Fields of Gold: Burn Baby Burn/Garbage Inferno!

When you live so fucking far away from civilization, garbage collection doesn't exist (like Michael Jackson), so the best way to deal with your trash is to burn the shit out of it. So that's exactly what we did.

It became a weekly ritual to set the heaps of trash that had accumulated over a 7 day span ablaze. This was achieved with a handheld butane torch (Good times), and an accelerant such as gasoline. See, back then, gasoline was astoundingly cheap, so it was thereby astoundingly easy to do this every week. There was a gas station just down the road, so a blazing pyre was only a short drive away at all times. Most of the "bonfires" we had were nothing short of epic, involving small and often intentional explosions via not-quite-spent aerosol cans and/or lighters that clearly state "Do not incinerate, you dumb fuck. What's wrong with you? Hey, wait, what are you doing? Is that gasoline? No.. No.. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Really, they did say that. As you know, however, Fortune's don't take instructions very well, and we did it anyways. Throughout the swiss cheese block I call my memory, I recall there being about 5 different fire-pits (piles?) scattered across the property and switching sites occurred only when one pile had become too great to place anything else atop it.

Some of our more memorable fires involved the burning of tires that were on the property for one reason or another, and subsequently burning a hole in the ozone. Another addition to the fire history books involved the unintentional setting-fire of a clubhouse that was built many a year prior, an incident which actually had burned a tree to the point where it just fell down. On whom you may ask? (You probably didn't, but I'm going to tell you.) My brother, that's who. He was minding his own business watching the pyre eat at our childhood clubhouse and suddenly there was a loud cracking noise, and before he could react, a tree fell on him. Fortunately, he was leaning back onto an old car on the property, and when the tree landed, it landed in such a way that he was untouched by its branches and leaning against the car.

Lucky break, brother. Lucky break.