Fun in the Kitchen

One of the things that I'll always cherish about Wes was curiosity about life and his love of learning. The desire to learn about the world he was in not only enabled him to excel in school, but often led to some bizarre "real world" experiments. During one summer between school years in high school (I would guess that it was either 1998 or 1999) Wes and I were "hanging out" at his house as was the norm for us. On this particular occasion, it was just Wes and I and we were discussing "fun" modifications that we could make to the tamed-down legal fireworks in order to make them more exciting. I had heard tell of an urban legend that involved painstakingly emptying out the contents of hundreds, if not thousands, of "poppers" into a large napkin. This would allow us to make a huge popper and would (theoretically) vastly increase the explosiveness of a standard popper. Upon hearing about this potentially awesome popper bomb that we could make, Wes enthusiastically agreed to start our own experiment of this idea.

We set up shop on the Truman's kitchen table and began the tedious work of emptying the insides of popper after popper onto a napkin that we had chosen. After approximately an hour we had a small mountain of what we called gunpowder. With each addition to the pile we would giggle with glee at the thought of our bomb making a huge explosion in the street. It was going to be legendary and something that we would definitely have to tell our other friends about. Had Phil or Lucinda known what we were "cooking" in the kitchen, they would have certainly asked us to take it outside...and for good reason. I'm not sure how or why it happened, but when the contents of the next popper were poured onto the pile, a huge blinding and deafening explosion erupted right before us. Dazed and ears ringing, it took me a moment to realize what had happened at a completely unexpected moment. We brushed charred bits of grit out of our hair and tried to spit out the bits of "shrapnel" that had mysteriously ended up in our mouths. At first, we weren't sure whether to laugh or cry. On one hand, our faces and arms stung from thousands of little bits of explosive, and moreover, our hard work had been completely wiped out in less than a second. On the other hand, the explosion was...AWESOME...we were just a little too close when it happened. We were fairly certain that had we stopped a few minutes sooner, that we would have had ourselves a completely functional super popper (although we never did work up the courage to attempt this again).

Ultimately we settled on laughing as we attempted to clean up the gigantic mess that we had made of Wes' parent's kitchen and adjoining living room. I'm sure that to this day somewhere in 4851 Torrence Drive there are still tiny bits of our experiment-gone-wrong hidden despite our best clean up efforts. Whenever this story came up over the next decade or so, it would make us laugh and look back fondly upon the good times that we shared.

-Matt McArthur