1973, Woodland Hills, California

By Ken Broomfield

My pyromania started before I was 10, when I witnessed, within a single year, two spectacular fires that totally destroyed large three-story houses atop hills directly overlooking our house.

Of course, a boy assumes that even such an unusual pair of events is normal, but as my interest in flame grew, my mother imposed on me the label of “firebug.” I always resisted this characterization. To me, the beauty of fire was self-evident; if you didn’t see it, something was wrong with you.

The joys of matches equaled or exceeded those of my numerous other toys, and the combination of matches and polymer-rich toys proved inevitable during my unstructured, lightly-supervised playtime. Rubber cement was an accelerant of choice because it could be brushed on a Hot Wheel car and steered onto a lighted match to produce a beautiful flaming crash. This tended to burn the little plastic driver beyond recognition, and post-mortems on car and driver — with the obligatory comparison of dental records — were half the fun, fire damage being the ultimate racing stripe and badge of honor.

The abundance of flammable liquids at hand around the house was amazing. Having been duly taught to read by now, I could finally put this essential skill to use by skipping containers marked merely “FLAMMABLE” in favor of those marked “EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE.” A gallon tin can of thick, opaque orange paint remover, found on a high garage shelf, struck an especially odd chord of awe and terror with its stark artificiality and hair-trigger volatility. A puddle on the concrete walk could burn for several minutes, finally forming a shrinking circle and vanishing, leaving the ground cooler than expected.

My friends and I would make the ever-popular “match rockets,” covering the tip of a match with aluminum foil, placing it on a ramp — a bent paper clip — and holding flame under it until it ignited, launching into the air. The failure rate was high, with some delicious launch pad explosions involving multi-engined blue-tip match rockets, but some flew so far as to be unrecoverable, leaving us to wonder whether they’d extinguished completely before touchdown.

Love of flame and burnt wreckage wasn’t my only motivation. Scientific inquiry was important too, and it led my colleagues and I to conduct groundbreaking studies in the field of flammability.

Does pee burn? No.

Motor oil? No.

Glossy magazines? Yes, and watching Frank Sinatra in the pages of Life magazine transform into brown crumples and black soot was beautifully hideous.

Cellophane? Yes, in a way which was at first scary and then boring.

The dry grass that covers every hillside in the state? Like gasoline!

The signature smell of burning grass and the transparency of flame under summer sun, as a lock of dry grass turned from gold to black, became beautiful and terrifying symbols of my misspent childhood. To this day, even the faint smell of a grass fire can trigger strong associations with summer vacation and virgin fear.

My friend Greg and I were very careful. We would dig a hole several feet from the gasoline-covered hillside and use it for safe burning, with a shovelful of dirt standing by. Putting out the fires was interesting too, with smoke and dust intertwining in the heat. But it was probably our easy mastery of flame that led to overconfidence. Soon we were lighting little stompable fires on the hillside itself, secure in our belief that we had fully tamed the lovely evil ghost.

The open hillsides above our houses were the exclusive domain of the neighborhood kids — a realm of grand exploration and discovery, rock throwing wars, fort digging projects, and playing in the mud and green Spring grass that grew taller than us. It was a vast neutral zone where adults never ventured and children were safe from scrutiny.

When the flames suddenly took wing well over our heads, six and then ten feet high, moths fluttered in my stomach and time stood still. My little brain reached the conclusion with perfect certainty: we can’t put it out.

I have no real recollection of what we did just then. I had unleashed — with the best of intentions, mind you — a huge flaming shitstorm, and could do nothing but stand there and watch my future turn from a vague white glow to a clearly discernible black hole. If I had been a different sort of child, I might have immediately started to worry about how this was going to affect my future political viability. We ended up in my back yard, on the wide green lawn surrounded by a high green hedge which hid the flames for the moment. The fact of the fire was so totally incompatible with our well-irrigated back yard that I could have believed we would be protected there from every consequence.

We’ll tell people we were playing catch right here when the fuckin’ hill caught fire all by itself.

As a mitigating factor, the jury should note that this stood for many years as the American recordholder for Most Astonishing Alibi, until it was exceeded by Heisman Trophy winner OJ Simpson in 1994. So, we really started throwing the football back and forth while home almost burned, but quickly realized that no one was around to see us not starting the fire.

We ran down the street with the idea of playing with the other neighborhood kids, but by this time the smoke had become visible in three counties and my parents, urged home by my mother who “had a feeling something had happened,” were driving up the street. That it never occurred to me or Greg to call the fire department may be seen as evidence of a deep character flaw that will be raised during my confirmation hearings for Assistant Undersecretary of Commerce, but I attribute it more to the simple childhood stupidity that let us start the fire in the first place. It wasn’t a Watergate — it was only a Vietnam.

I never saw much of the firefighting effort, and to have shown any interest would surely have given away the game. After all, what young boy wants to watch firemen put out a fire? The fire engines arrived on the hilltop road with amazing speed — who knows which nosy neighbor called them — and it was out before it had burned more than a football field. The house directly uphill from the point of ignition — the only house on this side of the hill, surrounded by many acres of open hillside — was untouched.

This was the first of many similar occasions in my life that make me wonder at my own incredible luck, not so much in great things attained but in disasters averted. But soon after the fire, the owners of the spared house installed a very bright floodlight that illuminated most of the hillside and shined directly through my bedroom window and into my face at night, so the jury should have no doubt about whether I’ve been punished enough for my crime.

Amazingly, I was never directly accused, and for many years it was intriguing to wonder what my family knew about my role in the near-disaster. My mother made allusions now and then, and seemed to have a tacit knowledge of my guilt. Maybe I was regarded for a while in the same way as the evil child in a horror movie. Or maybe they were just reluctant to dig too deeply, just as members of the Kennedy family know when to look the other way. It wasn’t until my late 20s that my mother asked me directly and I confessed, the statute of limitations and weight of parental authority having expired long ago.

Even more amazingly, my pyromaniacal career continued for a while longer, though always at a safe distance from dry hillsides. One day, I was looking under my bed for something and used a cigarette lighter for illumination, with predictable results. I put it out instantly — the fire might not have even flourished — but the terror that filled me and the sudden plainness of my own idiocy ruined my love of fire for good.

I went out back and threw the lighter as hard as I could, over the trees, onto the hillside that had burned. The lighter was polished, sharp-edged chrome, with a good supply of fuel, and I wondered whether, on a hot summer day if the sun hit it just right, it might catch fire all by itself.

Ken Broomfield is Chief Technology Officer at Wymea Bay and developer of the iRider web browser.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 | Email This Post

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