RAGS TO WILDERNESS

The mountains here were steep and completely covered in thick timber. The dirt road had grass growing in the middle of it making it a two track. In a few spots the grass completely covered the road. No one had been here for a long time and our guess was no one had been here this year except for Stu and Doc.

            Regardless of where we were, I still found myself from time to time struggling to listen for the far-off sound of a vehicle.

            We went to bed without anything to eat, knowing that we would have a nice hot meal the following day. Stu would surely be here in the morning in time for us to have a late breakfast.

            Morning rolled around and there was no Stu to be seen. We listened for the sound of a truck making its way up the road, but one never came. Oh well, we figured, he probably got himself caught up in something with Mom. We were convinced that he would be here sometime during the day.

            I grabbed the cutting torch and started pulling on hoses towards the old mill. While doing this, Frank yelled for me from inside a vessel. “Hey! We should blow something up first before we get into cutting iron. What do you think?”

            “Hell, yeah!” was my response. I loved the idea. It would be a perfect way to start the morning off. I rolled the hoses back up onto the oxygen bottle before making my way towards the boxes of explosives kept under a tarp.

            On my way, the thought of Stu running off of the road on his way back to town last night entered my mind. “Oh no you don’t,” I caught myself. “Don’t be thinking that way. This is the one time that you want him to be showing up.”

            We had six cases of dynamite to blow up iron with and that was where our heads needed to be. I reached into one of the boxes of explosives and counted out five sticks of dynamite. Not knowing what we had in mind to blow up, I decided ten sticks might be the better option.

            Frank approached me with a roll of black tape that he’d found in the fuse box and wrapped all ten sticks tightly together, while laughing at the size of it.

            In no time we had a cap and fuse shoved into one of the sticks that made up part of the large bomb. I held on to it while Frank lit the fuse. “The honor is all yours, find a spot,” Frank said.

            Once sparks were blowing out the end of the fuse, I jumped onto a nearby concrete pad. With fuse burning, I dropped the bundle down inside the jaws of a massive rock crusher that was bolted down to the concrete. Then I turned and ran behind a nearby large fir tree where I found Frank waiting for me to join him.

            Once behind the tree, the idea of us not being far enough away came to mind. We both knew that it would be extremely dangerous to try and seek out shelter somewhere else. The fuse was made up much too short to take the chance of scrambling to a better hiding spot.

            The two of us held our hands over our ears as the blast shattered the silence of the morning. With eyes tightly closed, we were engulfed by the sound of the massive explosion as it encased us.

            The blast sent pieces of cast iron hurling through the sky in every direction, ripping off branches from the tree we were hiding behind, as well as others. We could hear the sounds of iron being slammed into the side of the mountain and surrounding timber.