Weird Science

I enjoyed my 10th grade chemistry class at Southwest Miami Senior High School. It was an incendiary time in my teenage years, so to speak. I got to play with things that went boom. Not with anyone's help, of course, but the opportunity was there and I took it.

The storeroom for the science lab was left open most of the time we were in class, and during one of my trips to find rubber stoppers or new flasks, I came across a large jar filled with yellow liquid. Soaking in the liquid was a piece of rock. Well, it looked like a rock. Actually, it looked like a piece of petrified wood my grandmother brought back from a trip out West many years ago. It was a chunk of pure sodium, and the yellow fluid was kerosene. 

I looked up sodium in my text book, one of the few times I read the book without being told, and found sodium reacts exothermically with water. Really? I looked up exothermic and decided to find out if it meant what I thought it did. I went back into the store room, checked to make sure our somewhat overstressed teacher was busy, took down the huge jar and unscrewed the top. I didn't like the smell of kerosene so I was careful not to stick my hand all the way into the jar. The block of sodium was firm, but not rock hard. I could gouge pieces out with my keys. Several chunks slowly sank to the bottom of the jar. I took a test tube, poured some of the kerosene into it, and placed five or six small pieces of sodium in it, then capped it with a rubber stopper. I washed my hands in the sink, then wiped down the test tube slipped it into my pants pocket. I placed the jar of sodium carefully back on the shelf.

I didn't tell a soul about my criminal activity. I was terrified I would get caught and expelled. The next several classes I sat like a frozen zombie, afraid I would do something to give myself away.

I nervously rode home on the school bus, sitting by myself, as usual, trying not to talk to anyone. At home, I couldn't wait to show my brother, Dean, what I had. We went in the back yard and used a garden hose to half fill a galvanized bucket. I took the first piece of sodium, about the size of a fly, and using a tea spoon, dropped it in the bucket. At first it zipped around on the surface like a rocket-propelled fly, white smoke pouring out of it. Then it did something unique: it blew up! The loud bang got Versie's attention and she came outside to see what we were doing.

I told her it was a science experiment, which really wasn't a lie, and she watched as interested as Dean and I as we went through all the pieces in the test tube. The smaller pieces would scoot around and consume themselves, but the bigger pieces were really explosive.

The next day one of my classmates saw me in the store room with the log of sodium laying on the edge of a shelf. I took the sodium out of the kerosene and was cutting chunks out it with a knife I brought with me just for that purpose. I filled seven big test tubes with sodium and kerosene stuffed them all in my pants pockets. I couldn't walk without clinking. My classmate decided to take some, too, but he stupidly threw his in the lab sink where it exploded. Luckily our teacher was out of the room, but the teacher next door stuck his head in and saw the white cloud drifting through the classroom.

When the period bell rang, I put the test tubes in my hallway book locker. I couldn't take a chance on getting caught in class. My jerk science classmate took a chunk of the sodium and showed his buddies after class what it would do by flushing it down a toilet in the boy's room. I don't know how big a chunk he used, but it cracked the porcelain commode.

They locked the storeroom after the classroom sink incident, and perhaps they linked the two explosions, but I never heard any more about it. My access to the sodium was over that day, but I had seven test tubes full as I rode home on the school bus.

What to do with all that sodium? One answer appeared as if by magic, and it couldn't have turned out better. Our neighbor across the street, a high school coach somewhere in Dade County, was a real jerk. He threatened to keep our football if it rolled into his yard one more time. A big bear of a man, he would strut around his front yard in his Athletic department shorts, showing off his hairy physique as he pulled weeds and putzed around in his manly way. He always finished by taking his hose and watering his yard.

So, my brother Dean and I cut up twenty or so pieces of sodium, making sure they were all big enough to explode. We made them about the size of marbles. Then we casually walked across the street and quietly dropped the pieces of sodium over his entire front yard. We wanted to do it before he got home from work. We salted his whole yard in just a minute or so, careful not to be seen by his wife or kids who were at home watching television. We could hear it coming from inside the house.

Then we strolled back across the street and got our iced-teas, sat down on the front porch and waited. Our mom, Versie, came out to see what we were up to. It didn't take long for our victim to pull in. We never made any attempt to wave at him, although Versie might have said hello. I rather doubt it, she didn't care much for him, either.

Within a few minutes he was out in the yard in his shorts, as always. He pulled weeds, walked around the yard with his hands on his hips, and generally cleaned up imaginary trash. He eventually walked up to his coiled garden hose, stooped over and picked it up. He turned on the water spigot. Dean and I held our breath. He casually sprayed around a flower bed when suddenly, BOOM, and a cloud of white smoke floated up from his grass. He stared at the smoke and decided to spray water on it. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! The more he sprayed, the more explosions there were. They went off all over his yard. Dean and I had to go in the house we were laughing so hard.

He sprayed the whole yard and every single piece of sodium exploded as if it had been scripted in a movie. He never once looked across the street, but he spent hours looking through the grass the next several days.

Versie, Dean and I laughed about it on her 90^th birthday. She laughed almost as hard then as she did when it happened. One of the highlights of living on SW 36^th Street in Miami.