In Defense of Pyromania

The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders begins its entry on pyromania with three key facts: first, pyromania is defined as “a pattern of deliberate setting of fires for pleasure or satisfaction derived from the relief of tension experienced before the fire-setting”; second, the word “pyromania” is derived from the Greek words for “fire” and “loss of reason” or “madness”; and third, pyromania is described in the clinician’s handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMMV), as a rare disorder of impulse control, that “a person diagnosed with pyromania fails to resist the impulsive desire to set fires—as opposed to the organized planning of an arsonist or terrorist.”

The encyclopedia entry also specifies that only adults are pyromaniacs, whereas children and adolescents fall into categories of “firesetters” including, but not limited to “delinquent firesetters” who burn for the thrill of damaging property or committing hate crimes, “severely disturbed firesetters,” kids who also happen to be psychotic or paranoid and whose delusions are enhanced by the sensory experiences of fire, and “sociocultural firesetters,” kids who light fires to win the approval of the antisocial adult role models whom they admire.

Throughout his childhood, my dad was, and still is, a pyro. But he was none of the above. He prefers the more refined term “functional pyromaniac,” which, by way of explanation, involves a combination of the pleasure-seeking aspect of the pathological disorder, the pragmatic necessity of garbage disposal, and the continuing of family traditions (sans madness). All the descriptions that follow confirm Dad’s indisputable assertions of self-proclaimed pyromania, but may also help to explain that I inherited more from him than just his nose.

DSMMV Diagnostic Claim #1:
The patient must have set fires deliberately and purposefully on more than one occasion.

As a boy in the fifties Dad watched trucks making their rounds in his neighborhood of Elkins Park, Philadelphia—the white Good Humor ice cream trucks, the pastel yellow trucks of the milkmen who unloaded milk in glass bottles at each doorstep, and the green coal trucks that backed into the yards of homes with coal chutes. Some homes back then relied on the coal trucks to supply weekly rations that were funneled down the coal chutes and into bins in the basement.

Not only did trucks deliver coal along with ice cream and milk, but many homes in Dad’s neighborhood had fireplaces or wood stoves, as centerpieces of living room furniture arrangements, to supplement central heating systems. In days, when it seemed that, of all the décor on an accent wall, the fireplace—not the TV—commanded the eye’s attention, it was also not illegal for each household to burn their own trash in the backyard.

One of Dad’s chores was to help with the trash burning. The burning barrel, a 55-gallon steel drum with the top sawed off, was kept next to the backyard garden. On designated burning days, Dad helped collect all the paper trash from the house. Burning commenced at 5 PM. He would empty all the trashcans into a paper grocery sack, tote the load out to the barrel, listen to the requisite fire safety lecture, and watch his father (Grandpa George to me) light a blaze that swallowed the contents of the barrel.

Along with other boys who helped their fathers, my dad learned lots of useful things—how to build a teepee shelter of dry twigs over the flammable paper, how to light a match on the first strike, and where to stand on a windy day to avoid singing his eyebrows.

Ashes full of phosphates from the trash barrel were then emptied into the garden to nourish the soil that produced, besides Indian corn, roses, raspberry and blueberry bushes, strawberry vines, parsley, bell peppers, and tomatoes. Emptying the ashes completed one full burning cycle, and it would start all over again next month.

In elementary school I know fire safety basics—don’t play with matches under the bed or you’ll burn your house down like Billy Hand who was Dad’s neighbor when he was a kid. In first grade I come home excited about about stop, drop, and roll and Dad gathers us all in the living room to stage mock house fires, without any actual flames, much to my disappointment. My brother and sister and I have to crawl around on our elbows, single file, with washcloths on our faces; the washcloths are supposed to protect us from the noxious carbon dioxide fumes that would accompany a real fire, but after about one minute the seriousness of the drill deteriorates as my siblings turn their cloths into ninja face masks and karate-chopped each others’ backsides. “If this was a real fire you guys would be dying!” I scold from beneath the cover of my washcloth, as I am still taking the drill seriously. They ignore me.

After first grade I am cheerfully more reckless in my firesetting. My sister and I are always on the lookout for promising clubhouse locations. One year we construct a pallet shack in the backyard in which we hold secret meetings and consume massive amounts of candy our friends buy with their allowance. The candy wrappers have to be disposed of somehow without our parents knowing. So I “borrow” some kitchen matches and we dig a small hole in the shack and destroy all evidence of unauthorized sugar consumption, then cover the shallow fire pit with some scraps of plywood.

Several weeks later Dad storms into my room with an unpleasant speech about how he had spotted ashes underneath the scraps of our clubhouse floor, and how I could have moronically blown up the whole house and the neighbors’ too, sending everyone’s belongings into a roaring mushroom cloud blaze—because I had chosen an optimal site for the clubhouse and propped it against a 50-gallon drum of gasoline stored for winter snow machine use.

Oops.

Down goes the clubhouse.

DSMMV Diagnostic Claim #2:
The patient must have experienced feelings of tension or emotional arousal before setting the fires.

Today kids get adrenaline rushes sitting before the computer zapping aliens, or slashing the heads off of swarming chthonic fiends in medieval dungeons, or waving their extremities in front of their plasma screen TVs “playing” Wii cyber sports without sweating. Dad did what was in vogue in his day, like pedal his bike as fast as he could through foot-high piles of dead leaves by the curb. Sometimes those piles of leaves were on fire.

New England autumns are exquisitely scenic, with pockets of explosions of red and yellow in the changing colors of sycamores, maples, and oaks. Every year leaves drift to the ground and blanket lawns in thin films of fragile, cruncy parchment which must always be disposed of before winter. Now families clean their lawns with leaf blowers in a matter of minutes, but back then the common method of disposal in Dad’s day was to burn the leaves and make a day-long party out of turning work into play.

There were no county ordinances against curbside fires until the 1970s, and since it was considered disgraceful to just ignore the leaves piling higher and higher in your yard—only abandoned houses and inveterate slobs had leaves scattered about their lawns—dads and kids from every respectable house on the block would rake all the leaves into small mounds off the sides of the curb and burn them. This happened during football season, after Thanksgiving but before the first snow in December, while the grass was still green on a day that wasn’t too windy. Opportunistic dads taught their kids the essentials of fire safety, between sips of beer and talk of politics or fishing or college sports, and my dad raced his brother through the flaming (or more likely, smoldering) leaf piles, like Danny Lyon of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club speeding down Highway 66, while the dry, tangy scent of leaf smoke wafted through the neighborhood and the ashes swept away with the whisper of a breeze.

We do not take the average family camping trips where a weekend’s worth of hotdogs and soda are loaded into the car and driven to a nice, neat campground with port-o-potties. We live in the remote Alaskan villages where you can leave in the summer by plane and boat, or snow machine in the winter. Our camping is done in the summer, so Dad loads the boat with a messy jumble of sleeping bags, tents, fishing poles, rifles, gasoline cans, and peanut butter, 12-grain bread, cheese, canned oysters, Snickers bars, frozen burritos and Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Everything is covered in a tarp and lashed down with bungee cords. And since our boat trips typically double as hunting excursions, on the return trip, the boat is always weighed down with animal carcases—usually the antlered heads or hoofed legs of moose and caribou sticking out of the tarp at odd angles.

On trips like these, fires are of utmost importance. I am told that when I was three or four, I loved these fires. At times when it was safe to approach a dying blaze I was delighted to be the designated poker in charge of stirring the embers with a willow branch, sending sparks swirling into the air like a vertical parade of dancing orange fireflies, and I was so excited that I made up a chant to go along with the fire poking. I would say, “Look Dad, it’s Halloween time! It’s Halloween time!” And it was just as much fun as Christmas morning.

DSMMV Diagnostic Claim #3:
The patient must indicate that he or she is fascinated with, attracted to, or curious about fire and situations surrounding fire (for example, the equipment associated with fire, the uses of fire, or the aftermath of firesetting).

Poring over the book by the light of a dorm room lamp in Temple University in the 70s, Dad found in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 an author who wrote what he had been thinking all his life, “It was a pleasure to burn.” Dad wasn’t a book-burner (except phone books and Sears, Montomgery Ward, and Spiegels catalogs) but he couldn’t read this and not think about the fires burned at Elkins Park.

The men of the house—Grandpa George, Dad and his brother—would head out, armed with buck saws and a vintage two-man handle saw with a broad blade and one-inch teeth, to the forests beyond the field in the backyard. They were in search of “slash.” Slash was any part of a tree that blew onto the lawn after a storm, or any tree branches that needed trimming to prevent gnarly blockage of the views from kitchen and living room windows. Slash was either trimmed or blown into the yard from the forests that edged the field just beyond the backyard.

Sometimes a more serious storm left thicker limbs partly sheared off. These required rope, tackle, and ladders. These required someone to climb the ladder and saw the limbs down. The boys then bucked the fallen limbs, split them, and piled them for Thanksgiving and Christmas fires and for the occasional power outages, especially loved by Grandpa George because he could assemble materials in the fireplaces and light the backup candles and kerosene lamps. Then the brothers joyfully dug fire pits in the middle of the Indian corn patch and burned the remaining slash. When the “charm and vigor of the old bucksaws and two-man deal” faded for his brother, Dad continued the yard maintenance alone. His work was finished much more quickly when he graduated from handsaws to chainsaws at age sixteen.

And then there was the wood. Dad could catalog all the different types and uses for wood in his neighborhood. White, gold, silver, black birches were family favorites because of the volatility of the bark peeling back like dry slabs of speckled skin. Pitchy white pine and spruce were loved for their fragrant smoke, but inconvenient for leaving tar streaked chimneys. Hardwoods burned cleanest: beech, hornbeam, ash, and especially maples.

I don’t remember exactly when I discover the entertainment value of marshmallows and fire. It must be during one of our family’s epic road trips from Anchorage to Pennsylvania. We’re in a campground in Manitoba, since our route takes us from the Alaska Highway into the Canadian provinces, and someone persuades the parents to buy a bag of jumbo Jet Puffed marshmallows. Marshmallows are basically nutritionally bankrupt, (their only redeeming qualities are that they are very low in sodium, cholesterol, and saturated fat) so we never have them at home. Perhaps they’re a reward for getting through the whole day riding in the car without causing a backseat ruckus.

When the evening fire has died down sufficiently, out come the roasting sticks and the marshmallows. It takes me a few tries to master the art of marshmallow toasting and it’s fascinating watching the sugar burn into golden brown bubbles or turn flaky and black.

And then someone, I don’t remember who, drags a log over to the fire and starts painting it with burnt marshmallow goo. It looks fun, so I try it. I spear several marshmallows on my stick, wait until they’re melty, and poke the shapeless blob of sugar into a crevice in the log. Soon the whole bag of marshmallows is melted and mixed with ashes, covering the log like gray glue, much to the disgust of my parents who, in general disapprove of wasting food, but who also don’t consider marshmallows to be food, so we get away with it. The old log ends up looking kind of cool, like you could put it in a museum and call it modern art, the marshmallows keep us busy for hours, all for a grand total of 99 cents plus seven percent sales tax.

DSMMV Diagnostic Claim #4:
The patient must experience relief, pleasure, or satisfaction from setting the fire or from witnessing or participating in the aftermath.

On more than one occasion fire helped Dad solve several significant problems.

The backyard of the red brick Elkins Park house merged into a large empty field hedged in by forests of ancient colonial growths. The trees in those forests were at least 200 years old, giant white oaks with stumps wide as tables. The oaks were full of giant carpenter ants that tunneled and nested in the trunks. Dad and his brother enjoyed driving spikes into the trunks of dead trees to make climbing ladders. Ants often got in the way, because when their nests or tunnels were disturbed by the heads of spikes being pounded in by the hammer, they scurried out with pincers like serrated knives and bit anything on contact. So the boys learned to pack matches on their climbing excursions. When the ants scurried out they met their demise by fire. If fire didn’t work, the boys resorted to smashing them with hammers.

Another time, while Dad was scouting around in the empty field, he discovered an unusually large infestation of tent caterpillars. They were notorious garden pests that, if given the chance, would create cobwebby nests everywhere. The nests filled with seething masses of maggots that would grow up to be two inches long, black with yellow bristles and sometimes yellow-red and blue spots. These fat, wriggling pipe cleaners devoured all plants and fruit within their reach.

Dad enlisted a friend to help him make torches to set the whole nest on fire. It also happened to be summer. The nest also happened to be in the middle of a field full of dead, dry grass. When the fire spread into an uncontrollable radius the boys ran for cover and climbed a tree to observe the damage. The guilt washed over Dad as he watched the field burn to the ground. Fortunately the neighbors saw the smoke and called the fire department. Dad didn’t get caught, but felt guilty for a good half hour or so. He had only meant to be a creative problem solver without ever hurting anyone. Just the caterpillars.

And yet there were still more non-woody items to burn or dispose of. The sandbox outside served occasionally as a fire pit for toasting an assortment of insects and crayfish to a crisp. Later, as a teenager, the sandbox became a toy soldier graveyard for all Dad’s mutilated figurines. He had an impressive collection of plastic toys and soldiers he’d received as gifts for birthdays and Christmases—colonial Revolutionary War red and blue coats, men from both world wars, Ali Baba Arabian Knights, Cape Canaveral rockets and astronauts, dinosaurs, model planes, ships, tanks, little submarines. They would have been worth quite a bit of money now, but where did they go? Up in flames. These were rite of passage kind of burnings, where the men were all lined up in the sandbox together and blown up with firecrackers to signal the end of childhood.

What sweet relief it brought. . . at the time. The same goes for the thick knit sweater he got from his Grandma Honey one Christmas, and the Italian Cabretta leather jacket he wore in high school, all burned to herald the end of one phase and the beginning of the next.

In a small town with no trees to climb or open fields to roam or anything else remotely interesting, unbearable ennui sets in by mid June. So in the summer of 2000 my sister and friends and I decide to have a Fourth of July celebration of our own (names are left out to protect the not so innocent).

Several weeks before the big day we set up shop in my bedroom. Our task is to construct a miniature metropolis made entirely out of Popsicle sticks, cardboard, and milk cartons. On the fourth we will blow it up with firecrackers and watch it burn.

I am in charge of delegating responsibilities—Merella and A-- will sneak all the discarded cardboard milk cartons out of the trash in their respective homes, I will gather Popsicle sticks, and at the appointed place and time (our backyard, 1600 hours), C-- will have firecrackers and handfuls of her brother’s green plastic army men.

The construction begins two weeks before the fourth. By the end of the first week we have the sheriff’s station, the church, and the schoolhouse all ready to go in their pastel colored pencil and washable marker exteriors. All we need are the post office and saloon. The saloon ends up being the largest building the town, since Merella can’t find any more tiny milk cartons.

We wait to set it up in the yard until Dad falls asleep for his afternoon nap. We go out to the dirt hill in our yard and at its base erect our makeshift creation, a cartoonishly colored town dubbed Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, circa 1900. The random assortment of green support infantrymen, snipers, riflemen, anti-armor soldiers and demolition experts don’t exactly match but the add to the ambiance of imminent destruction that is about to take place. We allow a large number of soldiers to congregate at the swinging doors of the saloon. The firecrackers, of the variety that claim only to produce small smatterings of sparks, are laced throughout the milk carton maze in domino train fashion.

Operation Rabbit Hash begins rather well. The firecrackers spark as planned, the soldiers’ heads and limbs melt into green puddles, and the saloon goes up in a glorious half-inch blaze.

At first, there is a minimal amount of smoke. Then it really gets going. The smoke starts to rise straight up in thick billowy pillars, and the neighbors surely see it. We don’t notice. We are too absorbed in the scene of melting mayhem at our feet.

The next thing we know, police sirens are blaring down the street, red and blue lights flashing, doors slamming, badges glinting in the sun, guns in holsters, cops running straight toward us. My “friends” see all of this a split second before I do and A-- and C-- disappear before I can say anything, or think of anything to do but stand there and look idiotic. Fortunately, Merella doesn’t desert me.

All the time my heart is pounding because one of the officers is the dad of a casual friend I had in elementary school and I pray he doesn't recognize me, and the other lives right around the corner and it's not like I'll never see them again in a town of only 27 square miles and me with three years of high school still left.

They’re standing there asking us what we think we’re doing with fireworks, and don’t we know they’re not allowed, and why don’t we put out the last of them before the sparks shoot someone’s eye out, and this is a warning but next time we’ll be arrested and so on and so forth. I am so grateful that I promise never to light another fire until next year.

It’s a close call. Nobody finds out until I confess years later.

DSMMV Diagnostic Claim #5:
The patient does not have other motives for setting fires, such as financial motives; ideological convictions (such as terrorist or anarchist political beliefs); anger or revenge; a desire to cover up another crime; delusions or hallucinations; or impaired judgment resulting from substance abuse, dementia, mental retardation, or traumatic brain damage.

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