Lighting Fires

Towards the end of primary school we were running out of things to do on the weekend or in our spare time.

A group of friends and myself would just ride around on our bikes in search of fun stuff to do. We enjoyed making sparkler bombs but they cost money. In our pockets would always be a lighter to light the sparkler bomb up.

We previously lit a bush land on fire by mistake, lighting up a massive tree causing the fire brigade to come. Hurrying off on our bikes like we were about die, before anyone could blame us for it.

We decided to light small fires just because they were amusing. We would use sticks, leaves and pretty much anything we could find. At the end of every day our clothes would always smell like fire.

The real fun of lighting fires was spreading out the smoke so nobody could tell its a fire and get us in trouble. Riding around doing our own thing would always lead to lighting fires, which turned out to be most days. Every fire we did we made sure to put it out afterwards and slowly were making them bigger and bigger.

On top of this we would still make sparkler bombs with our spare money. One of the most amusing thing to watch was when we would get doggie poop bags and light the bottom of it, causing the plastic to drip while still on fire.

On the hot days we would go over each others house and continue to get up to mischief. I had two back yards one was behind my backyard and was over grown with grass and weeds. This was part of the sewage drain for emergencies.

We would lite parts of this on fire because it was really easy to go up and we had a hose to put it out. I also had these tiki torches and lawn mower petrol. We would fill my bird bath up with petrol then use the tiki torch to light it. Because the bird bath was on wood chip we would use my door mat to suffocate the fire instead of using water which could splash it down.

My friend slept over mine one night and we had been playing with fire in my 2nd back yard all day. My mum got home after working all day and night. She had a look outside and there was smoke everywhere and the whole back yard was on fire. Lucky enough we managed to use our hose and get rid of it after a few hours.

You would of thought by that I would of learnt my lesson.

I continued to make small fires around the neighbour hood with my friends. One day I was with only one of my friends and we were at our primary school which we did most of the fires around.

The school had just finished cutting back all of its trees and had a massive stack of dry wood and leaves. Of course we lit this on fire, the fire was huge almost out of control. For no reason the kindy teacher was in her class room and came out yelling at us. We managed to put the fire out surprisingly easy, she identified us to the police.

I went back over my friends house the next day and the police came. They were going to give us a juvenile warning and a fine. We denied everything and my friends dad and mum said we were with them all day. With out photographic evidence of us doing the fire we were unable to get into any trouble.

We all stopped lighting fires all together because even though we didn't get in trouble, we learnt our lesson.