Pro-Pain

As you could probably tell if you read any of my earlier posts here, I don’t have the best luck with electricity. Well, as it turns out, I’m not all that keen on fire, either.

It is always important to remember that fire and children do not mix well, unless you’d like a miniaturized Hindenburg on your hands.

I was probably eight or nine years old at the time of the incident. My dad had purchased a modular Coleman smoker / cooker propane powered bar-be-cue unit. It was fairly round, black, and cylindrical. You could stack modules up over the base unit to extend the center of the unit upwards, so that you could accommodate more than just one layer of whatever it was you were trying to cook, smoke, or otherwise char.

When you stacked up the modules and put the lid on the unit, it appeared to be a very shiny black rocket.

To light the unit, there was a tiny little “match” tube along the bottom of the unit. You would strike the match, and the gas whooshing out of the nozzle would connect with the flame, and voila! Instant combustion.


So, imagine, if you will, what happens when you involve a clumsy, shy, very introverted nine year-old, give him matches, and instructions that may have been age appropriate for an adult, but not for an inattentive hyperactive youngster.


So, Dad sets up the smoker, stacks it high, and places racks of salmon throughout the unit. On goes the lid. He goes into the house for some reason, and suggests that I light the unit.

Why? I’m not sure, I don’t actually remember. Some fun reason I’m sure, matches, propane, and me.

He issues instructions to me as follows:

Turn the tank to open, open the valve on the cooker all the way until you can hear the gas whooshing, then strike the match and hold it to the tube until the flame ignites the cooker.


Yeah, sure.

So I go out to the unit, turn on the propane tank feed, turn on the valve all the way on the cooker, I don’t hear anything. I probably was too nervous.

So I wander back into the house, and ask my dad the instructions again, to make sure I heard him correctly. He re-iterates the commands to me. No one realizes that I've had the unit on the "on" position this whole time.


I go back out to the back deck, where the cooker sits, light the match, bring the match down to the light tube, and……..


KABOOM!

The lid flies off, probably 30 feet into the air, and lands somewhere else, salmon flies out of the internal parts of the rocket cooker, and lands on the garage roof, I singed my eyebrows off, turned pale white, walked in through the rear patio window. My mother says that I screamed and passed out, or some such. Honestly, I don’t have a clue what happened.

Apparently the gas was flowing freely before I ever left the unit to re-confirm the instructions. In the time it took me to get confirmation, and head back out to the deck, the “rocket” portion of the cooker had basically filled up with propane, and when I lit it, propane does what propane is supposed to do, ignite.

Many people laughed, many people still laugh, and I admit that if it hadn’t happened to me, it probably would have been funny.

To me, I just make sure that I carry a flame around before ever making an attempt to light something.

I try to leave fire to someone else more talented, and less prone to eyebrow injury.