4th
Entry posted by Bobby Bass ·
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MOST OF THE time I have a hard time starting an opening paragraph for a update here at Lake Iwanttobethere, that is not the case here this past 4th of July as I have many. So I am just going to throw some out there in random order.
4th of July is of course is a time for celebration but it is also a time for bright lights and fireworks and also the time for blowing things up under the cover of fireworks. I received a call from the wife there is one less woodchuck in the garden at the cabin as it was shot by her using my twenty gage. I will need to clean the shotgun when I get home and she told me the body was tossed off the dock into the waters of Lake Iwanttobethere. I started to complain about that asking why she did not just bury it till she told me a big northern scooped up the wood chuck almost as soon as it hit the water. I guess I need to start fishing off the dock with a bigger sucker minnow.
At the RESORT there is no longer a curve in the driveway as Hammering Hank and Skinny blew out the big maple stump that was in the way.
A few beaver dams have been removed from the trout stream (Arlo) and there is a pool that has been deepen (Arlo)
Remember when you were young like twelve or thirteen and you had these great ideas but you lacked finical backing? Well when you get to be fifty or sixty that is no longer a problem. You can use cash, savings, borrow or barter, wheel and deal or share your ideas with others. On the fourth of July this year a number of things were tried that were first thought of in our youth. First off I do want to say that a gathering of men without kids or wife’s are usually done at deer camp and now we have the RESORT where kids and wife’s don’t belong on the 4th. Early in the day the FELLOWS tied several of their kid’s GI Joe miniature solders to bottle rockets duck taped together and then shot them skyward to watch them float back to the ground using their parachutes
Next estes rocket engines were placed inside their shipping tubes with a cherry bomb as a nose cone and launched off into the sky. They gave a satisfying explosion about five hundred feet into the sky. We had to stop that when somehow we shot out a passing drone. The drone sank in the waters of the bay before we could get to it. Funny because Vic had gone out to the mailbox that morning and put up the big sign that said explosives were going to be used that day and it had the skull and bones painted on it. We had borrowed the sign from the mine and will return it tomorrow, funny how people just can’t read warning signs.
The night before we had taken the outboards off the wood rowboats and had a bottle rocket and Roman candle war was held on the bay. I will add at this time the disclaimer that there was no drinking involved by any of the participants, just like it would have been if we were twelve.
4th of July night was a lot of fun as we did something we had been planning for months. We were going to try and out do Nytelyters Fireworks display down on Root Beer Island. I heard on KCUM radio that 43 % of al Americans go to a public fireworks display, the rest stay at home and shoot off their own or do nothing, we had a plan. Some where somehow the FELLOWS picked up what is suppose to be a civil war motar. It is big enough to shoot a bowling ball and of course that is what we started off with at dusk. So does a bowling ball make noise when it lands in the woods on the other side of the bay if we hope no one is there? Does a bowling ball make noise when ten bowling pins are in front of it when they all land on the other side of the bay?" I might add it was a perfect strike about halfway across.
Awhile back I wrote about how the FELLOW had brought back a crane to the RESORT. Well we have found many uses for the crane all the way from a very very high deer stand to moving picnic tables and outhouses around the RESORT. Well it also works very well in moving a civil war mortar to the edge of the bog where the FELLOWS dug it in and used the bog as a cushion. We also moved all of our fire extinguishers to that location and the old boat was filled with water and suspended over the motar just in case it was needed. Now I hear the first shot that was fired was perfectly timed between some shots Nytelyter and fired off and a few people down at the boat landing took notice of the cloud in the sky. Second shot was noticed a little more but our third shot was kind of special. I will take credit as it was something from my youth that I wanted to recreated
When I was maybe twelve or so A couple of my buddies saved our money and we bought about ten boxes of paper book matches from a very young Ma and Ma grocery store and we clipped off all the match heads and put them into a glass freeze dried coffee container that was shaped like a motar..We than ran a cord or something I don’t remember and lit off about 10,000 match heads at the same time. A roar of flame maybe ten feet high went skyward and it was the hottest est coolest thing we had ever done up to that point. Now being 756 months old I wanted to recreate that using the civil war motar. The last several months we have been secretly buying up paper book matches we cut off the heads, and now we put in a bowling ball and filled the motar with thousands of match heads, well maybe tens of thousands of match heads, actually I don’t really know, it filled the area in front of the bowling ball and I guess we forgot about the charge we had placed in behind the bowling ball.
Now all of us being hopefully a little older and smarter we also had brought up the back hoe to hide behind and with Nytelyters fireworks display coming to an end we had Elmer on his cell phone giving us the thumbs up to fire our motar off. It was not what we expected. It was way more!!! I only got to see a brief moment as the flame shot out of the motor and I was blinded by the light. It shot out in an arc across the bay and Elmer said from his vantage point it looked like a second sunset had appeared in the sky. The boom echoed through the bay and seemed to get louder each time. The crowd at the boat landed gave out a collective awe. And when it was done and we could see again we gagged at the sulfur cloud in the air. We all looked at each other with twelve year old grins and as we shook our heads back and forth saying no we said out loud we have to do this again ! Not this year though as the motor was gone. The explosion had driven it into the bog and steam was rising were it had been a moment before. Tiny tripped the release and the boat hanging from the crane dumped its load of water into the hole and the bog closed up around the mortar. We all agreed that later in the summer we would dig it back up, it would be safer that way here at Lake Iwanttobethere
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