Back in the '70s Uncles Mildred and Mary decided that they too wanted free energy on their farm up on Cedar Crick. Neither of them are overblessed with brains, but they get along okay, even if they are a tad confused because their parents had expected twin girls and got them instead.

Anyway, they heard about methane digesters somewhere, and decided to try it on the farm. They got some plans somewhere, maybe out of "Mother Earth News," and built one. Problem was, they'd never had much schooling after they learned to read and write their names, and they'd get confused by marks like ' and " and between feet and inches.

Which is probably why they built a methane digest that was a bit bigger than what was shown in the plans.

They were patient, though, and they shoveled the leavings of their two cows and two horses into it, along with the leavings from the outhouse and everything else they thought would be useful to the bacteria working therein.

One day, Millie and Mary got a little burp of methane and they were happier'n pigs in mudtime. They went out and bought a methane-powered generator so that they'd finally have electricity on the farm and called a well-driller to tap the waterlevel so they could close up the old cistern.

Next day a much bigger belch of methane burped up. Then, before they knew it and before they were ready, the digester was pumping out more methane than the city of Chicago could deal with in a week, to say nothing about their little forty-acre farm. It was becoming an explosion hazard of the first order, and the local volunteer fire department told 'em to shut it down.

Only they couldn't. Once them anaerobic bacteria started doing what they do, neither Mary nor Millie, and certainly not their sister, Aunt Nails, knew what to do.

But the boys were not anything if they weren't resourceful. They put a hose onto the methane output pipe and dropped the open end of it into Cedar Crick, figuring that the crickwater would backsiphon into the digester and dilute the stuff inside enough to stop the process.

Only the crick was lower than the digester, and the gas pressure inside would have held the crick out anyway. Instead, a huge bubble of methane built up under the waters of Cedar Crick and drifted unnoticed downstream to the Mississippi.

It drifted down the river towards the lock'n'dam, and just before it got there it drifted under a barge carrying 277,613,308,126 gallons of high-test gasoline -- and a spark from the engine exhaust of the barge somehow managed to ignite that bubble of methane.

The resulting explosion tossed everyone clear of the barge and into the river (no one was hurt, just dunked) and blew the entire barge two and a third miles into Missouri, where it flattened the town of Zon.

Zon never was much of a town, and after the flood of 1836 changed the course of the river and left Zon as a landlocked, instead of a riverfront, town it went downhill from there.

By the time the "Sara Belle" barge landed on top of it, Zon had been pretty well used up. In fact, the last resident had just moved and was a half mile down the road when the barge landed. Scared the pooh out him, too.

But he got lucky, because he was the actually the sole owner of Zon and by the salvage laws of Missouri he was legal owner of everything that fell out of the sky and landed on Zon. Previously, this had been chunks of "blue ice" discharged by passing airliners, but a gasoline barge was something different.

Anyway, it took years to straighten the matter out, and finally the feller got clear title and he cut a deal with a former Standard Oil company. He sold 'em the gasoline at a price than set him and his up in wealth for generations to come, and told 'em that they had to tell everyone where the gas had come from by changing their name. He had in mind something like "Harry's Gas."

The company agreed, but fooled him good on the name change. They couldn't see memorializing the man, so they memorialized the town. The gas is called Ex-Zon, only the company's ad agency spelled it Exxon.

This, I swear, is the absolute and complete truth of the matter. And I'll attest that while methane might sink ships, it certainly CAN blow them to hell or Missouri, whichever is closer.