Off the I-15

This one might even come as a shock to my parents.

I actually thought it was an April Fools joke when I came into the office on Tuesday morning to learn the police department had called in the explosive experts from Fort Irwin to examine a potato gun. True, the concept of a spud gun may be foreign to most, but for me and a couple of friends confined to the back roads and farm pastures of Ada, Michigan, it was a good time on a weekend night.

I did not see the gun confiscated by the police on Tuesday but I imagine it looked similar to the contraption my friends and I used to launch entire potatoes hundreds of yards with just a few squirts from a hair spray can, essentially a long plastic tube with some sort of ignition device at one end. I won’t go into detail about how to make a potato gun — as noted in the article, it is illegal to possess one in California.

My childhood pursuits were short-lived. Only on a few nights did my friends and I sneak onto the high school football field to conduct distance and accuracy tests. We could easily shoot the spud the length of the field but could never hit the broad side of barn, which I believe we tried once. Other nights we drove around the back roads launching spuds into farmers fields and stirring up quite a ruckus among the cows and llamas. Llama farming was really taking off in Ada during that time, don’t ask me why.

We never hit anything, to our knowledge, and spent most of our time figuring out which brand of hair spray acted as a better propellant. We singed a few eyebrows and burnt a few fingertips and then moved on with our teenage lives.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor