Booby Traps and Big Mama

Later, after Matt had gone, we laughed until we cried about poor Matt’s confusion over being shot at. I’m not sure if I ever told Matt about what really happened. Maybe someday I should, because we owe him a lot.

You see, unknowingly, Matt helped us feed our addiction. Now, we not only had explosives, but we also had a plan.


It didn’t take us long to dream up several different fun booby trap scenarios.

Our first, and possibly our best, idea was to put together a huge assortment of tiny landmines. Then, under the cover of night and while they were still wet, we’d toss our little bursts of excitement around campus in some of the high foot traffic areas. Due to the potential for echo, stairwells were a personal favorite. They’d have all night to dry and the next morning some poor, unsuspecting pedestrian would get a rather startling wake-up call.

Our next idea was to tie a 20 to 30-foot piece of string to one of the above-mentioned landmines. Once again, while they were still wet, we’d toss them up on roofs or awnings. The next morning, when some curious passerby came wandering along and pulled the string, BAM! Our only concern was the chance that the now airborne package might land on someone’s head. I wish I could say that our concern was due to some kind of higher moral dedication to keeping the general public safe. However, as I recall, it was more a desire not to get caught. Although, after testing this idea, it became apparent that it didn’t take more than a wee bit movement to create sufficient friction to ignite the package and they would usually detonate long before getting near the edge. So this too became a workable plan.

Over the next few months we came up with quite a few different plans all of which, at the time, seemed like great ideas. I’m not sure how many different little bundles of fun we made, but there were quite a few. My only regret is that I never stuck around to long enough, or got back to the scene early enough, to experience the fun of the actual explosions.

After a while, our fascination with these little bombs began to dwindle. After you’ve heard countless explosions and seen equally as many tiny mushroom clouds, the fun starts to stagnate.

That’s when we had the idea for Big Mama.

Big Mama was the mother of all the frictional impact explosives we had made so far, and Mama, was she BIG!

Using a razor blade, we made an incision in the side of a tennis ball and spooned in the wet mixture. In the interest of chemical conservation, as well as, to make sure the water had somewhere to go, we layered Big Mama with healthy supply of rice . Once complete, we parked her safely in the munitions box with an extra layer or two of toilet paper. Just to be safe.

We really didn’t give much thought to how, or by whom this would be thrown, launched, dropped, or otherwise given flight to. We were living in the moment and seeing as the d-day for Big Mama was several days away at best, it didn’t matter yet.

We also didn’t give much thought to how dangerous Big Mama might be. Based on the success of each of our previous home chem-lab experiments, (at least the ones we actually watched) we probably should have been a bit more wary. But we were young and we were immortal and we were stupid.

By this time we fancied ourselves as quite the frictional impact explosives experts. Being experts, it was our professional opinion that if we didn’t wait long enough for her to be dry all the way through, while she would probably blow up, the glorious explosion we were looking forward to would be far less spectacular than what we desired.

The days passed like years as we waited for Big Mama to mature. Unlike all of her predecessors who were packaged in wax paper, a somewhat porous container, the tennis ball she was in was, except for the slit cut by us, quite airtight.

We waited. And then just for good measure, we waited some more.

Waiting for over a week to play with a new toy gives you nothing, if not time to ponder. As the days passed, it seemed that something similar to good sense started to worm its way into our thoughts. The more we thought about it, we began to have visions of ways Big Mama could turn out to be a big disaster. Not the least of which was the two of us getting injured or caught.

Our original plan was to come up with some semi-safe way to detonate Big Mama on campus. However, after our thought provoked revelations, we figured that our plan needed to change. And we decided to take her out to a back road somewhere, toss her down the road and just see what we see.

Not quite as spectacular a plan as we had originally had our hearts set on, but our only other option was soaking Big Mama in water and dismantling her.

Roads like we wanted were all too common around our university and it didn’t take more than fifteen minutes to get ourselves pretty far out of town. We pulled over and carefully lifted the munitions box out of the car.

Dan opened the munitions box and with my arm outstretched, I carefully reached in. We really had no idea how fragile Big Mama was going to be, and I was afraid of grabbing it too tightly and setting it off in my hand. I was also afraid of holding it too loosely and dropping it on my foot. As luck would have it, I was able to gently roll it off of the toilet paper padding and into my hand. Then, cradling it gently in my hand with my arm extended and my elbow locked I made a grenade type toss about 20 yards down the road.

The explosion was incredible.

The sound was more than just a loud explosion it was awesome. It was a delayed sound like I had only experienced while watching movies in science class. The kind where you first see a completely silent burst of light and then, just as you begin to wonder about why there’s no sound, the sound hits and echoes through your entire body.

The mushroom cloud was at least six feet tall, its canopied top had a diameter of four to five feet. It was easily a hundred times the size of anything we had made so far. And it didn’t quickly dissipate into the air like the small ones. Oh no, it slowly drifted off into the darkening sky.

Stupefied by what we had accomplished, we stood frozen for what felt like an eternity. Remembering to breath again, I suddenly gasped for breath as we both ran to the point of impact.

Looking down at the spot where Big Mama had met the road, I couldn’t help but think it looked beautiful. The force of the explosion had embedded bits of tennis ball into the asphalt and created a sunburst pattern with shades of blues and reds mixed in.

Mesmerized by all that had just transpired, we started being pelted with tiny bits of falling tennis ball. Standing in a tennis ball downpour, I began to have a whole new kind of respect for the power that this stuff had. We weren’t just playing with a bunch of Black Cat firecrackers that we picked up at some roadside stand. These were explosives. Frictional Impact Explosives...and they were for real.

The drive home was silent and the ride seemed longer this time, both of us trying to wrap our minds around this new truth about what we were doing. When we finally spoke, we agreed that Big Mama had been fun to make and an intriguing learning experience, but we vowed to never make anything anywhere near that big again.


Coming Soon…
Part 5: The End of an Era