The Dynamite Diaries: A Schoolyard Saga

Ok, so grade 6… I was 11 years old. It was a Saturday, and I told my parents I was spending the night at James’s house. James told his parents he was staying at Chris’s house, Chris at Todd’s, and so on. So, me and 5 or 6 of my friends ditched out and spent the night walking all over town. Not doing anything bad, really. We just walked along the railroad tracks, throwing rocks at anything in sight, talking about which girls were growing boobs – that sort of thing – and how awesome we were going to be next year playing American football. We had walked quite a ways, and when we looked up, we were at the railroad station. James said it was where his father worked, and he knew the code to get in. So, we went inside and looked all around. He showed us his dad’s office, and we stood and talked for a while. Just as we were about to leave, one of the guys spotted a wooden crate, and on it, it said “DANGER EXPLOSIVE” – it was a crate of dynamite. So, uh… somehow, two bricks of dynamite may have accidentally ended up in my pockets. I took two bricks, James one of the small ones, and a couple of guys took some as well.

The next day, my brothers and I went to the lake we lived beside. All of our time was spent at the lake hunting, fishing, and shooting guns – just normal Texas boy stuff. My brothers and I sat one of the dynamite bricks on a rock at the bottom of a cliff, then carried some large rocks up to the top. We dropped them one by one until – BOOM! One of them hit, and it exploded to high hell…!!! Our guardian angels were working overtime that day; we felt the ground shake when it exploded, and suddenly the ground gave way beneath us as the cliff collapsed! I don’t know how we were not at the bottom of that avalanche, but by God’s grace, we were on top of it all – and laughing! I still remember seeing the shockwave of displaced air for the blink of an eye. Stupid kids as we were, we were lucky that we were all up on the top together, and not one of us was waiting at the bottom watching. The side of the cliff was crumbled, and we looked over and saw that the fallen dirt had unearthed a femur bone. I grabbed it and held it to my leg, and the size was close to mine! We dug a little more, and there was a child’s shoe next to another child-sized bone. That was enough for us; we ran home and told our father that we found the skeleton of a dead kid. He said to take him and let him see – of course, he didn’t know about the dynamite yet. My father saw the scene and then told us not to go near it. He rushed home and called the police. I remember they had police tape everywhere, and so many different branches of law enforcement; they even brought in a pathologist from a different city because our little town didn’t have one. The pathologist arrived, and I remember the sun had started going down and so many police lights were reflecting off everything. We got to hang out at the edge of the scene and watch. After a few minutes, we saw the pathologist laughing as he walked up to his vehicle and drove away. Well, it turned out that the bones were that of a dead dog, and the shoe just happened to be randomly there next to it… but everyone thought the same thing too… Hehehehe!

So, James and I agreed to take dynamite to school the next day and set it off at lunch. The bell rang, and all of the kids were outside playing and talking. James said he was ready, and he sat his brick down on the sidewalk. The school was building a new cafeteria just across the dirt road beside the playground, and there were lots of caliche rocks that were dug up – caliche is a rock made out of chalk, and if you squeeze it, it breaks into powder. We saw a big one and walked across the dirt road to pick it up. It was so heavy that the two of us were side-stepping it all the way back. We caught the attention of a few kids as we shuffled back, and then a few kids more, and more, until it seemed the whole student body was gathered around to see what was happening. We smiled at each other as we saw all of the kids around us and said, “On 3…” We counted it off, raised the rock in the air, and dropped it. I had every intention of dropping the rock and sprinting to safety… but I was 11 years old and didn’t understand physics yet. No sooner did I turn to run – BOOM!!! I remember hearing an “Eeeeeeeeee…” sound with my ears ringing, and it blew me forward, so all I could see was the ground, then the sky, the ground, the sky… I don’t remember how many times the blast flipped me over, but OMG, the shell shock! We were so lucky that it was the smaller dynamite because the full brick would have likely killed most of us! LOL!!! The chalk from the caliche rock made this huge mushroom cloud, and this white powder hung thick in the air like London fog. All of these white-faced children were running away crying or laughing as there were teachers from EVERYWHERE running in frantically, carrying crying children away in their arms. I can still see Mr. Warren’s face of terror as he was carrying some crying kid, but some of the kids were rolling on the ground laughing. I ran! I ran and hid between the school buses, thinking of where I was going to run away to! But then I heard some drums playing, and I snapped out of panic mode. The bell would ring soon, and the next class was Band – and I played the drums. I ran up the stairs and went inside, and it was Tony (James’s cousin), and he asked if that was mine that went off. I reached in my pocket and pulled mine out with a smile. He said we have to set it off; we can’t get caught with it. I looked over and saw the windows open, and I leaned out to the edge and looked down. It was perfect… I looked across the dirt road where the cafeteria was being built, and there were stacks and stacks of bricks. I told Tony to hang on, and I ran down the stairs and across the road and grabbed a brick. I ran back and stood under the window, looking up and measuring where I needed to set it – perfect spot! I ran back up with the brick and leaned out as Tony held my waist. I took careful aim and… Sssssssssseeeeewww (bomb whistle sound) BOOM! Once again, I saw the displaced air, and it happened so fast I wasn’t able to fully get back inside. It was so loud that it shook the building! My ears were already ringing from the first one, and now this! The school was shaped like an elongated square “C,” and we were in the middle, but the sheer sound waves bouncing to and fro in that cauldron of concrete buildings… it was ungodly loud. I was in shock because you could feel the building shake when it blew. We ran over to the drums and began to innocently play and act like nothing had happened. Suddenly, I heard CLOM CLOMP CLOMP up the stairs. I am laughing so damn hard right now typing this…!!! It was Joe’s father (Joe was with us when we stole the dynamite, which makes it even funnier). His dad, Dan, was the manager of the buses. He was holding his glasses in one hand and had a red-splotched handkerchief in the other as he dabbed at the bloody shards of glass that were stuck in his face and beard. I said, “Oh, Dan, I am so sorry!” He was so angry that his eye was twitching! He didn’t speak; he just pointed aggressively at me and then sharply pointed downstairs. I followed him down and went into the bus office, and he handed me a broom and dustpan and pointed at the mess – there was glass and papers and potato chips everywhere! What happened was, Dan was sitting in his office eating lunch, and the bus office is right below the band hall in the basement level. The windows there are all at ground level. The bad thing is that his office window was right where I placed the dynamite. So, he was eating at his desk as he watched me run across and get the brick, run back, and place something in front of his window, and then run up the stairs. There was a slice of sandwich bread with maybe two bites out of it, but I never found the rest of the sandwich. God, I’m laughing so hard right now. So, I cleaned it all, and he still said nothing; he just pointed aggressively at the Principal’s office. I was walking to my doom, it seemed. I tried to make it take as long as possible, but the door was only meters away. I opened the door and heard the muffled sounds of police radios, and I knew my life was forfeit. I walked in… I saw one of my other friends and his father being taken to a room by a police officer. Head down, eyes forward – I walked past all of the officers and directly into the principal’s office. My father was there, as were some other fathers. It turned out that the police were already at the school from the first explosion when I set my brick off, and there were officers out looking for “whoever” caused the new explosion. Ooooh… man, the gravity of the situation hit me, and the look on my father’s face – I knew I was going to get the hell beaten out of me. When I said it shook the building, that’s because it cracked and blew out the mortar between the bricks on that side of the building and caused some structural damage – as well as breaking the windows, of course. Lucky, with the construction of the cafeteria across the street already taking place, it was cheaper to repair the building. My father only had to pay the price of the material and labor, and the contractor accepted cash. They had to get all new windows on the side and demo out that wall completely and rebuild it. I’ll spare recounting the beating I got that day, but it was well-earned, but looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing and would do it all over again.