At 1:30 p.m. Wednesday at Ray Dennison Memorial Field on the Fort Lewis College campus, 13 men and one woman huddled together on the rain-streaked field, watching – with hope, unabashed wonder and a thrilling, dreadful feeling of anticipatory destruction – as a single spark took six seconds to travel down the cannon’s fuse, ever-closer to lighting the 4-ounce charge of gun powder.
Bang!
The cannon fired. Like a fire-breathing dragon convulsed by a violent cough, the effects of the cannon’s explosion, while dramatic, passed almost instantaneously. But in the split seconds before the handsome machine reverted to perfect stillness, everyone stood mesmerized by its fiery violence: First, it spurt forth a sudden gust of hot light, followed by a low quaking boom and, finally, a thick stream of enveloping white-gray smoke.
For a long moment, everyone stood shell-shocked and silent.
Then, all at once, the crowd cheered.
“Touchdown, Skyhawks!” cried one man.
After three long years in which FLC’s cannon was out of commission, leaving its football games scored by the lower-decibel roar of human cheering, ardent FLC supporters’ relief and joy was palpable Wednesday afternoon.
FLC’s loudest athletic tradition started in the 1970s, when the athletic department, helped by athletes and random “cannoneers,” started firing a cannon donated to FLC by Sean Waddell to punctuate the beginning, end and intervening triumphs of FLC’s football team.
But the cannon became unsafe around 2012.
“We’re making a lot of people really happy by doing this,” said FLC Alumni Director Dave Kerns, whose efforts spearheading FLC’s “Bringing Back the Boom” campaign spanned more than two years and saw glorious fruition on the field Wednesday afternoon after raising the $7,500 necessary to purchase a new, safe cannon barrel from the esteemed Kentucky firm Steen Cannons.
According to Ken Wright’s official history of FLC’s cannon, it’s a Civil War-era Parrott Rifle Cannon that was originally engineered by Robert Parrott, a 19th-century supervisor of the West Point Foundry “who developed a way of wrapping a band of iron around the breech end to reinforce it and keep it from exploding.”
Brad Hitti, a former FLC student and lifelong cannon enthusiast and caretaker, fondly recalls how he and others deployed the cannon to blow up “stuffed mascots of the other teams by hanging them in front of the cannon,” according to the official history.
Though Hitti admits the maneuver “might be politically incorrect today,” he still savors one incident, when a rival team’s mascot, quite aflame, landed in the bleachers “dangerously close to the crowd,” necessitating an emergency fire-fighting mission.
FLC looks to have even more fun with its cannon in the future.
Gary Hunter, athletic director, tried to explain the fun everyone was having as a result of humans’ hopeless fascination with fire.
“I think there’s just a 7-year-old boy part of me, maybe everyone, that loves lighting things on fire and watching them go ‘boom.’”
After the initial blast Wednesday afternoon, for the next hour-and-a-half, FLC staff, alumni and fans seemed to relish loading the cannon – a laborious, resplendently dorky process supervised by health and safety officials, who relied throughout on a “very thorough” cannon-firing manual from Steen Cannons for guidance.
Spokesman Mitch Davis said the highly technical loading process involved various vital instruments, including a wet sponge, a dry sponge and a “pointy metal thing.”
The training, which saw about six successful cannon fires, quickly became a media event, drawing crews from two different Durango-based online television stations, whose cameramen hustled side by side with a newspaper photographer, trying to get a perfect shot of the cannon firing.
FLC Athletic Operations Coordinator Adam Ruetschle said the athletic department planned to fire the cannon at the beginning of football games, track meets and, hopefully, soccer games.
He said staff hadn’t yet worked out how to incorporate the tradition into “indoor events. But we’re thinking about it.”
Many people who participated in the cannon training grew misty-eyed about the tradition.
“We’ve just done it for so long, and it’s such a presence at games – to come back to it after breaking with it for three or four years – it’s exciting. It’s Fort Lewis College,” said Sarah Meier, assistant athletic director.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
