If you have read some of the other stories here you know that things were a LOT different when I was younger in Texas. For one thing, you could walk into a hardware store and buy ammunition and explosives without so much as a raised eyebrow at any age.
On the ranch, we used small sticks of dynamite to remove stubborn tree stumps. Every so often I would take the pickup into town and buy more. I should also note that I did not have a drivers license. I was too young to get one. The town police didn’t care as long as I didn’t hit anything. Which I never did.
Snakes on the ranch were an ongoing nuisance. I can’t even hazard a guess as to how many rattlesnakes I shot while working there. It was a lot. We knew where they were living and breeding, it was cave along a bluff by the river that ran through the ranch. Nights in the bunkhouse we would spend countless hours devising all manner of ways to eradicate them.
Then we hit on the idea of blowing up the cave. We had the dynamite…what could go wrong? In hindsight I wish we had thought it through a little better.
Several of us got a good size stick of explosive and headed to the cave. We cut a length of primer cord long enough for us to get safely away before it went off. We did rock-paper scissors to see who would walk up to the cave and toss it in. Thankfully I did not win that game.
So, the loser walked gingerly up to the cave entrance and right past several sleeping but wary snakes at the opening. He had put on snake proof chaps just in case. Then he lit the fuse, tossed it in the cave and ran full speed back to where we were waiting. We all laughed at what was about to happen.
The stick went off with a huge boom. Dust, rocks and snakes came flying our way. Not just bits of snakes but entire snakes who were angry beyond belief. It literally rained snakes, and snake parts all around us.
Now we had a serious problem. How to get back to the bunkhouse. We moved slowly and shot a good dozen snakes before we got clear of them.
When we got back the foreman asked what the explosion was, so we told him. He proceeded to tell us that we were the craziest hands he had ever worked with and we were lucky that none of us got bit. As a result he said that the area around the cave was off limits for the next few months.
Once in a very great while, I will relive that event in my dreams…or should I call it a nightmare?