Aggie Bonfire

For almost a century, once a year students at Texas A&M University take it upon themselves to assemble a large stack of wood, douse it with jet fuel, and light it on fire. You can read more about that here:
Aggie Bonfire

Robert Gates, who at various points in his career served as Director of Central Intelligence, Secretary of Defense, and President of Texas A&M, once said of the university that "From the outside looking in, you can't understand it. From the inside looking out, you can't explain it." The former Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas is an institution rich in tradition and ritual, and has a cult(ure) that must seem often baffling to outsiders. Among other things, upperclassmen can insist that those in newer classes do push-ups in exchange for saying certain privileged words, and are typically taken seriously while doing this (at least during football season). By comparison, the value of setting lots of stuff on fire is obvious.

For all of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st, A&M's  chief athletic nemesis was a certain university in Austin, and the tradition of Bonfire quickly became an annual rallying cry against the Longhorns. Few parts of the university's history better show the ferocious ambition of the Aggies than the almost Kurzweilian growth in the Bonfire stack's height in its first half-century. By 1969, while men from Earth walked upon the face of the Moon, the Bonfire reached a height of 109 feet, in what remains a record for bonfires anywhere. Surely history has shown the 1960s to be a decade ahead of its time. Cooler heads prevailed after that, and the university administration imposed clear limits on height and diameter out of concern for students' safety and the surrounding buildings' fire-suppression capabilities.

The administration's endorsement of Bonfire came to a painful, jarring halt in 1999 when the stack collapsed in the early-morning hours a week before its scheduled ignition. 12 students were killed and 27 injured when the joints holding the 5,000 logs together buckled and failed in what hopefully will remain the most traumatic single event in the university's history. An investigation revealed inadequate engineering of the structure, a lack of meaningful management accountability, and unsafe work practices to be contributing factors, and since then no Bonfire has burned on the A&M campus.

Four years after the tragedy of 1999 an independent Bonfire burned once again, this time far from campus proper, and under the supervision of professional structural engineering. A year after that a memorial was erected on the site of the collapse, and it's as much an introduction to that nebulous-but-meaningful Aggie Spirit that Gates was trying to talk about as it is a monument to the senselessness of what happened. The Aggies and Longhorns no longer play football each year, but Bonfire burns on, and the memories stay with us, and, hopefully, we learn from our mistakes.