Burning bushes: not always spiritual

Last night at a friend's house, I told the story about the time my roommate managed to create total, fiery disaster in the kitchen by trying to steam live crabs in three small posts (as opposed to the one, large pot she couldn't use because it belonged to our Kosher housemate) and managed to a) lose one the of crabs several times on the floor, b) light a plastic grocery sack on fire, and c) splash herself with boiling water as she was doing all of this while wearing a sports bra and a thong. There are many aspects of that scenario that were ill-advised.

Anyway, telling that story made me think of another incident involving fire and shempery. It's important to understand a little about the main player in this story, my uncle "Greg." He's an entrepreneur, currently involved in a vegetarian restuarant/gallery/bookstore (the food is vegetarian, not the art or the books). His last project was a chain of stores that sold new-agey stuff like rocks with peaceful words engraved on the sides, air chairs, and necklaces that read "carpe diem." You know, one of those places where you really liked to shop in middle school for reasons you couldn't fully explain to your parents as you never did anything with the stuff you bought there. That place. For Christmas every year, Greg puts a 50-foot inflatable Santa on his roof and anchors it to the yard with a few strategically-placed cables. Greg likes to get a deal, move it himself, and sometimes errs a bit on the side of results-oriented myopia that tends to overlook the costs along the way.

It came as no surprise when he decided to forego hiring a landscaping service to relandscape his front yard a few years ago and rented a small, front-loading tractor-CAT-thing to use himself. This wasn't a small undertaking by any means; the intent was to completely "reshape" the front yard. His wife, "Jen"--a moderatly wise woman with judgment that's generally more hit than miss, decided to bypass this process entirely and loaded the kids in the car to escape the scene for the day.

Aside from the obvious, the whole thing should have started to appear ill-fated to Greg after the fourth or fifth time he confused the "lower" function for the digging claw with the "release" function. It should be noted that the front claw of this thing held the equivalent of 5 wheelbarrow-fulls of dirt, which he kept depositing on top of himself by accident. After a few hours of scooting dirt piles around the yard (with little success, I'd imagine), Greg decided to attempt something a little more high-yield. A large span of bushes lined one side of their property, and Greg had never liked them. They were strikingly unattractive bushes, and it would be entirely unfair to expect Greg to have known about the substantial colony of wasps that lived among them.

Pause for a second and assemble the scene in your head: dirt-covered Greg in a small tractor amidst piles of dirt, bushes, and swarms of wasps. Clearly, something had to be done about the wasps, and Greg's first thought was to burn them. Being deathly afraid myself of all things that sting, I can't say I'd come up with anything better if I found myself in the same situation. He (rather ingeniously, I think) came up with an idea on the fly for a flame-thrower, made from a fertilizer bottle filled with kerosene, attached to a garden hose. You can control the concentration on those sprayers pretty well, so it was mostly kerosene spraying from the nozzle, with just enough water to give it the necessary pressure to spray. He lit it, and started (successfully) flaming the clouds and clouds of wasps that were swarming above the yard. As one might imagine with a cooler head, however, the flames didn't exactly stay confined to the wasps. It wasn't long before several trees were burning pretty well, which necessitated another of Greg's back-of-the-envelope engineering feats. This one wasn't quite as well-planned as the flame thrower, as it involved using a shovel to break the (now exposed) water main that ran near the front of their property. Why didn't he just detach the kerosene bottle from the hose and use it? No one has ever been able to explain that part, and I suspect no one ever will.

It's unfortunate that Greg's wife drove up at this moment, because I think in another 15 minutes or so the tree fires would have been out. Apparently, if you have a big enough shovel and decent forearm strength, you can do a lot to aim the geyser that erupts from a broken water main. Not surprisingly, Jen didn't stop the car, but continued around the block to my grandparents' house where she stayed with the kids until Greg had had time to a) call the city to repair the water main, b) hire a landscaping crew to make the yard look like something other than a disaster, and c) make many profound and apologetic overtures to her in penance for the $25,000 it cost to fix everything.

Among the many lessons to be learned here, I think the most impressive is the importance of identifying traits like this in people you intend to marry. Well, that, and the fact that a well-stocked garage can produce a flamethrower on short notice, but it might not be a good idea.