Firebug

Even when I was a child I knew how to create fire. Back in those days matches and lighters were easy to get. Even non-smoking parents like my own kept them for a variety of reasons. It was the eighties, and though smoking was known to be dangerous to a person’s health it was a risk far more people were willing to take. In those days it was commonplace for guests to smoke in houses.

If a kid was desperate, they could just go to 7-11 and buy a pack of matches for a couple cents and tell the clerk that they were for the parents, who were waiting in the car just out of sight. Back then we didn’t need ID.

When I was a child of about seven or eight years old, I would sneak matches and vanish for the afternoon. Sometimes I went out back to the ‘barrens’, the wild growth against Deerfoot Trail that would eventually become an additional nine holes of Maple Ridge Golf Course, strike them against the box, or the package, and watch the red head with the white dot explode into yellow, red and blue flames. There I would sit and watch as the beautiful dancing flames pop and crackle as they slowly, eagerly, devoured the wooden stick. I also enjoyed the smell of the sulfur as it burned, but what I truly enjoyed was the angry and bitter smell of the burnt and charred wood after watching the flame shrink until it vanished.

That was why I was becoming a firebug. The seductive flames dancing around my head like the song of a siren at sea, the beautiful smells of wood burning, and the knowledge that maybe—just maybe—I could be caught with my pants down, proverbially speaking.

As the days and weeks went on, I became less interested in burning matches and more interested in how other things burned. I wanted to know what fire was on an intimate level, why it did what it did, and how it could be so dangerous yet so seductively beautiful. It started at home with me watching as a piece of paper went alight and burned dangerously close to my precious fingertips. I would always do it when I knew my parents were at work and wouldn’t be home for at least a couple hours so I could let the house air out.

I remember the general apex of my career as a young firebug, but some of the more specific details may have been lost through the years. Some are hazy like a city suffering next door to a forest fire.

It was a nice summer afternoon with only a wisp of a breeze and a clear blue sky. My parents were at home doing what parents did when not surrounded by their little ones. My sister was someplace else, and that suited me just fine. Both of us loved each other, but like most siblings at that age, we were not completely close. I had some paper and matches and the urge to burn.

Not far down the street from the front of my house was a large man-made ditch the neighborhood lovingly called the ‘gully’. To a little boy it was huge. With the exception of a small grove of bushes at one corner, the ditch was completely open for all to see.

I told my parents I was going out and would be back by dinner, and vanished to have my fun and satiate that strange urge. The little patch of bushes was only about ten feet in length and half that in width, barely enough to hide me from the road beside and behind me. I was almost completely exposed to the gully, which was strangely empty that day.

Like an addict only seconds away from shooting brown gold into his veins, I tossed the paper aside and brought out my stolen box of matches. Reverently, I opened the box and stared down at the brown rectangular wood, the bulging red sulfur head and the strike-able white dot on the tip. I had copious amounts of my heroin which would give me a euphoric high that would last for hours.

I lit a match and watched with pure fascination and childish lust as the fire sputtered audibly and finally roared to life. I watched as the fire slowly, but surely, ate the light brown wood turning it into something black, curled and useless. Sometimes the fire would coo at me with its naughty hisses and pops, and I would listen, rapt. But I would always have to shake the flame into nothingness lest it try to eat me and turn my fingers into something black and useless.

I placed a bit of torn paper on the dirt floor beneath the bushes, raked my hands through the grass to coax out the dead and pile it upon the paper. With eyes wide and greedy, I took out a match, slide it quickly over the striker on the side and lovingly lit the edge of the paper. The flame licked, tasted and finally caught a liking of the paper, and then it tasted the dead grass and enjoyed that even more. The small flame fed and grew, ate some more, and grew even higher. My eyes grew like the flames, my blood boiled in ecstasy as the heat from my small fire radiated out.

With something as beautiful as the fire, how could I even contemplate that the grass at the edge of the bushes had caught fire? How could I fathom that the famished fire was about to light the bushes?

Even though I heard my dog Suzette from somewhere close behind, I was already caught. My mother and father was taking her for a walk and smelled the smoke; from what I understand they were just coming to see if they could put it out without calling the fire department.

Even before I knew what was happening, a foot crashed down onto my fire and stomped the beautiful creature out until it was dead. I stared up at my father with what must have been absolute horror on my face, kind of like the junky who just realizes they bought from an undercover cop.

There have been very few times I have seen my father incredibly furious, but that moment was certainly one of them. He looked as if there was a raging fire behind his eyes as he stared at me balefully.

“Give me those!” He growled and swiped the matches out of my paralyzed hands. Using a time-honored cliché, taking the matches from me must have been as easy as taking candy from a baby. “You will go right home, mister!”

“Consider yourself grounded for the rest of your life!” My mother added. Her voice was high like a furious banshee.

I raced home as fast as I could. The self-preservation side of me knew to do exactly as they commanded. When they got home from walking the dog, leaving me to steep in my own fear, they did ground me. It was only two weeks, but to a child of my age two weeks is nothing short of an eternity. I did learn my lesson that day, but the fire in the bushes was not the last one I would ever set.