Chapter 8 Explosion.
The next day, Fritz and I returned to Calabash Wood and decided to do some more exploring.
We found a plant with a berry that I recognized as the kind that could be boiled to get out wax for making candles.
We gathered the berries and continued to explore until we found a colony of parrots among the trees.
Fritz climbed a tree to try to catch one.
He was bitten on the hand for his trouble, but did manage to grab a parrot and put it in his pocket.
When he came down, he showed me his pretty green bird.
He decided to try to teach it how to talk.
Making our way back, we stumbled on some gummy syrup coming from a tree.
Touching it, we found that it was quite stretchy.
"'Look, father, could it be rubber?' asked Fritz.
"'Let me see,' I answered.
"'You're right, it is.
This will be perfect for making boots and shoes.'
We made our way back to Falconhurst and told everyone about our adventures.
Everyone was so excited about the idea of making candles that we thought we would all try our hand at it right away.
We boiled our berries over the fire, scooped out the wax, and put it into another pot.
Then we took strings and dipped them into the pot of hot wax.
Sure enough, as we let them dry and continued to dip them until they were thick, we found we had made candles.
That night, for the first time, we had light at night at Falconhurst.
It was an amazing thing.
The next morning we tried to make butter from cream that we had skimmed off the top of the cow's milk.
We put it in a gourd and rolled it back and forth for a half an hour in a sail.
And it worked.
We were thrilled to open the gourd to find perfect butter inside.
Things we used to take for granted at home suddenly filled us with great joy.
We then started a long project of making tent home a safe place to go in case of emergency.
We wanted to get it all ready just in case we needed it.
I planted a prickly hedge to block out animals and mounted two guns at its entrance.
We were ready for attack by man or animal.
We passed our days on the island in projects, exploring and hunting, and every Sunday I taught the boys to swim and climb.
As a result, they became very strong over time, but soon enough their clothes were in tatters from all of their activities.
The boys needed shoes, so my next task was to try making them from the rubber we had found.
I did this by filling a pair of socks with sand.
Around these sock forms I laid clay, making a mold that hardened.
On this clay mold, I painted rubber, layer after layer, until I had built up a pair of rubber boots.
I was thrilled with my new boots, but I worried about what we would use for clothing, especially when the winter started.
I wondered if there were any clothes still on the wreck and decided that the older boys and I should return to the wreck one last time.
We would take all the supplies that were left and would destroy the wreck once and for all.
After filling our boats with everything we could find, we rigged the ship to blow up and headed to shore to watch our fireworks.
As we made dinner and watched, a giant pillar of fire rose up with a massive roar.
Our ship, our main connection to old Switzerland, our former home, was no more.
