Sorry for the long post but here is a semi topical personal experience-
I do have a story on the "recreational use" of explosives". Back in the early 70's when I was growing up a lot of the landowners/ farmers had access to dynamite and caps for land clearing and other legitimate uses like pond building. I was probably around 12 at the time and attended a small town church with several young cousins and other extended family members. Our sunday school teacher was an uncle and he frequently took our class of about 6 adventurous boys out fishing or shooting other fun stuff on Sunday afternoons.
This particular Sunday he had been helping clear some land on a nearby farm owned by the family of two of the boys in the class. The day started off great with us boys hunting up water dogs and playing around the area he had been clearing stumps.The shallow holes and stump remnants left by the blasts were of great interest to us boys. My uncle was probably still in his early 20's at the time and we convinced him to set off a small charge as we had never seen dynamite used before...
He started of with a small charge, probably a quarter stick or so and we put a partial can of blue paint we had found on top of the charge to see what would happen. He had us stand well back and the shot went off with a big bang but not a lot of fly debris...except for the blue paint which left a truly impressive coverage near the charge as well as some blue waterdogs. We were all excited after that and somehow convinced him to let us watch a stump go up next.
There was one large old growth stump he had planned to get to next and he had a post hole digger and a couple shovels handy so we eagerly got to work making two holes, one on each side of the stump. I'm not sure how deep we got but it was well into the root wad angling toward the center. It came time to load them up and he didn't let us help with that but I remember that in addition to the dynamite with the cap and fuse attached he had added a bag or two of fertilizer. After filling what was left of the holes and stomping them down he had us get back....way back near the far side of what seemed like a pretty big clearing.
We were all eagerly watching and I vividly remember the detonation....this was a big boom...really big! As we watched chunks of stump heading way up into the sky in every direction it wasn't long before we realized that some of those large chunks were heading our way. My first impulse was to run but I didn't. I kept my eyes up and tracked the chunks that seemed to be slowly closing in. I remember taking a few steps to my left and I was out of the path of the nearest impact. A large piece that I'm sure would have ended me. Looking around for my classmates after the smoke cleared revealed there were still six of us but we were a lot further apart than we had been.
We did get to look over the crater left by the blast. I remember being impressed at what a perfect hard packed crater was left on the edge of that field. No stump remnants anywhere near the hole. Truly an impressive demonstration of the power of explosives!
That pretty much wrapped up that Sunday afternoon adventure. We didn't talk about that outing outside our class for quite a while. I learned to always have something to duck under, no matter how far away from shots, from that event.
