VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 02:17:04 02/05/02 Tue
Author: Jason
Subject: Texas A&M bonfire

Mid may be the only one to appreciate this, hopefully not...but as you may or may not have heard, the tradition of the Texas A&M bonfire has been cancelled, for safety reasons. Even as much as I hate Texas A&M, I love the tradition, and the passion they have for the game. For 91 years, every year, Texas A&M has been building a huge bonfire to burn before the football game vs. Texas, traditionally played on Thanksgiving Day, now played the day after. For years, it's been a symbol of the fire between these two schools, and the sign that a battle was going to take place...whether both teams were in the top 10, having dismal seasons, or even when one team was clearly superior to the other, it didn't matter... it was ON. Very sadly so, most of America will know about this tradition solely based on the context of the events of 1999, when the bonfire collapsed and claimed several lives. I consider myself lucky to have witnessed it before it was taken away, and I won't argue the reasons for doing so, because I understand.

On a Longhorn message board I frequent, an old-timer left a post that I thought was pretty poignant. I thought if one person other than myself could appreciate it, it was worth posting here. It's less about a bonfire, than it is about change itself. I won't alter the spelling, it's best read as is:

"When I was a child we lived in the then still-rural area of Satsuma, Texas. Highway 6 ran right along the Texas A&M campus, and when we went up to my father's parents home in eastern Bell county (where most people over thirty spoke their English with a central Eurpean accent) to visit and see how many quail we were likely to have to shoot at during the rapidly approaching season, we could see bonfire a-building as we drove past.

For fifty years or so, then, bonfire had been burning. I know for a fact there were occasional accidents, but by and large bonfire got built and burned and nothing much ever happened. Most eighteen-year old Texas men (and almost all Aggies) had done enough barn-building and brush clearing in their day to cut, haul, and stack a bunch of logs without getting hurt. I suppose it helped to keep injuries down (and the size of the project under control) that most of the work was done with saws and axes, as chainsaws were few and far between.

Students from what was then really and truly known as Texas University would try to set bonfire off early, or otherwise disrupt things. When it happened to be cloudy over College Station, I could see the faint glare off to the northeast when I climbed the forty-foot antenna tower (necessary then for teevee reception in countryside) in our back yard Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.

The quail are gone from the blackland of eastern Bell county, now. Fire ants got them. Even if there was going to be one, you couldn't see bonfire from my father's house in what is now suburban Houston, as Hempstead, Navasota and College Station have almost grown together along Highway 6 and the glare from the lights of countless shopping malls, subdivisions, and car lots is staggering.

As Texas became less rural and more complex socially, so did Texas A&M. Bonfire was not being run by farmer's and rancher's sons, anymore, because there were so few farmers and ranchers. Oh, sure, what kids there were with genuine rural backgrounds preferred to attend A&M. Many wealthier kids had fathers who owned what they thought of as ranches. But the vast majority of those ranches were weekend retreats, the main purpose of which was to provide an excuse to keep horses, and where the real work was usually done by others. Bonfire came to run by and mostly built by engineering students with little practical experience of such things. And it became very, very big.

Now, there are no more folks in the few remaining general stores of Central Texas negotiating purchases of kerosene and fence supplies in Czech or even German. People who think of themselves as authentic Texans simply cannot live without air conditioning; only the poorest of the poor feel they cannot afford it, and even they are allowed by heartless entities like utilities to run up huge, unpayable bills that are subsidized by others because everyone knows it is just not possible to sustain life in Texas without AC. And insurance companies persuade university officials to tell a bunch of young men with predominantly suburban backgrounds that it is too expensive and dangerous to build a stack of logs and burn it in what is rapidly becoming part of the greater Houston area.

I never moved. Where did Texas go?"

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.