By Will Dabbs, MD
Blowing stuff up is one of the few marketable skills I retained from the military. There’s not exactly a thriving civilian market for flying a helicopter gunship or coordinating a 15-ship NVG air assault. However, sometimes life gives you problems that are best solved via the judicial application of high explosives. Uncle Sam was good enough to show me how to manage that.
My farm and my wife are the only two really good investments I have ever made. We bought the land in rural Mississippi back when I was in the Army, assuming we’d retire to it someday. When God’s plans allowed us to move there while the kids were still young, that 100 acres of unspoiled wilderness became our family playground. Burbling through the middle of it all was a lovely little creek. This seemed the perfect raw material for a nice lake.
I was not the only one to feel that way. Arrayed along the creek were fully a dozen sequential beaver dams, each creating a modest shallow pond adequate to attract veritable battalions of water moccasins and legions of mosquitoes. Before we could dredge out the bottom and erect a proper dam with a spillway and a drainage pipe, the beaver dams had to go.
A Different Time
These were the heady days before 9/11, and high explosives were easy to source. Everything about life was better then, to be honest. I look back with fondness to the era when you need not be electronically strip-searched to board a commercial airplane, but, I digress…
Back then, if you knew where to look, it was easier to buy kinepak binary explosive charges and det cord than it was to purchase a handgun. No kidding, I arranged to meet a guy in a neighboring town who maintained an explosives license through his home. I bought two cases of binary explosive charges along with the sundry blasting caps and such required to make it energetic out of the trunk of his car in a church parking lot. All I had to do was supply a valid driver’s license and sign my name. Ah, the good old days.
How To Blow A Beaver Dam
There’s a technique to it. The charges come in long plastic cylinders and are inert when dry. When it’s time to get real, you remove a cap and pour a liquid component into the bottle. Let it soak in for a minute, and you’re set to pop. You then place a length of det cord into a groove in the cylinder, fold it back on itself, and secure the whole shebang with duct tape. Easy peazy.
To remove a beaver dam with high explosives, you need to get the charge underneath whatever it is you want moved. I scored a big steel rod and used it to slam a hole down into the meat of the dam. I then slid the primed charge down into the hole until it seated. On the near end, you then fold a short bight of det cord around a fuse-fired blasting cap, tape that to a handy tree limb, and get ready to rock.
I got my kids to help me rig my charges. You never know when they might need those sorts of life skills. Yeah, we were some of those homeschool freaks.
We cut the time fuse for about two minutes. You want enough time to light the thing and then amble peacefully to a position of safety without feeling unduly rushed. We set up an old VHS video camera to capture the action and hunkered down as a family to wait for the boom. The anticipation was the best part.
For the larger dams I’d rig several charges in series. Once they went off, the ground would literally shake and untold volumes of muddy debris would launch into the air like something from Space-X. The kids would immediately leap out of our refuge and charge into the beaten zone in time to let the mud shower them vigorously before everything settled. Needless to say, a grand time was had by all.
Unintended Consequences
So, what happened to the beavers while we were wreaking all of this subterranean chaos, might you wonder? Well, most of them just wisely moved on to safer spaces. However, it seemed our farm also played host to the most unfortunate beaver on Planet Earth.
My boys rushed into the beaten zone whooping and hollering like the little savages they were. Then the timbre of their outburst palpably changed. Fearing that something was amiss, I ran after them.
Apparently curiosity is not the sole purview of the feline. Some 30 meters or so up on the creek bank, the boys had discovered a freshly-demised beaver. Apparently this poor guy was sniffing around the base of his handiwork investigating what all the sputtering was about when my chain of three charges detonated. The poor guy had clearly been right on top of them. The resulting blast launched that big, toothy rodent into outer space.
For those tree huggers in the audience, take solace in the fact that at least the poor creature did not suffer. This was a beefy beast, likely pushing 50 pounds or more. Trust me, he joined the choir eternal in a fashion most expeditious. The look on his furry visage was one of pure unfiltered surprise.
The resulting lake occupies some seven acres today. It has been our science lab, food source, and primary recreation for more than two decades now. However, before we could start tidying up the place and engaging in a little responsible forestry, one hapless beaver did indeed make the ultimate sacrifice. May he forever rest in pieces.
