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Eternal flame: after the 1999 tragedy that killed twelve Aggies, Texas A&M wanted to extinguish its annual Bonfire. Good luck.

Article Excerpt
THE OAK TREE, WHICH A FEW TEXAS A&M students had been chipping away at with an ax for hours, finally crashed to the ground. "That's the greatest sound in the world!" cried Mac Lampton, a jovial, ruddy-cheeked Aggie, over the cheers and high-fiving of the tree crew. "That's the sound of Bonfire!" All around Lampton, in a wooded lot east of College Station, more than a hundred A&M students were chopping trees and loading logs for the unsanctioned blaze they planned to hold the weekend before Thanksgiving. Upperclassmen barked out orders while freshmen in muddy overalls heaved logs onto the backs of trailers. "Push!" a senior shouted at a group of red-faced boys who strained under the weight of a massive tree. Between turns at the ax, students speculated on how long their 46-foot-high, diesel-soaked slack of timber would take to burn.

In 1999 the notion that students might revive Bonfire would have seemed unconscionable. That year, the ninety-year-old tradition came to an end on November 18 with a singularly horrifying event: The 59-foot-high structure collapsed, and 12 Aggies, nearly all of them teenagers, were crushed to death beneath a million pounds of timber. Among the 27 injured, some survived with the memory of having been pinned beneath the stack for hours, rendered helpless as their friends died around them. In the wake of the tragedy, which then-president Ray Bowen called "perhaps the most difficult time in our 123-year history," university officials put a hold, and later an official moratorium, on Bonfire. But at A&M, tradition never dies easily. "The administration thought that by taking Bonfire away from us for a few years, guys like us would eventually just fade away," said Lampton, who graduated in May and is helping to lead Student Bonfire, an organization that is working to revive the tradition. "They thought we'd forget about Bonfire. They underestimated us."

Four years later, to the world beyond A&M, the desire to resurrect Bonfire after it claimed the lives of twelve people still seems needlessly reckless. But to judge Bonfire by the grimmest moment in its history is to miss the point of why some students and alumni continue to view it as a sacred, and necessary, rite of passage. Its official purpose, as Aggies liked to say, was to stoke their "burning desire to beat the hell out of t.u." (as the University of Texas is disparagingly called). But long before the 1999 collapse, the event had evolved into...