The Committee for Predatory Detonation

Farm folk, despite their quaint and gentle appearance, are essentially criminal.

To this observation any average sampling confirms the indictment. Even while sitting around a farm shop and generally minding their own business an alteration in character is manifest as Clark Kent turning into Superman, in this case super detonation. Known clandestinely as the Committee for Predatory Detonation, an identity well-known to the FBI as the insurgent CPD. I could detail the names of the membership list but then the county sheriff would have a dossier against which he could check the occasional public complaint. The reader may know the sort, that inexplicable sonic boom, the distant dull thud, perhaps a minor sort of earthquake or sudden bright flashes of light, some accompanied by a discernable mushroom cloud. As explains why I shall not reveal the names and membership list of the CPD, the Committee for Predatory Detonation.

Who meet but occasionally so not to arouse suspicion, rarely by daylight owing what they can now do with spy satellites, like read license plates and shirt size. Most are life-long members, childhood what started with paper caps and progressed to oatmeal box “devices.” Ordinarily the term to use is bomb but with post 9/11 security in place there are detection nets doing active word searches even of newspapers like this. Humorless sorts are those homeland security guys. At this very moment a macro lens swivels in my direction despite I am indoors as I write this, knowing they can see around corners if you are within six feet of a window. Should I write the word BOMB in capital letters even after dark, somebody in some cubical knows it. Which is why I never look out the east window first thing in the morning, instead always check the south window first. An eastward orientation adds to their suspicion especially should I or any other innocent face east first thing in the morning. Soon after the crosshairs are squared on the back of the head and a drone downloaded with the coordinates, this for using the word bomb in print and to mention again, east is the tipping point, god forbid don’t even think macadamia ice cream as might be confused with…mecca.

The Committee for Predatory Detonation is a harmless collection of amateurs and hobbyists, farmkids mostly who have this visceral attachment to matchheads and one inch pipe. Just a bunch of homemade experimenters, if not quite to the scale of the Manhattan Project they have had their moments. Their oath, and they really do have an oath that follows the Boy Scout example not to do harm to plants, animals or the neighborhood. More pointedly to be discreet and so maintain their amateur status. No C-4. To avoid hydrogen peroxide reagents, no low temperature propellants, no LOX, nothing radioactive. Instead, regular stuff, casual materials, off-the-shelf ingredients; hair spray, rubber cement, tire patches, miscellaneous aerosols, various glues, oatmeal, aviation gas, butane lighters, compressed air, propane…like at 50 yards a balloon filled with 50% propane to 50% oxygen (read cutting torch). As said, 50 yards, a candle lit nearby and one J.C. Higgins bolt action single shot. Neat result. Also works as well with aviation gas and doesn’t need the oxygen. Do be very wise with the candle.

There is a country fable among participants of the gargantuan garbage bag, leaf litter size, and mapp gas, that’s the green hose side of the cutting torch. Nifty. After dark, really nifty.

It is amazing what dusts, chaffs and dander when evenly distributed in ordinary air provide a spectacle, that strange bump in the night. Regular old corn meal shaken not stirred will blow a #10 can to smithereens. Do be wise.

As kids few other elements had the attractant power as the word, smithereens. If we were enchanted by other words like rocket-propelled, catapult, projectile, detonation, contrail, boom, bang and a dull ringing in our ears…smithereens was special.

Take the standard issue New Idea manure spreader, not routinely credited as a weapons-grade anything much less a battlefield catapult. But lay out a length of twine on top of a load of manure initially about two feet from the beaters, the far end of the twine tied to a leg of a dead chicken. Once most farms had a pretty steady supply of dead chickens. Some for cats but chickens were more air-worthy and spectacular.

Soon as the beaters caught hold of the twine the slack in that twine is wound up in short order, when the chicken hits the beaters it is approaching escape velocity. Amazing how many farmkids who weren’t particularly good at math knew orbit velocity is 26,400 feet per second. A sudden burst of feathers and the chicken now confessing its sins disappears over the horizon. At the time this pageant seemed to make sense, not to mention the drama, than just feeding another dead chicken to the woods. Cats weren’t nearly so spectacular. Over-ripe watermelons were pretty good except did you ever try to tie baler twine around a watermelon?

After a series of such experiments, this is what we called them, experiments, our dad made us cut off all the twine off the beaters. As a chore it was kinda gross unless you are a farmkid to start with.

Our farm owned a fencepost setter, at least that’s what it was designed to do. A simple device, spring loaded, engaging the PTO wound the spring to a preset point then the clutch disengaged. A couple windups was sufficient to hammer in a standard fencepost. In the muck soil a single windup did the trick. It was when we turned it upside down that the fencepost setter became a marvelous device rather than merely labor-saving. A standard seven-foot tee post was good for two hundred yards. Made a weird whistling sound flying through the air, fence posts without stability vanes tended to tumble, as was another weird sound. Not a whistle so much as a helicopter sort of hyphenated whop-whop syllable, the next time we heard it was Vietnam.

Our grandfather Eugene Fletcher, blessed be the memory of that man, had an early model bale thrower. After the four cylinder Wisconsin engine puked he attached a Ford 262 straight six that had another 1,000 rpm available. Slack off on the compression springs and a hundred feet was pretty easy, a straw bale good for a hundred fifty feet. There is something intrinsically satisfying about a bale of straw sailing fifty yards through the air. Amazing what a hay bale can do to an outhouse.

Silo blowers were designed to loft haylage and silage to various sorts of silos, as members of the Committee for Predatory Detonation we decided to see what else a silo blower could do. No favor to the dead chicken because you had to hold your breath till the breeze cleared the air. A standard size cob of corn was good for 200 feet in the air, where it came down was another thing. Cucumbers were useless and came down everywhere, but Keds were cool and could take several lickings before they no longer resembled Keds. Cats…you don’t want to know.