How to Burn a Circular Hole In Your Deck

Here is how you burn a hole in your deck.

First, you buy a chicken. You go to the local farmer's market, swing by the booth of one of your favorite merchants, and purchase a whole, locally farmed, actually-tastes-like-chicken chicken. It's expensive as all dickens, but, as previously noted, it tastes like chicken, which most things that supposedly taste like chicken, including supermarket chicken, do not.

Then, you take the chicken home and decided, since it's already defrosted, to smoke it. You do this because you have a smoker, and because you don't want to freeze the chicken, and because you've been watching too many episodes of horrible bbq-themed reality shows on a basic cable network that seems to be all about eating yourself to death while going through the crap in your neighbor's attic.

You get out your smoker, and clean it and prep it. Then you notice that the spot where you normally set your smoker up is entirely too close to the lawn, which, because of local drought conditions that cover a significant portion of the country, has turned into something that looks like a matte painting from The Lion King. You know, the bad parts, where Jeremy Irons is in charge, and everything is on fire or dead or voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. Setting up the smoker there, you decide, would be a bad thing, as it would probably set the lawn on fire. Setting the lawn on fire, in turn, would set the house, the neighborhood, and possibly the zip code on fire, and this would be bad.

So, you take the smoker up to your deck. You do this knowing that your deck is made of wood, and yet you do this knowing that you have successfully smoked stuff on your deck before without setting anything the slightest bit on fire. You carefully set up the smoker. You start the coals. You check the temperature carefully, and frequently. You set up the chicken, which you have prepared, and you check the coals again. And again. And again.

No fire.

Then some friends stop by for lunch. You go inside. You have lunch, confident that things are not on fire. You finish lunch, in leisurely fashion, and you walk back out onto your deck.

Which is on fire.

You notice a few things. One, the fire is in a circle around the base of the smoker. Two, the rest of the deck is not on fire. Three, nobody else seems to have noticed this. You say, "Oh, shit. The deck's on fire." At this point, people notice this. You run to the sink to get a pitcher of water to throw on the flames, and do so. The flames do not go out. You run past the smoker, down the steps, around the deck and into a bush to get the hose, which you then toss onto the deck and turn on. Then you run back around the deck and up the stairs, grabbing the hose and lugging it over before spraying the burning deck around the smoker. You notice at this time that the smoker is noticeably lower than it was when you went to run past it, down the stairs and around the deck to get the hose, and you surmise that if you had taken much longer to run past the smoker, down the stairs and around the deck to get the hose, the deck might have burned through, dropping the smoker onto the ground below and spilling the coals everywhere, which then would have ignited the lawn, the house, the neighborhood, the zip code, and possibly the east coast, in that order.

Luckily, this does not come to pass. You put out the fire. You move the still-warm smoker, gingerly, and notice the large, circular hole underneath it.

And you rescue the chicken. Which is delicious.