The Vanquished Foe!

Buh Bye!

In a nighttime scorched earth campaign the yellow jackets that had taken up residence in my yard met a fiery end. Daytime reconnaissance missions have not been undertaken to assure that the threat has been neutralized, but such a mission is planned for tomorrow.

I have been told that the only thing necessary to get rid of a bunch of yellow jackets is to pour petrochemicals down the hole to their nest. It is apparently not that important setting said petrochemicals on fire, but having done 8 years in the Boy Scouts of America, adding fire was a source of additional entertainment.

Few people realize that one of the main reasons for the existence of the BSA is to give boys a chance to play with knives and fire. If you don't believe me, just ask your average Boy Scout what they did to entertain themselves on their last camping trip. My bet is that knives and fire will figure in to the stories that you hear!

I decided to use kerosene for the nighttime raid because I had every intention of setting the stuff on fire, and I've heard too many stories about folks ending up like crispy critters when using gasoline for similar operations.

Of course, there was the one immensely humorous story that I heard on the John Boy and Billy Big Show a couple of years ago that described what happened when a fellow used gasoline to take care of a yellow jacket's nest that unbeknownst to him went all the way into his septic tank. According to the story, when he lit it, the resulting explosion of gasoline and septic tank gasses launched the lid of his septic tank nearly into orbit, (I think that they said that it landed a good distance from its place of origination.) and sent a fireball up the toilet where his wife was taking care of necessary biological needs. Seems like she divorced him for some reason after that...

Anyway, the kerosene seemed to do the job, but it wasn't nearly as impressive as some petro fires that I have witnessed before. I remember one summer camp when some fellas from my troop brought a jar of varsol (a particularly flammable solvent). At the time we had to do our cooking on wood stoves, and they were notoriously difficult to get started in the morning. Oddly enough, that year we didn't have any trouble at all getting our morning fires going without the varsol. Well, of course, we couldn't just take the stuff back home again. So at night we would get a fire going in the stove and the guys would pour the varsol down the smokestack. It was darn impressive. We'd have fire shooting about six feet beyond the top of the chimney! (And you wonder why the Parks Service is trying to get the BSA to pay for that wildfire that they started! I'm not surprised that it happened at all. I'm more surprised that we never caused one!)

I remember another summer camp when I was the head commissioner. For whatever reason, we were responsible for building the campfire for one of the camp wide campfires that we had. My staff and I went to work. By the time that we were done, we had built two of the most perfect log cabin fire lays ever. They stood about 4 feet tall on top of the altars that were in the campfire circle. The bottom logs were 6 to 8 inches in diameter and graduated slightly all the way to the top where the last layer of sticks was smaller than a pencil. On top of that we had nests of tinder. Sheer perfection.

I don't remember why we weren't at the campfire that night - for some reason we had to be away - but we were told that our fires cleared out the first 8 rows of seats! They had to bring in Indian Pumps to cool the fires off! Needless to say, we never had fire duty again! It was one of the proudest moments in my life!

It's truly a wonder we were never seriously injured in all of our Scouting exploits. We sure enough did plenty of stuff that should have gotten us killed! Chalk it up to some guardian angels that are going to have some words for us when we meet them in Heaven!