JAMES FUQUA, TEXAS A&M class of 1983, lives and works at the end of a 12-mile driveway. The Lazy U ranch, halfway between Amarillo and Wichita Falls in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, has been in his family since 1894. His great-grandfather, J.J. Summers, helped pioneer the Texas-to-Kansas cattle drives that "Lonesome Dove" was based on. Not one but two of Fuqua's ancestors died at the Alamo. In downtown Dallas and Houston, there are streets named Fuqua. And rounding out his entrenched Texasness is the fact that Fuqua was a Senior Redpot in 1982, when Bonfire had arguably reached its zenith.

"The Redpots were extremely tough on each other back then. Nowadays, they'd probably accuse us of assault and battery." - James Fuqua

"The Redpots were known to be a little rough back then," Fuqua tells me one day from his ranch. "We were extremely tough on each other. I'm almost afraid to get into it too much. Nowadays they'd probably accuse us of assault and battery." The Corps of Cadets has, since the beginning, been the soul of A&M; military service is to the school what Catholicism is to Notre Dame. And so in Fuqua's day, and for almost all of Bonfire's history on campus, an ethos of military ruggedness prevailed. His Redpot initiation involved ax-handle whuppings. (Imagine a batter in a batting cage and young Fuqua's backside hung out over the plate.) It also involved something called Nezzie's Night. Nezzie's was the rankest dive bar in all of Brazos County. It attracted a certain crowd -- a roughneck war-vet cowhand ex-con biker type crowd. Nezzie's was where the Redpots each spring held a secret meeting to announce their new initiates. It being secret, only other Redpots were allowed in the room for the meeting. Nezzie's had only one room. As a new initiate, "My job was to clear that bar so we could have the meeting," Fuqua says. "Never been in a bar fight until that night."

These tests of toughness were meant to steel new Redpots for the job ahead. Bonfire season was arduous on both a body and a mind. So arduous, Fuqua says, "The football coaches every now and then would send us their hard cases." One way or another, apprentice Redpots learned the techniques of Bonfire management from their "dada." Like a kind of technical folklore, they were passed down generation to generation -- no blueprint, nothing engineered. "An ax handle was not a tool of hazement, it was a tool of instruction," says Griff Lasley, Redpot Headstack of 1973. "If you screwed up, you got instructed on how to tie that log right. And by God you'd get it right next time. Was there a plan written down? No. The plan was etched in my brain -- and my backside." Bonfire was, in that way, the ne plus ultra of an Aggie concept that lies close to the school's soul: that of the "other education," a kind of practical learning that comes from doing, not studying. At some point in Bonfire's evolution from a trash pile at the beginning of the 20th century to a monstrous ziggurat, the process of building Bonfire usurped the burning of it. There was something deeply appealing about the sheer audacious pointlessness of the endeavor. As one oft-quoted Bonfire slogan, quoted to me by Fuqua, goes: "Ask any Redpot: We burned it down to get it the hell out of the way for next year."

AT THE BONFIRE CUT site in 2014, there are no ax-handle beatings, no hard-case football players, no Redpots clearing the bikers out of Nezzie's. There is, instead, Alia Eckardt, sophomore civil engineering major and one of the chiefs of the Lechner dorm crew, who are now in the process of setting a wedge in the trunk of a 30-foot post oak. The wedge expands as the crewmembers take turns whaling at the tree. Wood chips rain down, amid a chorus of profane catcalls. When the tree at last teeters -- the fall-paths carefully cleared of humans -- the crew yells "Headache!" and it crashes down amid a joyous clamor.

Lechner is one of A&M's two honors dorms, and a quick survey of this Lechner crowd reveals the following majors: chemical engineering, pre-medicine, computer science, entomology, biochemistry-genetics (a double major), nuclear engineering. One scrawny-armed fish looks to be about 13. It is practically inevitable that Lechner's crewmembers are known at Bonfire as Lechnerds. On one side of Eckardt's pot are the words "NERD CHIEF," on the other "BOTTOM POT." The other crew chiefs are dubbed Strange Pot and Charm Pot. Bottom? Strange? Charm? "Those are three types of quarks," one kid explains. Lechnerds.

Nearly six feet tall and trim as a tennis pro, Eckardt wears denim overalls. A fawn-colored braid falls from under her pot and over one shoulder. When she wields an ax, it is with power. In appearance and dexterity, there is nothing nerdy about Alia Eckardt. Her major is civil engineering. Born and raised in Dallas to parents who are not Aggies, she turned down Cornell to attend A&M. At first she was unsure she'd made the right decision. "I can easily say, if I had not found Bonfire in my first semester, I would not be nearly as happy at this university as I am now," she says. "Especially for our fish, the nerdy ones, the ones who aren't necessarily going to go out and meet people, Bonfire gives them a community."

Eckardt and several other Lechnerds are wearing what appear to be special Lechner-only T-shirts. On the back is an architectural blueprint, complete with diagrams, measurements, dimensions, degrees of angle. It's an accurate depiction of the contemporary structure, and as it happens, the old Lechner crews before 1999 had a similar T-shirt. When investigators went looking for any document at all with a diagram of the wedding-cake tower, anything that could help them diagnose potential design flaws, the Lechner T-shirt was all they found.

OF THE MANY cruel ironies of the 1999 tragedy, perhaps the cruelest was that Bonfire's collapse occurred at a school known for the eminence of its engineering programs. "It never occurred to me that the whole construction of it and the oversight of it was not being done by engineers, with Texas A&M being an engineering school," says Janice Kerlee, the mother of Tim Kerlee Jr., who died from the collapse.

Ray Bowen, A&M class of 1958, who worked on Bonfire as a cadet -- every cadet at A&M worked on Bonfire in those days -- was university president from 1994 to 2002. Bowen himself is a mechanical engineer and a now-retired professor of the discipline. The independent commission set up to investigate the collapse found an almost total lack of expert oversight of Bonfire. It seems blindingly obvious now, but leaving the structure's development entirely to students -- which had become its raison d'etre, the Aggies' other education -- produced an ever-evolving tradition that allowed bad practices to creep in. This, perhaps more than anything else, led to Bonfire's demise. "A rational person could say: 'Well, you were really dumb. You should have intervened,'" Bowen says. "And that may well be true."

It's a testament to the power of the Bonfire tradition that after the commission released its report in May 2000, A&M spent two years considering from every angle how Bonfire might be brought back to campus. The consensus among administrators and students, Bowen says, was that Bonfire ought to be brought back. He set up a task force that, after consulting civil and structural engineers, suggested a potential redesign as well as substantial organizational changes: Although students would still "build" Bonfire, they'd be surrounded by professional construction experts at all times. Debate ensued: If these changes were made, could Bonfire even be considered a student project any longer? But then the discussion came to a halt. When A&M priced liability insurance, the estimates that came back exceeded $2 million a year. In 2002, Bowen announced at a news conference that Bonfire was now an impossibility. "In our hearts we wanted to do it," Bowen says. "But our brains wouldn't let us."

TEXAS A&M IS not a campus known for its student protests. But after Bowen made his Bonfire-nullification statement in February 2002, several hundred people massed in front of the president's mansion. It was a polite crowd. They were careful, for instance, to stay off the lawn. And when Bowen came outside, a civil discussion ensued. They called him "sir," and then dispersed. Many of them, though, gravitated next to a dorm called Walton Hall. Dion McInnis was already a well-known campus figure -- he'd even run for Yell Leader in 2001 -- and he, too, was amped to restart the Bonfire tradition. He addressed the crowd in front of Walton. "Bonfire is something you have to take back," he remembers telling them.

McInnis today lives with his wife and two young daughters in an apartment near the main strip of College Station nightlife, such as it is. From his front door, it's about a one-minute walk to the Dixie Chicken, which has served since its establishment in 1974 as Bonfire's unofficial clubhouse. The exterior resembles a honky-tonk as dreamed up by the Disney people who designed Frontierland. On the inside, it's pure Texas, with outlaw country on an infinite loop and Lone Star longnecks sliding down the bars, not to mention photos of old Bonfires all over the walls. When I meet McInnis there, he wears a Dixie Chicken ball cap and the beard he always grows for the duration of Bonfire season. In addition to being a Student Bonfire board member, he's become its photo documentarian, shooting pictures every Bonfire workday from September through November, to the chagrin of his wife, whom he calls a "Bonfire widow."

Ever since he was a kid, McInnis desperately wanted to be an Aggie, but he entered A&M as a transfer student in January 2000, the second semester of his freshman year -- thereby missing the 1999 Bonfire, a source of shame and even guilt for him to this day. He was put into Walton Hall, a bare-bones all-male cinder block dormitory directly across the street from the Dixie Chicken, and one that had long had a reputation for residents with a rowdy and emphatic fealty to Bonfire.

In 2002, the same fall as the march on the president's mansion, a group of Waltonites and some others from the crowd that day hacked some brush and lit the resulting pile of sticks the day before the Thanksgiving game. Through word of mouth, they were able to attract more than a thousand spectators. The next year, their ambitions grew. They decided they wanted to build a proper vertical Stack, with a center pole and tiers of logs. But they also knew there was no way they could go back to the old structure. As it happened, Bowen's task force had published a report that contained a potential redesign of the Stack. The group had also reached out to a few Old Ags who'd worked on Bonfire before 1999 and were sympathetic to the cause. One of these, a working structural engineer, helped the group put the design specs from the report into practice.

The central idea of the re-envisioned Bonfire structure was ingenious. Most importantly, every log would touch the ground. In 1999 and for more than 30 years prior, each tier of logs above the first essentially rested on the one below. Now, to preserve that classic wedding-cake shape, they would simply use logs of different heights to create the five tiers. The tallest, cut to a uniform length of 32 feet, would surround the center pole, a somewhat shorter set would surround that tallest group, and so on. The resulting structure would be analogous to a fully extended telescope. Each "layer" would be secured internally by tying individual logs to their neighbors with baling wire -- a pre-collapse technique. Then, as a final fail-safe, each doughnut-shaped tier would be wound with so-called "supersets" -- aircraft-grade steel cable wrapped around and around, then cinched tight. The result was a shrunken version -- less than half the size, incredibly -- of the behemoths that had emerged in the 1960s. In those days, two utility poles were spliced together to create a soaring 90-foot mast as the center pole. No longer. One utility pole would now do, sunk 15 feet into the ground. To provide support during construction, four shorter poles would be set in the ground at each of the cardinal directions, then linked to the center pole up top with pipes welded to collars on each of the poles. That way, as teams of students wired logs into place, the developing structure would be less likely to shift.

The design hasn't changed since 2003, and Student Bonfire has organized itself in the years since expressly to ensure that it doesn't. Now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the group has bylaws and a board of directors made up of six A&M graduates. The directors have made safety in all phases, from Cut to Stack, a religion. Alcohol and hazing are forbidden. Many of the minor traditions that had become woven into the larger Bonfire tradition have been discarded as irrelevant or dangerous or both. The chairman of the board is Scott Coker, 44, who was a Yellowpot in the 1990s. "What we tell the students is, if you want to pad your ego and try to outdo the year before you, then outdo them on safety or getting participation up or fundraising. But outdoing them on how big Stack is, that's not going to happen. It's going to be the same height and same design every year."