March, 2003. Sunday, after church. Front yard.
I had received a paintball gun for my thirteenth birthday, the kind that uses small disposable carbon dioxide capsules made from steel. The gun itself was interesting enough for a while, but the real fascination was in the used CO2 cylinders. These empty cartridges had a nice shape to them, with a round hemispherical end, and a smoothly streamlined opposite end cap, where the gun pierced through with a hollow spike to let the pressurized gas out.
The shape looked so sleek, like it would make a fine rocket engine casing. I had built and flown safe, predictable model rockets before. I thought they were pretty boring. You buy a kit, follow the instructions, fly it a couple of times, then hang it up and watch it collect dust.
I wanted some more adventure. And there was a pretty girl to impress this day, carefully watching me.
I thought I'd make her a little homemade firework. I borrowed some black powder from her dad, and poured some into one of my empty CO2 capsules. I threaded a fuse down inside, then poured a little melted wax in the opening, to seal it and allow the pressure from the black powder to build. I thought it would explode. I set it behind a big log of firewood in my family's fire pit.
I lit the fuse, and quickly backed away. The fuse hissed as the flame made its way toward the end of the tiny metal tank. Then, nothing happened. I went around the log and picked up the little device.
The liquid wax had seeped through the thin paper shell of the firecracker fuse, and formed a barrier that stopped the flame from entering the capsule. Disappointed, I pulled the wax plug out from the end. My original idea of flight took hold of my mind again.
"With no wax to keep the pressure inside, the burning powder would create a stream of hot gas that would rush out the end and create thrust, propelling the thing forward like a rocket," I thought.
I'd just set up a piece of plastic pipe with one end on a log to angle it upward, away from the house, and watch as the little metal missile launched out the end and flew away. A perfect way to make my own rocket motor. Brilliant!
One little problem didn't seem insurmountable: I was out of fuse. I'd just light a match and stick it in the end where the wax plug used to be. No big deal.
This would put me close to the rocket when it lit up, but I could just back away as I had when it failed to light earlier.
I held the match until a good amount of the stick was inflamed, then quickly shoved it in the small steel opening, just inside the end of the larger PVC pipe.
A shrill hiss startled and satisfied me for a split second, as I excitedly jumped away and began telling the pretty girl nearby what great spectacle we were about to witness.
A ground-shaking BOOM with a bright flash of light and a cloud of white smoke, followed by a scream from my friend shook me for a second. Then, I laughed. I thought, "That's great! It exploded! Way cool!"
Then I noticed my mouth didn't seem to feel right. It seemed heavy, like something was attached to my lower lip and cheeks, pulling down. My tongue seemed to fit into my chin in a way that was unnatural and new. It tasted metallic and a little sweet, but salty.
I looked down at my belly. A warm cascade of bright red bounced off my shirt and settled in the grass. What in the world?
I reached up and felt my face. My fingers found new places they'd never been. I flicked them away and looked at my hands. They were dripping with the same red fluid. How could this be?
Was I bleeding? Yeah, I think so! From where? I don't know!
I rushed inside the house to the bathroom sink to see myself in the mirror.
My stomach turned as I came into view. I saw a ragged, gaping hole below my lower lip. I spat out a broken tooth. I could stick out my tongue with my mouth closed!
I turned and looked left, and right. I had a hole hanging open in each of my cheeks! The one on my right continued backwards and formed a line with a small cut on the tip of my earlobe!
I saw two holes in my shirt over my left shoulder, looking like the path of a bullet, with oozing red coming out from a cut there. Oh man! I'm a mess! Wait, why can't I feel anything? I touched the wounds, and could feel those touches, and even pain from pinching the edges of the cuts. But not a hint of pain from the injuries themselves! I didn't understand.
My younger sister came in with a really worried look on her face. I began to feel the same worry. Our parents were away with our older sister in a meeting. What were we to do?
The father of the girl I was then no longer impressing favorably came and pushed a bag of ice wrapped in a towel over my face. We got in his car and headed toward the small-town hospital nine miles away. As we left he said, "You know, this is going to be one of those things we look back on and laugh about."
"I'm not quite there yet," I thought.
We hit the door of the rural hospital and were met by a lady asking what had happened. I took the icy towel off my face and tried to explain. I was pitiful. My friend's dad had to tell her an embarrassing and slightly inaccurate story of making a homemade firework. I remember thinking indignantly, "It wasn't a firework, it was a rocket!"
Come on, man! That's like calling a helicopter an airplane! They both do similar things, but for entirely different reasons. Oh well, I was helpless to defend my scientific pursuits now, and consigned to suffer the shame of being helped by people who held no regard for the aeronautical achievement I had intended. My humility reached a low when my parents came in and saw me. The looks on their faces only added to my distress.
I was further burdened by guilt as I was compelled to stand in front of an x-ray machine, to see where the little pieces of plastic and metal were still embedded, like taking booking photos at a jail after a disorderly, immediately regretted moment.
I rode with my mom to the bigger hospital in the suburbs an hour away. I sat for over two hours as pieces of shrapnel were extracted and sutures were placed.
The funny thing is I felt every one of those sutures, as the needle popped through my skin in raw, searing mocking of the pleasant numbness I enjoyed in the aftermath of the lacerations. Several doctors and nurses told me how much fun they used to have as kids being crazy about rockets and fireworks, nearly blowing themselves up. I wished I could someday tell such stories about nearly blowing myself up. That was forever taken from me. They were all interested in learning how I had been designing my rockets.
It was hard for me to talk, like I was Bill Cosby in a dentist's chair while he was asking me about golf and fishing and all kinds of things not suited to discussing with your lip hanging down on the floor:
Some recovery over a few weeks concluded with the extraction of the two broken roots of teeth still in my lower jaw. This explosive experience was quite disruptive to my young teenage life. I had to learn how to eat corn on the cob again, had to learn how to chew my fingernails in a different way, had to figure out how to shift my mouth to the side just to play my trumpet!
The seriousness of the ordeal only sank in later. Remember how I was talking at the moment of the explosion? My jaw was in just the right position to take up the flying bits of shrapnel by hitting my teeth and thick padded cheeks. Had my mouth been closed, the piece that pierced my lower lip may have hit my jawbone, shattering it like a bullet strike.
Had my mouth been open wider than it was, the missile might have missed my teeth altogether, and entered my mouth, impacting at the back of my throat and possibly killing me. Had the three pieces that struck my face been two inches higher or lower, they could have taken out my eyes and nose, or my throat and the large blood vessels in my neck. Going in my nose, it could have made it really far back into my nasal cavity, doing untold damage inside my head. Likewise, going up into the back of my mouth could have hit my spine. The way these little destroyers were miraculously steered to spare me those kinds of injuries still haunts me, especially since learning human anatomy, and seeing many people injured and killed in sundry ways, some with injuries far less dramatic.
It worked out to be just right, to give me the indelible lessons learned, without the devastating injuries to myself or my family members that were so easily possible.
Don't get caught up in a frenzied rush to impress a pretty girl. You might do something stupid. Don't use a fuse; use a model rocket launch controller instead. Don't try and build rocket motors without knowing what you're doing. Reduce rocketry's risks down to a responsible level of safety. This means only flying with factory-made motors, professionally engineered, ready to go right from the package.
And don't stick out your tongue with your mouth closed!
It's really weird. People don't like to see that.