The years pass and little boys are slowly transformed into big boys. As the saying goes, “Only the toys change.”

In my case the toys didn’t change they just became louder.

I feel sorry for kids today. No excitement.

When I was a kid we had cherry bombs and M-80,s oh how sweet the sound.
(Perhaps that is one reason that Mama’s hair turned prematurely gray.)

There I was, just a kid, innocently trying to blow things up and before I knew it I was a few years older and actually blowing things up, and getting paid for it to boot. Shucks, what they didn’t know is that I would have done it for nothing; I just loved that big bang! But I am getting ahead of myself…

Today in these strange times it is against the law to even think about possessing dynamite so I would hate to think what might happen if they caught you with a case of Dupont 40% in the trunk of your car.

Way back then if you had some stumps you wanted to blow all you did was go down to the local hardware store and walk out with a half dozen blasting sticks, a box of percussion caps and fifty feet of fuse with no questions asked.

We used dynamite for several relatively innocent endeavors the first of which that comes to mind is fishing, and of course blowing stumps. It must be nored that fishing with dynamite is sort of an indiscriminate form of fishing due to the fact that a stick of dynamite can’t tell the difference between a carp and a bass.

Then I moved to Michigan where they have lots of beavers. Beavers as you know, like to build dams. They like to build dams almost as much as I enjoyed blowing things up.

Beaver dams flood roads and property so I got a job tearing out beaver dams. A couple of sticks of dynamite strategically placed in a beaver dam would blow a nice big hole and release the water and that night the beaver would rebuild the dam and in a few days we would be back making booming noises again.

Those beaver were assuring us of job security. Smart critters them beaver.

Then some desk jockey decided we were having too much fun playing with dynamite so we were given the task of live trapping beaver and discovered that the beaver were smarter than we were.
(More next time) Chaz

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