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As a group of Texas A&M students hoist 25-foot logs, several wearing yellow helmets -- or pots -- bark orders at them, while their bosses -- distinguishable by their red pots -- monitor the scene.
These students on a rural patch of land 15 miles north of campus consider themselves the keepers of an Aggie tradition broken 10 years ago this week when bonfire collapsed, killing 12 and injuring 27.
An A&M decision in 2002 -- based on cost and liability -- that bonfire couldn't continue on campus, spawned the off-campus group Student Bonfire, which isn't recognized by the university.
A few renegade bonfires were lit during the years in between.
"The purpose is to keep the tradition alive," said Jeremy Stark, one of three senior red pots, the top of the hierarchy.
But with the settlement of litigation related to A&M last year and a statement supporting its on-campus return by the Texas governor, an uncertainty surrounds the tradition's future.
A student-led debate?
Texas A&M Interim President R. Bowen Loftin and Texas A&M System Chancellor Mike McKinney both have said that talk of bonfire's return to campus would have to originate from students.
But much of the discussion has been sparked by authority figures and influential former students rather than the current student body.
Daniel Dick, a senior political science major, said there's always been chatter among students about bonfire's return since he has been at Texas A&M.
"But it's much different this time than the last few years," he said about the current discussion. He cited as reasons the 10-year anniversary, settlement of litigation and Perry's comments "trying to appeal to Aggies in his campaign" for governor.
Gov. Rick Perry, a former Aggie yell leader and red pot, told Texas Monthly magazine in comments posted online in September that bonfire would return to campus. The comments were similar to those he had made five years earlier at a ceremony unveiling the Bonfire Memorial.
University officials said then and recently that no such plans are in place.
"It's really going to be interesting when Bonfire is reintroduced on the campus again, and it will be" he said. "I will not be surprised if it happens by 2011, maybe even 2010."
A Perry spokeswoman said the governor had nothing to add to what had been printed.
When asked how the tradition would return, Perry continued, "I'd leave that up to the board and the current administration to sit down and decide the safety parameters, the oversight, et cetera ... They are very capable men and women, and I trust their judgment."
A former Perry chief of staff -- the governor's top adviser -- now is a "special adviser" to the nine-member Texas A&M System Board of Regents. Jay Kimbrough began serving in the role created for him in August.
At a student senate meeting last month, Chancellor Mike McKinney, the head of the 11-university Texas A&M University System, encouraged students to submit a "business plan" that would address concerns such as safety, liability and sexual harassment.
McKinney, a former family physician, also is a former Perry chief of staff.
Joe Weber, Texas A&M's vice president for student affairs, has met with the off-campus red pots. Weber is the top administrator over students for the College Station campus.
Weber, a Perry friend and former roommate while the two were at Texas A&M, did not respond to messages for this story.
Talk intensifies
The tradition started on campus as a trash heap in 1909 and evolved to a 59-foot mountain of logs when it collapsed during construction at 2:42 a.m. Nov. 18, 1999.
The stack -- initially created to congratulate the football team on a victory -- came to symbolize the "burning desire" to beat football rival the University of Texas at Austin. It took months to build and then would be lit as a raging inferno before the big game.
"I can only imagine the buzz around this time of year, when there are people working on something 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Trent Ollre, who works on the off-campus bonfire but wants to see it burn again on campus.
He was one of about 70 people who attended an open forum about bonfire late last month.
Steve Humeniuk, a senior political science major, said he wants to see bonfire back on campus.
"I don't think it's possible for it to come back," he said. "It has to be student-run and student-built. If it can't meet those criteria, then what's the point of doing it?"
Derek Woodley wired logs on a fourth-stack swing connected to Center Pole, the structure's spine, when the logs collapsed. He fell some 50 feet and had cracked ribs and a fractured back.
"I would like to see bonfire back," he said last week. "The thing that would give me pause ... I have a feeling the university is going to be so paranoid about liability that they'll try to make it übersafe to the point that it's pointless."
For Woodley, a 2003 political science graduate, bonfire brought together students from all different parts of campus working toward a common goal larger than themselves.
"You could see the Aggie spirit literally manifested in this huge tower of logs," he said. "It was the single most important A&M tradition."
Past examinations
The debate about the tradition's return will unfold under the shadow of past examinations by two former Texas A&M presidents: Ray Bowen and Elsa Murano.
Bowen had appointed a committee to examine the tradition's return in 2002. The committee concluded that construction and liability insurance proved to be too costly.
He estimated that an on-campus bonfire would cost as much as $2.5 million to construct the first year and $1.3 million every year after that, and that liability insurance would cost $425,000 a year.
The current debate is healthy, he said, but it should be based on facts. Everyone should familiarize themselves with the exhaustive studies already conducted, he said.
There are also "incorrect perceptions," like everyone was intensely passionate about bonfire. Though upward of 70,000 may have enjoyed watching bonfire, only a small core took part in its creation.
"Another is that bonfire is the Aggie spirit," Bowen said. "Bonfire was a manifestation of the Aggie spirit."
He said he opposes its return, especially after reading the type of reckless behavior that went on behind the scenes as the project developed.
Bowen's successor, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, wouldn't engage the issue of bonfire's return while litigation was pending.
Murano settled Texas A&M's litigation related to the collapse in October 2008 and became the first president who had to address the question of bonfire's return.
Shortly afterward, she began meeting with 10 of the 12 families who had lost a loved one in the collapse. She didn't meet the other two because of scheduling conflicts.
"We are not going to be able to make it 100 percent safe, because nothing is," said Murano, who resigned in June.
The former president said she had made up her mind that the tradition could not continue, citing the same concerns that Bowen did in 2002: safety and liability. She had planned to communicate her conclusion to students in the spring, she said.
"There would have to be so much control how this is done that it would not be the same," Murano said, noting that the cutting and stacking likely would be done with an amount of supervision not acceptable to many students.
It they build it, it will burn
A Johnny Cash compilation with songs such as Ring of Fire competed last week with the buzzing of chainsaws, profanity-laced volleys, and the stomping in unison of boots hustling to retrieve another 750-pound log.
Stark and Mitch West, two of the three senior red pots, present an almost militant-like devotion to safety, and no tolerance for anything that falls short.
More than a dozen on this crisp Tuesday night heave a log upright, thudding it against the unfinished stack. Those whose roles in the process are complete run away, even though there's no sense of urgency.
"It's just an added safety measure," Stark said. "The less people in the perimeter, the safer it is if something goes wrong."
But a collapse like the one in 1999 just isn't a possibility, the off-campus leaders said.
All the logs touch the ground, whereas in 1999, the log stacks were built on top of each other. The stack also is wired with a 3/8-inch steel cable wrapped around the stack's top and bottom. Center Pole is buried 15 feet in the ground and is one piece. The 1999 bonfire's Center Pole was buried 10 feet and spliced together from two pieces, Stark said.
Bonfire never had a guidebook passed down from year to year. Instead, students handed down instructions about how to build the structure. Over the years, as advisers and professors who unofficially contributed advice left, some lessons from prior years were erased, changing how the stack was built and the some of the safety measures once in place.
The "new" bonfire has everything in writing and will remain at 45 feet, Stark said of the off-campus stack. No changes will ever be made without a professional engineer signing off on them, the leaders said. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers agreed with that plan after family members of one of those killed in the collapse brought the case to them, saying bonfire was a construction project and should have been treated as such.
"It could be built on a fault line and it wouldn't collapse," said West, the senior red pot, of this year's bonfire.
Stark stays out of the bonfire debate. He seems content with what he has off campus. The value of bonfire, he says, is teaching students about leadership, camaraderie, time management and hard work.
Location, he says, isn't as important.
"Burning it is great," Stark said, "but the only reason we burn it is so we can build it again next year."
