This story has been told a few times yet it's still as fresh in my mind as ever...take one GlitterGirl, add a heady coctail of drugs and a stubborn desire for "fun", shake with mortar shells and ignite. Kapow.

We were on the Black Rock Desert for the Fourth of July, exercising our God-given American liberties or some such blather. There's since been a bit of crackdown on this sort of thing ("don't congregate, don't talk to each other, quit having so much fun, etc. etc.") so I doubt I'll see it again in my lifetime. But the week had been a hoot and the smoke drifted across the desert and we'd gotten lost in the midst of something that wouldn't exist again and giggled at the stars and cooked good food for our new best friends.

On our final night, we were using the last of the ordinance by lobbing starshell mortars at the camp across the way (we'd checked range and invited them for dinner first but for now they were content to sit in lawn chairs and drink beer while the show danced across the intervening desert and occasionally tumbled spent at their feet). We had a loose skirmish line about twenty feet in front of the living room and I was about to drop a round when I heard an unexpected muted fizzling noise from behind me and a burning lump of something wandered lazily past Slim's shoulder. He shouted, "misfire" and ducked away. I think we all turned at about the same time to find the source of the projectile, I was worried that a bit of burning something had perhaps set the table full of explosives behind us on fire. But no.

Standing behind us, just a couple feet from a table loaded with gunpowder, stood GlitterGirl. She'd been through camp before, too high to talk, naked, covered in colored glitter and smiling the blank smile of someone who thinks you must be a gossamer farm implement grown overly large and inquisitive. In her right hand she held a sizzling tube and her expression was puzzled. This tube had not acted the way ours had. She was raising it to her face to inspect it more closely when it exploded.

In the flash of the explosion, I saw a younger guy who had been eating with us earlier whipping his shirt off and before she had even had a chance to scream, he had the shirt around what was left of her hand and was compressing it. A small cooler of ice appeared underneath her and someone from a neighboring camp came to a skidding stop in a small car and she was hustled into it and off on the ride to Reno, some hour+ distant. And there was my camp. Very very quiet. The table of explosives sitting there. A trail of blood leading away from it.

It took a while for me to figure out what had happened and quit freaking out on my feelings of responsibility. GlitterGirl had walked through the living room where a group of ladies was chatting and had smiled at them for a bit but hadn't talked. They had quit paying attention to her -- this was her normal thing. Unobserved, she had walked over to the table and selected the biggest mortar shell and stuffed it, upside down, into the thinnest tube. When she lit the fuse, she pointed the tube the way she saw us doing....but from her position behind us, it just meant that she was AIMING AT US! When it hit the projectile package, the payload sat in the bottom of the tube with its three-second fuse burning while the projectile load waffled past Slim. Had she dropped it immediately or thrown it away then she'd have been fine although she probably would have thrown the explosive (given her proximity) right into the middle of my camp and the girls chatting.

I've heard through the grapevine that after a lot of physical therapy and multiple operations she now has the use of her hand. No one had returned from the hospital run by the time we had to pull out and head home the next day and I heard from another person in attendance that GlitterGirl had actually had her friends leave her behind the night before so she could "have some fun".