So the car-b-que thread got me thinking, because I’ve got a friend from a small town on Vancouver Island who tells me that when he was in high school, they used to have (as an odd treat between bush parties) car-b-ques, where someone would light an old beater on fire and it would basically be a bonfire from a car.
So anyway, my ex girlfriend took me to a bush party in Kelowna this summer (not a very small town), and of course there were the guys listening to hard rock in their pickup trucks, the fire pit filled with wooden palettes, and guys doing laps around the fire with burning beer cases on their heads. Not to mention the fact that if I wanted a non-twist-off beer opened, all I’d have to do would be to raise the beer several inches above my head and a young lady would inevitably come by and open it with her teeth.
I grew up in Vancouver, so it seemed pretty weird to me, but I went to university with a lot of people from small towns in BC and it sounds pretty par for the course on a Friday night.
Surely this isn’t just a BC thing… surely Montana can outdo us on bush parties?
Maybe I’m looking for stories… maybe this would be better in another forum.
I would think the burning of an old car for the purpose of entertainment to be rather hazardous. Besides the nasty stuff in the smoke, you would get the low level toxins at ground level. These are given off the paint, plastics and fabrics just before these items catch on fire. I attended some fairly wild parties in my younger days in Western Washington, just south of you, and I never saw any cars torched on purpose.
Yeah… well in Port Alberni, a mill town, I’m sure they made sure that any environmentalists that were kicking around were in the car when they set it on fire! How’s that for nasty stuff in the smoke?
I don’t think a car-b-que rates that high on the Port Alberni dysfunctionometer… they do have deep fried bread there though!
Bush parties in Ontario = yes. Burning a car? No! There’s a lot of nasty stuff in car upholstery! Besides that, if your fire’s too big, the police will be able to find you. (They don’t like bush bashes because it’spretty guaranteed that a good portion of the revellers are drunken minors.)
Bush is a word, at least in Canada, meaning “out in the woods.” If you are going into “the bush,” you are going out of town into a forest or something like that. So if you hold a party way out of town in some field or in the forest, you’re holding a bush party.
Bush parties are pretty common here in Ontario. They’re also a major source of drunk driving fatalities and alcohol poisoning cases.
JC, it’s a “bush” party, because, in my limited experience, it’s usually a bunch of underage kids sneaking off “into the bush” to get wasted. Common in Maple Ridge in the seventies. Maple Ridge sure has changed.
Here in Idaho we hold annual mid-winter bush parties where in we cross country ski into the back country dig a shelter, wait for the full moon to rise and light a snag (preferably a dead Alpine Fir with lots of branches) an awe inspiring sight.
We tend towards good wine though, as it’s damn hard to get back onto your skis with a keg on your back. No minors welcome.
There may be a factual answer to the question, but I interpret this mostly as a poll (as in “Do you have bush parties where you live?”), so I’ll move this thread to IMHO.
Here the kids have gravel pit parties. Stupid idea. Most gravel pits have only one road going in and out - if the cops show up you can’t leave. Much better to use someone’s secluded back 40. Not that I ever threw a party like that on the land we own back by the river…
Growing up in Prince George, BC, a mid/large sized town in northern BC, which has several pulp mills, I can attest that the crap emanating from a burning car is probably not that much worse than all the effluent floating around the town from all the pulp mills. Just a bunch of drunk kids trying to ingest a new flavour of dioxin they haven’t had yet.
Yes. PG is well-recognized as being a bush-party-type town, too. They have a hell of a Denny’s though. The one thing I couldn’t figure out is, on the way from Vancouver to Ft. St. John, is PG the last trace of civilization, or the first firm evidence that you long ago left civilization behind?
