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Down here in the south it’s a given that every red blooded male escapes the womb knowing how to make great barbeque.  Give him a match and a bag of charcoal and he can make even the most sensitive of noses quiver with the aroma of a pork shoulder smoking over a pile of briquettes. 

Unfortunately, the act of playing with fire often brings out the idiotic side of more than a few backyard chefs!  It’s good to note that there is a distinction between outdoor cooks; city dwellers and country boys.  City folks can’t really be expected to know a lot of things that their country cousins take for granted, such as what to do with your coals and ashes once you’ve finished using them.

It would seem that the removal of the ashes is a no-brainer, but the Fire Marshall in our town tells me otherwise.  Some folks just do not like to get their grill wet and messy from dousing the coals with water.  Firefighters I talked with had a few expletives to share with me about their latest call to a barbeque genius in our town. 

By all indications, this hearty fellow would be classified as a southern gentleman and should have known better.  In our part of North Alabama, it has been a dry year.  It’s only the middle of April and we are already 12 inches below our normal amount or rainfall.  Everything is parchment dry and susceptible to the tiniest spark!  This is no place to leave charcoal on the grill and allow it to burn itself out.

We’ll call this fellow Billy Earl, (not his real name).  After letting the charcoal burn until all the goals were cold, he shoveled the ashes into an old paper grocery bag and threw it into a large outdoor trash can.  After the clean up from the party, the can was filled to over flowing with paper plates, napkins and an assortment of other paper material.  Billy Earl keeps the trash can in his garage next to his automobiles.

Everyone went to bed that evening with the satisfaction of knowing that another outdoor cookout was a success and plans for the next one were already percolating in their dreams.  About 3:00 a.m. the smoke alarm rudely interrupted those dreams.  Smoke had engulfed most of the house by this time, but they could see no fire; only an eerie glow from the garage.

Sirens could be heard in the distance.  Friends next door had seen the flames in the garage and called the fire department.  Soon there was a small crowd of neighbors huddled together across the street from Billy Earl’s house, cringing at small explosions that occurred periodically. Paint thinner and gasoline cans had been stored under his work bench.  Not anymore!  Fortunately the fire was contained to the garage and the kitchen.  All that was lost was the kitchen, a ‘78 Camaro and a new SUV. 

The fire started in the bottom of the overfilled trash can by charcoal briquettes that were not completely out.  This, I discovered was not an uncommon call to the fire department.  Our local fire fighters are called out several times a year to put out fires that have been started by “cold ashes”.

While there are few restrictions regarding barbeque fires in residential areas of the city, there are definitely some that apply to apartment dwellers.  For multifamily units you can’t grill on the porch or deck, balcony or breeze ways of the building.  In addition, the barbeque grill has to be at least 10 feet away from the building.  Our Fire Marshall told me that these rules are basically the same everywhere, with the space between grill and building varying depending upon the city.

No matter where you live, the idiocy factor comes into play.  Nation wide, 45-50 people die each year from barbeque related fires, while a few thousand more are injured.  If you plan on having a cook-out on a hot, dry Saturday afternoon on your deck, make sure you have some kind of covering on the deck and not expose the wood to sparks form the grill.  Better still, move the grill away from the house so there’s no chance anything can catch on fire!

It’s sad, but most states now have barbeque safety tips.  This implies that there are a lot of folks out there who do not know their way around a barbeque grill.  That’s a sad commentary on our society! 

Bob Alexander  is well experienced in outdoor cooking, fishing and leisure living.  Bob is also the author and owner of this article.  Visit his sites at:
http://www.redfishbob.com
http://www.homeandgardenbob.com

God in his infinite wisdom must have prepared a special place in heaven for watermelons, barbeque, shrimp and homemade banana ice cream!  I’ve tasted watermelons all over the south, but the best ones I’ve ever eaten were the melons my cousin Jackie and I stole from Big Jim Tatum’s watermelon patch in Mississippi when we were kids.
 

Some memories, like good wine, age better than others.  Sometimes when I awake early in the morning, in my mind I can still hear the rooster crowing as he greeted the sun with a boisterous cry and with a swagger in his walk.  There are not a lot of roosters left in Mississippi now, having gone the way of hand milking old Bessie the cow and digging sweet potatoes with a shovel and bushel basket.
 

10 year old boys were perfectly safe on their farms back then without their mothers and fathers watching every move.  They didn’t have to worry about child predators doing obscene things with their children.  Their only concern was that their kids might do something stupid and injure themselves!  Some things just don’t change.
 

I recall that we ate a fast breakfast that morning and then headed to the creek with cane fishing poles and a bucket to hold our bait.  Making a detour to the barn, we carefully knocked down a few of the huge red wasp nests hanging onto the rafters.  They were so high above our heads that when we hit them with the tips of our fishing poles, the wasps buzzing around didn’t see us.  We scooped the fallen nests up and threw them into the buckets.  We would use the larvae to bait our hooks. 
 

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Mississippi summers are hot!  After fishing for a couple of hours Jackie casually mentioned that he knew where we could find some watermelons that were ripe; he had already sampled one a few days before I arrived.
We hid our fishing poles under a sweet gum tree and marched across the pasture to a corn field where we sneaked up on a watermelon patch on the other side of the corn.
It was then that I figured out that these melons didn’t belong to my uncle.  
 

My cousin elaborated on the fact that a fellow by the name of Big Jim Tatum. He didn’t mince words as he described this mountain of a man as huge, mean and someone who hated kids!  His one big love was his prize winning, yellow meated watermelons.  This was enough to make any kid with a sense of adventure, willing to accept almost any punishment just to get a taste of those wonderful melons.
 

As we came out of the cornfield, we saw watermelons everywhere.  The field was covered in them and there all by themselves in a little corner of the field were the yellow ones.  Their skins were a lighter color than those of the red ones.

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We didn’t have a knife to cut the melons, but that wasn’t any problem for two 10 year old boys with time on their hands and a huge craving for watermelon.  We didn’t even twist the stem off the vine.  We just picked up one of those gorgeous melons and dropped it on the ground in the middle of the patch.
 

It burst open with all its golden goodness laying there for the taking.  My cousin and I grabbed handfuls of the most delicious watermelon I have ever tasted!  We ate two of those juicy and sugary sweet yellow watermelons and gobbled half-way through a red one before we had to quit due to sheer exhaustion from over eating. 
 

Later that year my cousin slipped and told his parents about our raid on Big Jim’s watermelon patch.  They made him go to the old man, tell him what we did and pay him for the destruction of the melons.  Very solemnly he listened to my cousin’s confession and then held out his hand for the half-dollar coin.  I guess crime really doesn’t pay!

Bob Alexander  is well experienced in outdoor cooking, fishing and leisure living.  Bob is also the author and owner of this article.  Visit his sites at:
http://www.bluemarlinbob.com
http://www.redfishbob.com

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