With pine sap and flat sandstone rocks you can make an explosion in the woods, and when you’re 13 you really really want to. This gives indescribable joy to teenage boys, who like loud noises and seeing how things break or blow up.
Flat rocks. Build a little rock house out of these, on the ground, with four sides and a roof, and fit all the stones together as tight as you can. Flat rocks and not fat rocks, not round rocks. Sandstone is best, it seems to explode most suddenly instead of cracking slow.
Collect a big glob of resin from the bleeding wound of a conifer trunk. Probably where a branch was torn off in a storm.
I just said “conifer” but that was for you, to not cause you unnecessary pain; they were all “pine” to us. We always said “pine sap”, but where you grew up it might be “resin”. Pine resin, then. It’s rocket fuel. I wish I could be more scientific for you here, but all we knew was to search under the great boughs where the old needles carpet the forest, and look for twisted and broken limbs and where they tore from the trunk, where their armpits used to be, you might find years of coagulated resin that bled from the wound.
Don’t think liquid. We’re not talking here about those sissy drips of clear maple syrup you saw on a documentary about Vermont. “Globs” is the right word: semi-solid balls, dark colors flecked with gold, with a crust you can touch but do not touch, because just beneath the thin crust is sticky, sticky jelly. Use a stick.
It seemed like one year’s resin would harden a bit, then each successive year the tree would weep again on top of last year’s flow, so you’d find large magma flows dripping down the bark of the main trunk. Harvest these with a sharp stick and fill your sandstone house.
Glob it. Glob the resin in the middle of your little rock house. Cover it with pine needles. Lay on the flat roof.
Drop lit matches through the tiny gap you left over the resin glob. You’ll know when the resin catches fire.
Wait.
I’m willing to admit that a 60 year old memory might have dramatized itself a bit but when I say “bomb” I mean a crack so loud it would shush the woods and fill my heart with joy.
As far as I know we didn’t set the woods on fire or sabotage anything made by hands. And Pine Bombs is not a recreation I can recommend to my son or his son. It just seems a shame for engineering knowledge, once perfected, to die.