Everybody knows not to throw water on a grease fire. We either learned that from a grisly first-hand experience, or from a friendly fireman who visited our grade school and instructed us on what not to throw on fires, and told us to “tuck and roll,” or something like that, if we were suddenly surrounded by flames. We were also told by the fireman to feel doors before we opened them during a fire, and to go home and tell our parents to design an escape plan from our houses and have the whole family practice it. I don’t recall getting any cooperation at home on that front, however.
As children, we are given a lot of instruction on safety. It was probably our parents or teachers who taught us to yell “stranger” at the top of our lungs at all unknown passersby who happened to look our way. In the mid-1960s, we learned to sit along the walls in our school’s corridor, with our heads covered by our hands and arms, in order to survive an atom bomb attack. It was guaranteed to work.
When I was growing up in Northeast Philadelphia in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were men who drove trucks with amusement rides hitched to the back. The rides were surrounded by steel mesh. Inside the enclosure were colorfully painted cars that spun around on tracks, or sometimes the truck held a mini Ferris Wheel. For safety’s sake, the seats on the Ferris Wheel were inside large metal buckets that had a top, sides, steel mesh windows, and a door that locked. Kids lined up to pay their dimes and enter the ride area. My mother would never let us participate. She said that the driver could easily take off with a mesh container of kids. I never believed her, though. I thought she was being cheap. Now that I’m older, I think she was very wise, and maybe a little cheap.
But, back to fires. I know not to throw water on a grease fire. However, nobody ever mentioned that water shouldn’t be used on gas grill flames. I figured that out today, all on my own.
I had put burgers on the gas grill and while they cooked, it started to rain. The lid was closed, but I had to open it in order to flip the burgers. Just as I lifted the lid, the rain became torrential. The rain hit the grill and the flames shot up into the sky. I knew I should shut the lid immediately, but the burgers had to be flipped first or they would burn. I needn’t have worried. When the flames became a solid wall against the inside of the grill’s lid, the burgers cooked at an unusually fast rate and became rock-solid burnt hockey pucks in seconds. I finally closed the lid. As soon as the rain let up a little, I took the burgers off the grill and told my family that they were charbroiled.
They didn’t fall for it. Even the dog wouldn’t touch the burgers. We filled up on corn and other side dishes. I distributed ice cream cones after dinner to mitigate the taste of burnt meat.
You know, I can never die, because I’m still learning things that others consider common sense. Maybe I should have paid better attention to the friendly fireman.
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