Jim was dying. He was sitting on the deck at Mark Bennion’s spectacular cabin, perched high on a bluff overlooking the Snake River near Heise Hot Springs. Mark had invited about 100 friends to a farewell home evening and cannon shoot. It proved to be memorable.
Early on a Sunday morning several months earlier, Jim was attending a High Council meeting and had a grand mal seizure. He was taken across the street to the hospital where he was found to have an aggressive brain tumor. That was his last High Council meeting.
As with most patients with glioblastoma, Jim faded rapidly. By the time the cannon shoot was held he wasn’t able to participate much beyond just sitting in the chair on the deck. As far as we could tell, he was comfortably watching the late afternoon shadows fall across the steep canyon walls above the river. He didn’t say much, but smiled graciously at the many well-wishers, acknowledging their kindness.
On the other hand, Mark was not going to let this man pass without a bang. His weapon of choice was a large antique cannon that he hauled around on a big trailer. When he fired the cannon in town, he filled the firing chamber with black powder and about five pounds of flour. The noise and bluster of cannon fired flour started the Greenbelt Duck Race for many years. For Jim's last roundup, Mark had created some actual munitions by filling No. 5 fruit cans with concrete. Each ka-BOOM was followed by a distinct oscillating warble as the fruit cans spun end-over-end. In the sunset, I could see some of the cans tumbling and grow smaller before they disappeared into a cloud of dust on the other side of the river.
Mark proved to be an exceptional cannoneer. Between shots, the cannon was cleaned and cooled before being re-armed with more primers, gun powder, and concrete-filled fruit cans. This process took about ten minutes and gave us time to visit as we watched. The observers included church leaders and civic officials, INL scientists, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen who were not usually part of an artillery team. One man with considerable gun experience opined that the tolerances of the Confederate-era cannon were not known. He added that while the enthusiastic shooter may overload the gunpowder and damage the weapon, a catastrophic failure was not likely unless the overload was repeated. Someone estimated that Mark had fired the cannon over 100 times. Pictured here is a confederate cannon that experienced catastrophic overload failure.
The analytic minds, in our group, figured that Mark was shooting unlicensed projectiles from the cannon on his private property onto Sonny Spaulding's private property on the opposite side of the river. It cost Mark a fifth of Glenlivet Scotch whiskey to get Sonny to approve the use of his property as a firing range for the afternoon. Not so with the government agencies that were left out of the deal. I pointed out that while the projectiles were fired from private property, their trajectory then flew over the Snake River, a body of water governed by Bonneville County, Fish and Game, Idaho Department of Water Resources, and the U.S. Army Engineers. After that, the flight path crossed the road on the other side of the river, governed by Jefferson County and the Idaho State Police. This all was surrounded by areas of BLM and CRP ground, more private property, and the Caribou-Targhee National Forest involving the United States Department of the Interior, the FBI, and ATF agents. What could go wrong? Situational awareness became evident as the potentates imagined the headlines in the local paper: “Fire Crews Battle Wildfire After Catastrophic Antique Cannon Failure! Prominent Idaho Falls Citizens Injured!” Without announcing their departure, and almost in unison, they did the side-shoe shuffle over to their cars and zoomed away. Jim's last vision of some of these friends was a caravan of Suburbans hurrying up the dirt road in a big cloud of dust as they escaped onto Hwy 26. By comparison, the rest of the afternoon was fairly uneventful. Mark stopped shooting when we told him that he had just fired over two rafts of alarmed fishermen that he hadn’t seen. I was called to replace Jim on the High Council and that was my last cannon shoot.
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