I headed for the Adirondacks after work on Friday. Cubby said he’d come up later that evening with his friend Luke, who had a driver’s license and a car of his own. I thought that meant Luke would drive them up in his car. However, Cubby had a different understanding, as I discovered when they rolled into the motel parking lot driving my repaired and re-doored Mini. Kids in front, poodle in back.
“What are you doing driving?” I asked him. He just looked at me. “Luke isn’t eighteen. You can’t drive with him as a passenger. What if you got stopped?”
“They would have given me a ticket and Luke would have had to drive. Besides, I was extra careful, because I didn’t want to get stopped. See? I got here okay!”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I was secretly proud that he’d driven two hundred miles all by himself. He’d navigated country roads, busy interstates, and the heavy traffic around Albany, all without damage. Yet I could never admit that to him. He should have known better than to take a chance driving my car. I growled and snorted and wandered away.
But I didn’t wander alone. I took the dog. And the reason I took the dog was another of Cubby’s obsessions—he had decided that the poodle’s fur “felt funny” and could no longer bring himself to touch him. Somehow fur that was soft and woolly became weird and bristly. I could not discern any change in the poodle’s exterior texture, but Cubby was not budging. That left Martha and me to take care of the dog. Feeling Cubby had abandoned his pet, I suggested we give him to the Estonian family with the poodle acrobatic act in the circus, but Cubby objected strenuously. Clearly, he still liked Shenzi; he just didn’t want to handle him. Just as clearly, the dog’s fur hadn’t changed a bit since we’d gotten him years before. Cubby’s obsessions might have been harmless, but they sure could be annoying!
The next day I overheard the kids talking when they thought I wasn’t paying attention. “There was one point where Jack drove over a bump and the whole car went into the air,” Luke said excitedly. Clearly, Cubby had not learned sufficient restraint from the previous two mishaps. When the time came to go home, I drove the Mini and let him ride back with my friends. If there had been a bus, I’d have sent him on it.
Finally, it was time for driving school. It had been years since he was eager to go to any school, but he definitely wanted that license. Every day we took him there and picked him up when he was done. Then, armed with a certificate, he made an appointment at the registry. He wanted to take the test in my Mini, but it didn’t meet the registry requirements, so his mom ended up taking him in her minivan.
He passed.
That left the matter of a car. Cubby helpfully offered his notion that a BMW Z4 would be great.
“They’re nice cars,” I said, “but I wonder when Kia started importing vehicles to the USA. I’ve heard the early models are really getting collectible. Hyundai has some nice compact cars too. You might even like a vintage Taurus or Escort.”
“Dad! Be serious! You would really like a BMW!”
And indeed I would like a BMW, but that wasn’t what he was proposing. He wanted me to buy one for him. However, there were more realistic options. He ended up with a ten-year-old Subaru wagon. Sensible yet slow, and not very sporty. It was a nice shade of blue.
Soon it was also a nice shade of dented. He rear-ended another car on an icy road, smashing in the whole front end. That event seemed to do the trick. From then on, Cubby drove with restraint and caution. At least when I was around.
I figured he’d drive his new car to school, since he hated the bus so much. That was one of the reasons we’d given it to him. But when summer ended, and Cubby’s friends went back to school for their senior year, he announced that he had other plans. “Look,” he said one evening. “They don’t have any more chemistry courses at the high school, and I’m failing anyway. I think I should take the GED and enroll at Holyoke Community College instead. They have a chemistry lab class I can sign up for now.”
I had really wanted my son to graduate from high school and go on to a four-year university. The idea of him dropping out sounded awful, and I once again reminded him how many opportunities I’d missed out on by making the same choice. He was stubborn, though, and I couldn’t change his mind. He dropped out of school, took the GED, and aced it. Then he signed up for chemistry at Holyoke Community College. He was seventeen years old, young for a college student, but he already knew more than any of the other students in his class.
“UMass won’t admit me with a GED,” he told me, “but HCC will, and I can get an associate’s here and transfer to UMass with that, if I want.”
“I’ve made it to college quicker than my friends,” he said proudly, and I couldn’t dispute that.
Things finally came to a head with Cubby’s chemistry experiments in late 2007. He had turned seventeen that spring, and his interest in chemistry was looking like a real obsession. When you added the girlfriend, a driver’s license, and a teenager’s confidence in his own limitless wisdom, we were bound to collide. It would have happened sooner, if not for my own issues. My first book had just been published, and I was traveling all the time to promote it. When I was home, I was distracted by the demands of a budding writing career, which were piled on top of my existing responsibilities to my family and to Robison Service. With me away or preoccupied, and Martha’s quiet personality, there was nothing standing in the way of Cubby’s enthusiasm. He more or less seized the house and ramped up his experimentation in a major way.
Before, his experiments had been relegated to one corner of the garage. Now he took advantage of my absence to expand his operations into the house. Glassware, jars, and boxes with cryptic handwritten labels appeared all over the house, even in our refrigerator. Then there were the results. Friends who lived half a mile away would call and say, “Jack must be experimenting again. I heard him last night.” Sometimes they were right, but not all the bangs were his. There were nights when I’d hear a loud bang from the landfill, yet Cubby was home in his room. I asked whether he knew who it was, but it was a mystery to him too. As far as I knew, none of Cubby’s friends were experimenting with chemistry, but his own interest was no secret, and others could have been inspired. It was, after all, a college town with lots of geek kids.
When I was a kid no one noticed stuff like that. We shot rifles at targets right in the backyard. Nowadays, if we want to shoot some skeet, we have to call the cops first so they know what to say when the inevitable calls come in. That’s what happens when rural areas get gentrified, I guess. We still have a right to shoot guns in the woods, but we have to be more careful if we want to keep the law at bay. Unfortunately, Cubby couldn’t do that quite as easily. In most places in the U.S., you can still call the cops and say, “I’m shooting my rifle out back,” but you can’t call them and say, “I just wanna let you know that I’m going to be testing some explosives in the meadow.”
I urged moderation, with only limited success. “You can’t aggravate the neighbors,” I told him. “If you get them mad, and they call the cops, you’ll be all done. You should follow the same rules hunters use. No blasts on Sunday, and nothing in the dark. Those are the times people get annoyed and call to complain.”
Noise was not the only concern. There was also the issue of space. Cubby had started out with a corner of the workbench in my garage. That fall, he expanded his territory to the whole bench, plus two portable refrigerators on the floor. He had salvaged them from the “free for the taking” junk pile in the Amherst recycling center. To my surprise and pleasure, he fixed both in short order. He was looking smarter and more useful all the time. If only he fixed things around the house …
Cubby scavenged parts from scrap appliances and reconfigured them to make a vacuum pump. Vacuum pumps were essential for some of the more sophisticated experiments he wanted to perform. “My pump pulls almost as good a vacuum as the ones in lab-supply catalogs for seven hundred fifty dollars,” he boasted. I looked at the gauge readings, and he was right. He’d built a
complex concoction of glassware, which had overspread the workbench and taken up a large area of floor. It looked like something out of Back to the Future, and it might well have had similar powers. But I had to be practical. Now there was no room for me to park an automobile inside the garage, and that would not do.
The problem was that any suggestion that the glassware be moved started a fight. And I was wary of moving things myself, because I did not know which liquids might explode and which might eat holes in my foot or the concrete floor. That’s the problem with chemists—when you have one loose in the house you lose all confidence in the stability of liquids and even solids. A beaker of clear liquid could turn into white powder, or a ball of fire, just by lifting and shaking. The best course was to treat them all with caution.
Before Cubby became a chemist, the chemicals around me, at work and at home, behaved in a very predictable fashion. I had never worried that the chemicals stored in the garage would turn into something else or blow up. Cubby assured me that I didn’t have to worry about spontaneous explosions. “Besides, all the chemicals in the garage change all the time,” he said. “Paint catalyzes and hardens in the can. Spray solvents evaporate into the air. Everything changes. You just don’t notice.” I knew he was right. He didn’t really introduce chemical instability into my life; he simply made me aware of the natural instability that surrounds us all. Very little truly stays the same. Even if it doesn’t blow up or change visibly, everything changes at a microscopic rate, all the time. Geologists say even the land is in constant motion until it finds the level of repose—a state where everything has worn to gentle rolling terrain. Chemicals do that too, reacting until the energy is dissipated. Even then, change can continue. Insects eat things. Rodents dig tunnels. Men drive bulldozers.
Thanks to Cubby, I see the whole world differently. In that way, I became a little like him, which is how it should be. Kids are our future; we parents can strive to be like them, but we should not try to make them like us. They are the next step, and we can’t know what they will do until it happens.
Still, I missed that illusion of stability. It was troubling, always wondering if the shelf beside me would spontaneously combust. But of course that never happened, and when I admitted as much to my son he said, “See? You’re irrational.” At the same time, Cubby had gotten himself into a pattern of behavior that troubled me. His special interest in chemistry had turned into a total obsession. It would not have been so bad if he pursued it out in the open, but he did all his studying (or whatever he was doing) behind a locked door in his room. When he wasn’t in there he was working in his garage lab. I hardly spoke to him at all, because he’d stopped eating meals with us and he wasn’t awake when I got up in the morning. He was sleeping till noon and staying up all night. I was so frustrated that I began thinking Cubby might need to get an apartment of his own.
When I complained to a friend about Cubby’s behavior, he told me kids were programmed to act that way. “When they’re teenagers they turn into total jerks, so you don’t miss them too much when you throw them out,” he said. “He’ll be better once he turns twenty-five.”
Meanwhile, Cubby continued to be very active online. He was talking chemistry and explosives with people all over the country and possibly all over the world. Cubby was only interested in explosives for the science, but I wasn’t so sure about the others. Of course, when I challenged Cubby, he dismissed my concerns.
“My videos don’t show anything getting destroyed,” he said. “All they show is explosives detonating on the ground. What’s wrong with that?” He contrasted his videos with others on YouTube that showed old cars being destroyed and even houses being wrecked.
When I suggested that the FBI or the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) might still have a problem with his explosions, he disagreed. He kept insisting that there were far worse videos out there than his, and if the lawmen wanted to target people on YouTube, he’d be at the bottom of the list. It was very hard to counter his arguments.
“What law do you think people break, blowing up junk cars?” Hearing him, I had to agree. If it was your junk car, you had every right to destroy it. My son wasn’t even doing that. He just set off explosives on the ground. Yet there were other laws.
“What about possessing the explosives? You already told me that’s illegal.”
Cubby’s justification for that sounded quite a bit shakier. “I don’t keep explosives around,” he insisted. “All these chemicals I keep are just the ingredients. None of them are illegal at all. I mix them into a batch of explosive, carry it into the woods, and set it off. I don’t have a stockpile of explosives.” He was very rational, very insistent, and probably correct. However, it was increasingly clear that his notions would not protect us from a raid.
“Cubby,” I pleaded, “how could someone from the ATF know any of what you are saying? If they see those videos of yours, how could they know you don’t have a whole trunkful and you’re waiting to go on a rampage? Just calling attention to yourself might be enough to get the doors kicked in by feds. Can’t you see that?”
“Huuunh,” he said. Sometimes it was striking how closely he imitated my noises. This time I wasn’t amused.
I knew his interest was purely scientific, and I knew how it felt to be driven to experiment and refine something to make it better and better. That very trait had been the key to my success. However, I also knew he’d ventured into dangerous territory. The distinctive crack of fast-detonating high explosive is quite recognizable, even in an online video. If I could see it, it would surely be just as unmistakable to an expert, like the ones in law enforcement.
“Don’t you think the ATF is watching you? How would they know you don’t have a hundred pounds of homemade dynamite, ready to blow up the post office or your old school?” When I said that, Cubby just looked at me like I was nuts. He was so certain of the purity of his own scientific curiosity. The idea that he would blow up the post office was total nonsense to him, and he could not even conceive of the possibility that someone else might think he could do such a thing.
Instinct told me he was headed for disaster. But he didn’t agree, and he argued his case with the greatest of eloquence. My attempts to change his mind went nowhere, and I could not decide on a course of action.
“Why put the videos online at all?” I asked him. That was the obvious question. By this time, he’d uploaded twenty-some videos to his own channel on YouTube. Cubby said he had worked hard to accomplish what he had, and he wanted to share the results with other chemists who might want to do something similar.
“What you don’t understand, Dad, is that there is a lot of bad science online. There are lots of how-to videos that show procedures that would kill you if you tried them at home. I want to show people safe science.” I wondered what would have happened if he’d followed hints in any of those “bad science” videos he talked about. Did his intelligence protect him, or was it just luck? Plus, “safe science” in the context of home-brew explosives sounded like an oxymoron to me, but he assured me it was not. “People make explosives for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “Look at mining companies. They mix their own charges all the time.”
Cubby’s experiments and his videos put me in a very difficult spot. I wanted to encourage him in his passions, but I did not want to awake one morning to find my home surrounded by federal agents with tanks and helicopters. I also did not want to get a phone call one day, telling me that Cubby had blown his arm off. I knew he was smart and careful, but there was no margin for error in what he was doing. He did stick to small charges most of the time, but when he showed me a video of one particular test in the swamp behind the house, I was frightened almost as much as I was impressed. The blast tossed water twenty feet into the air, and I knew it would have injured him badly if it had gone off when he was placing it. Yet he dismissed my concerns once again.
“We’re talking about water, Dad! I can throw a big rock in the swamp and
blast water just as far, and no one gets worried. I’m not blowing buildings into the air!” Once again, I had to concede he was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
When I challenged the risks of handling his explosives, I got a lecture on how stable the various chemicals were and how the explosives couldn’t detonate without an initiating charge. And I did know that dynamite wasn’t very sensitive, and that it was perfectly safe to handle under normal conditions. Blasting caps were safe too, until you connected the electrical wires to trigger them. They didn’t go off spontaneously. You had to make a mistake to get hurt.
But those were commercial explosives. Cubby was making his own explosive compounds, and if he made any mistakes formulating them, they might well be unstable in ways none of us could predict. That is the nature of experimentation. So what was the risk?
I tried to put what Cubby did in perspective. Other kids did skateboarding tricks, and the risks they took may well have been greater. Kids joined ski clubs and hit trees. High schoolers got concussions playing football. Cubby was thoughtful, careful, and performed all his experiments well away from people or houses. Logic told me he was less likely to sustain damage than many of his peers, but I still worried.
My biggest fear was the speed with which he was racing forward in his research and experimentation. He had started out imitating the work of others—mixing chemicals to make mildly explosive compounds like flash powder. From there, he had moved on to blending simple rocket fuels. Then he took a big leap: He went from mixing to actually reacting. He mixed chemicals, extracted a product of the reaction, and mixed that with other chemicals. Those multistep processes were what yielded the sophisticated high explosive he was so proud of.