The Bull

 The next several stories will be about things we did while working at White Oak Baptist Conference Center.  The staff did some creative things to pass the time, when we had free time.
 As I wrote in the last story, we had a guy named John who worked on the staff with us.  He was a senior in high school and an Eagle Scout.  John was younger than the rest of us, but he also had some great ideas for things to do.  He, Jeff and Mike got an idea to throw cafeteria trays in the air and take pictures of them.  We were going to send them into the National Enquirer and say they were UFO's.  Somebody suggested that we wrap the trays in tin foil to make them more shiny.  I also chimed in and said we should do this at night, since most UFO sightings had been at night.  John said that we needed to propel the trays into the air, so he suggested building a cannon.  So, we did.  The planning and execution took a couple of hours.  In hindsight, we should have planned it out a little more.
 It was around 10pm, and we set out to find a place that had no street lights.  We wanted to find a place where the only light was the flash of the camera.  John had the "cannon".  It was a tube filled with gunpowder.  I don't know where the gunpowder came from, and I don't want to know.  We brought a couple of trays wrapped in tin foil.  We set one of the trays on top of the cannon, and lit the fuse.  The tray went up about six feet and fell quickly.  It really wasn't enough time to snap the picture.  So, John "modified" the cannon to get a bigger explosion.  This time, the tray flew farther up, and I took the picture.  We wanted to get several good pictures, so we did this procedure over and over again.
 To do this event, we had chosen a large cow pasture that was far enough away from the farm house that we didn't think anyone would mind.  Unbeknownst to us, it wasn't far enough away from the cows.  A bull heard the explosions and decided to investigate.  He was not pleased that we had woken him up from his dreams of cows.  When the bull came over toward us, he was pretty mad and charged us.  We ran with the trays, but we left the cannon out there.  We barely outran the bull.  The next day, the farmer contacted the director of the conference center.  We had apparently woke him up too, and he found the cannon in the pasture, and put two and two together.  After all, the White Oak staff was known in the community for being pranksters.  We got into trouble and had to apologize to the farmer.  We didn't send the pictures into the National Enquirer.  They just weren't good enough.