 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Ring Of Fire | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| My Favorite Links: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Yahoo! | My Info: | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Name: | Victor Scardella | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Email: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| victorscardella@yahoo.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Return To Main Page | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Gasoline and the Ring of Fire
!..: By Victor Scardella When I became a teenager, so many things were changing in my life. I was in Junior High School and Nixon was president. I was struggling to find my own identity in the world and was under a great deal of stress ! I began to go to church with some neighbors from McNair Drive and did not really understand what church or religion was all about. Not only was Nixon president but, there was also an energy crisis going on in the country (the USA), maybe all over the world but, I don't remember too much about that part of it. It was the early 1970's and still a turbulent time for everyone. There was a real big problem with gasoline shortages in the USA and it was all over the news media at that time. I began to think about possible solutions to this energy crisis problem and developed and idea for an electric car that used a series of batteries, generators and motors that would be able to move a vehicle and not need to be plugged in to recharge. My idea was that the batteries would power the motors that would in turn spin the generators that would charge the batteries back up and somewhere in the mix would be some kind of transmission system that move the vehicle down the road. The experts in the psychiatric world called it a Perpetual Motion Machine and said it was impossible and that I was crazy to even think that something like that would work. I ended up getting so caught up with the idea that I lost touch the reality of being a teenager in school and having school responcibilities. I also ended up getting confused with all the religious stuff and began to believe that I had received the idea for the electric car from God and that made me like another type of savior for the world. At one point, I felt like I could not take the strain of all that I felt and was going through and decided to cash in my chips and kill myself. I decided to get some gasoline and go out into the woods behind our house. My friends and I had built a wooden fort on the ground between some trees. It was square and only about four feet tall. It had a small square door way that was low to the ground that we had to kneel down and bend over to crawl in or out. It was winter time and there was snow on the ground and on the wooden fort. I walked down to the gas station one mile down Fisher Road to Chili Ave. where the gas station was located. I had retrieved the gas can from our garage that we used for our lawn mower and got one gallon of gasoline with the lunch money I had saved from school. I then walked into the woods behind our house to the wooden fort. I poured gas all over the outside of the walls of the fort and the flat, square roof. I then crawled into the fort with the gas can and poured a ring of gas on the ground inside the wooden fort. I then set the gas can outside of the small doorway and sat in the middle of the ring of gas that was on the ground inside the wooden fort. I pulled a book of matches out of my pocket and struck a match and lit the gas on fire. As I sat there in the middle of the ring of burning gas, I contemplated my life and the kind of death I was about to experience. I decided to abandon the idea of killing myself by fire and got to my knees and crawled through the fire out the small doorway to the outside. I then grabbed the gas can that was sitting outside of the fort and ran toward our house through a field that was between our house and the woods. I looked back over my shoulder as I ran, to see if the fire might be visible from the houses. I realized that the fire was very visible and I might get into trouble if anyone saw me running out of the woods with a gas can. So, I dropped the gas can in the field and kept running towards one of the other houses down my street. I walked down my street to my house and walked in like nothing was wrong. My mother said she smelled gas on me and asked what I was doing. I told her that I accidently caught the fort on fire so, she called the fire dept to come and put out the fire. Since she smelled gas on me, I figure I should have burned in the fire but, miraculously I was unharmed and did not even have a scratch or any kind of burn or anything on me at all !! I now believe that God spared my life that day in a very miraculous way ! |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
