We were so young

There was a golden time
When I could do anything
And get away with it.
We moved around in the adult world
Like smoke.
I was reading "My Side of the Mountain"
And wanted more than anything
To live in a hollow tree.
So we, the three of us, set out
To find a suitable tree
Large enough in girth
For a small boy to live in.
Kind of a home away from home.
In a woods between a derelict gravel quarry
And the road where my friend Tony lived with his father,
We found one that might do,
An old maple with a rotten cavity in its trunk,
The perfect place to start a fire
Following the example of Sam Gribley.
Everything was in our favor.
Once the fire started, the flames
Found plenty of punky wood straight up,
As it appeared that the core of the tree
Was mostly rotten
Which became only too obvious
When we noticed smoke
Curling out of the gap between
Two massive branches
About twenty feet up.
Turns out our tree was a giant chimney
With a wide open flue.
Once our fire had burned through
Whatever debris was obstructing its climb,
Our tree became an oven.
It was hollowing out all right,
But clearly the fire
Was not in compliance with the story.
It being a hot summers day,
It took little imagination, in fact
No imagination at all, to picture
The whole tree and then the forest ablaze.
Our options were to run away
And distance ourselves from the disaster,
Or to head for Tony's house
And report the fire like good citizens,
Which is what we did. (I think we voted.)
Drawing on acting skills that, I at least,
Had mastered, by lying for years to my parents
Who, like most adults, seemed primed
To be deceived, Tony's father being no exception,
All we had to do was
Take credit for happening by
And point to the smoke
Rising above the trees across from his house
And he ran for the phone.
The fire department
Came with their shiny red truck
With a long enough hose
To put the fire out,
Which we did not wait to witness.
But we did stay long enough
To make sure that we would not be cited as the cause
But rather as serendipitous heroes,
Because, who would blame
Three small boys for starting a fire in a tree!