This story of fucking up begins with a lack of power in the battery of our tent trailer. My cousins and I used to go camping for a week or so in the Santa Cruz mountains when i was a teenager. This was usually in the Big Basin campground but Henry Cowell the location of this actual story.
If you have read this site in any depth you know I am a nerd and fond of role-playing games. This was the focal point of all our camping trips. We would load my parents old Coleman tent trailer full of food and games and spent a week or more with limited supervision. This was great for us though really we should have had someone a little wiser watching us. While we were playing dungeons and dragons 90% of the time, it was the remaining 10% that was worrisome.
This particular trip we had my cousin Rick, his cousin Anthony and my friend Keith De Carlo in attendance. It was fun but early one we realized we had an issue with running the lights inside the tent as there was something going funny with the battery. It was some years old and may not have been up to snuff to begin with. This was a problem as we wanted to spend most of the night playing Dungeons and Dragons. The nature of the game is reading and note taking intensive so you do need full visibility to see.
We had a few candles stored for emergency purposes, by my parents, stashed in the trailer. This was the best solution we had and quickly we had a glass ash tray configures with a candles to provide light. This was passable for an evening but really was not great. I say this until a strange set of events turned the candle stand into an open flame lantern. The first step in this process was the complete liquidation of the candles into a broth of liquid wax, due to the heat of an enclosed tent and the lit candles themselves. Next there was some sort of wagering about putting things in and out of the flames uncharred. At some point the outside of a box of matches was played over the flames. This was almost magical as the cardboard soaked up the wax and served as a wick.
Circumstances had provided us with the ideal solution to our lighting needs. Here then the male brain's simplicity befouled our results, If one was good more is better. The next day we traveled into the little town of Felton to gather supplies to make more of these lanterns. We didn't really find a cheap solution of the ash tray but assumed the bottom half of coke cans would do the job. This would be the turning point from novel solution to out right fuck up.
The coke can versions of the lanterns worked all too well. Providing light for each of us to study our Players Handbooks and read up all the spells we needed so desperately to know. The continued until the cans reached a certain heating point where the liquid wax was actually drawn up the inner wall of the cans. The wicks we provided were no longer the point of ignition but rather the entire top of the coke can. The cans had now become some thing akin to a modest Molotov cocktail, blazing freely at one end the other ended in a heated to scalding hot coke can.
In recognition of our Fuck up the ersatz braziers were quickly hurled out the door, generally at the fire pit the good folks at Henry Cowell had provided in our camp. The burns were luckily minor to our persons, though the trailers table was burned and I was doomed to catch some level of hell from my parents.
I suppose the lesson was not to experiment with fire upon your parents property or perhaps something with heat and vacuums. Really i am not sure.
If you have read this site in any depth you know I am a nerd and fond of role-playing games. This was the focal point of all our camping trips. We would load my parents old Coleman tent trailer full of food and games and spent a week or more with limited supervision. This was great for us though really we should have had someone a little wiser watching us. While we were playing dungeons and dragons 90% of the time, it was the remaining 10% that was worrisome.
This particular trip we had my cousin Rick, his cousin Anthony and my friend Keith De Carlo in attendance. It was fun but early one we realized we had an issue with running the lights inside the tent as there was something going funny with the battery. It was some years old and may not have been up to snuff to begin with. This was a problem as we wanted to spend most of the night playing Dungeons and Dragons. The nature of the game is reading and note taking intensive so you do need full visibility to see.
We had a few candles stored for emergency purposes, by my parents, stashed in the trailer. This was the best solution we had and quickly we had a glass ash tray configures with a candles to provide light. This was passable for an evening but really was not great. I say this until a strange set of events turned the candle stand into an open flame lantern. The first step in this process was the complete liquidation of the candles into a broth of liquid wax, due to the heat of an enclosed tent and the lit candles themselves. Next there was some sort of wagering about putting things in and out of the flames uncharred. At some point the outside of a box of matches was played over the flames. This was almost magical as the cardboard soaked up the wax and served as a wick.
Circumstances had provided us with the ideal solution to our lighting needs. Here then the male brain's simplicity befouled our results, If one was good more is better. The next day we traveled into the little town of Felton to gather supplies to make more of these lanterns. We didn't really find a cheap solution of the ash tray but assumed the bottom half of coke cans would do the job. This would be the turning point from novel solution to out right fuck up.
The coke can versions of the lanterns worked all too well. Providing light for each of us to study our Players Handbooks and read up all the spells we needed so desperately to know. The continued until the cans reached a certain heating point where the liquid wax was actually drawn up the inner wall of the cans. The wicks we provided were no longer the point of ignition but rather the entire top of the coke can. The cans had now become some thing akin to a modest Molotov cocktail, blazing freely at one end the other ended in a heated to scalding hot coke can.
In recognition of our Fuck up the ersatz braziers were quickly hurled out the door, generally at the fire pit the good folks at Henry Cowell had provided in our camp. The burns were luckily minor to our persons, though the trailers table was burned and I was doomed to catch some level of hell from my parents.
I suppose the lesson was not to experiment with fire upon your parents property or perhaps something with heat and vacuums. Really i am not sure.
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