my homemade parachutes and once flying several hundred feet aloft on the tail of a kite before crashing into the bay.
On this day I played with Joe on top of this rotten stump, deep in some battle on a foreign shore. Quickly that got boring and so we decided to ‘liven’ up the action. Martin also just happened to have a box of matches, purloined no doubt from Addie’s pantry (Addie being his Mother).
You know where this is going?
In short we lit the top of the stump on fire, a wee fire, just enough for Joe to valiantly leap through to capture the enemy! This got a bit tiring after awhile, not to mention a couple of singed eyebrows, so we dumped water on the fire from the creek and went off to get a snack.
Unbeknownst to us a few small embers had burrowed into the old stump. By midnight a small curl of smoke wafted over the stump and by daybreak half an acre of forest was in full flame!
Again I hid.
All day my Father, my brothers and every available man fought that fire. At one point the local volunteer fire dept had a pumper truck sucking water out of the creek to spray the flames! By sundown the fire was out, with heavy smoke still covering the neighbourhood. But my Father didn’t stop, going in and out of the forest searching and putting out hot spots. I was to find out shortly why.
Martin had confessed to his part in the ‘crime’ but told him Mother and my Father early in the day that he didn’t know where I had gone. Ut oh, this was a red flag for my Father. Meanwhile I hid in the house, thinking that my life would be over when Dad returned. Finally I got up the nerve and emerged to take responsibility for the fire.
My Dad was coming across the backyard, dirt and soot from head to foot when I came out the basement door. He stopped and looked at me hard. Now you need to know that as a child neither of my parents were expressive of their affection, more showing in the things they did how they cared. And then he hugged me, thats all, just a hug and then he was off to wash up.
The fire was never mentioned again and neither Martin or I ever stole matches out of Addie’s pantry.