BY GEORGE STRANAHAN
One lady friend left her Wagoneer behind Hunter’s house, perhaps thinking it would be there when she returned, perhaps thinking she would come and take it away some day. The Wagoneer stayed through more than a winter, and one day Hunter called me and barked, “Bring down some dynamite, a lot of it.”
Well, I did that, and we sat in his kitchen drinking whiskey as he described his need to eliminate the Wagoneer from his view and from his memory; there were fist poundings and many loud “Goddamnits,” and more whiskey. After a while it became time to act; there’s some discrimination required when mixing whiskey and dynamite. Hunter hauled up a 25-pound canister of gunpowder from the war room, and we went to work. Seven sticks of dynamite were placed head to toe from midengine back to the firewall, the gunpowder placed in the driver’s seat. My fuse burns roughly 10 seconds per inch; I jammed 18 inches into the blasting cap and crimped it with my teeth.
My rule is “walk, don’t run,” and I made it down to the picnic table with about a minute of fuse left. I don’t look at my watch; the vagaries of fuse chemistry ensure that the explosion will always come as a complete surprise, which it did. When we started the project, we understood the importance of the edge — being on the edge together. Not one man standing on the edge alone — we were in this together.
We were barely 100 yards from the blast and the shock wave knocked the wind out of our lungs, yet we “Yheehaaaed!,” hugged, and clapped each other on our backs. When haying that fall I found a fender that had sailed over our heads and a further 300 yards, almost to Woody Creek.
