It’s not the weekend, which is a perfect time to reflect on the weekend before last weekend. If you’ve already forgotten about the weekend before last weekend (and if you live in a place without fireworks, that’s probably an easy thing to do), then you need to remember that it was recently the Fourth of July. It’s one of those holidays, like Cinco de Mayo, named after itself, though sometimes it is shortened to “the fourth” like in the question, “What are you doing for the Fourth?” If the answer isn’t usually “launching fireworks!” then you live a radically different life from my own.
For an unfortunate majority of Americans, fireworks are something watched from a distance. Come the Fourth of July, folks across the world drive up to their local elementary school or their town’s empty patch of field to see the tax-funded display in action. I’ve seen a lot of those. From Massachusetts to Maine to Quebec city, there are a lot of fireworks to see. And guess what? They all suck.
In the state of New Hampshire, where people are allowed to buy fireworks at their own pleasure (though it is never pleasurable to spend money on fireworks), you can find some of the most incredible gunpowder shows that you will ever see short of an active battlefield. In fact, there is a particularly well-to-do lake in southern New Hampshire whose residents go fucking nuts over fireworks. Immense wealth and little concern for safety combine to create a display that literally blackens out the sky and generates a mist of smog that lasts into the morning. Dead aquatic life washes upon the beaches in heaps, and the children find burnt out shells in their sandcastles from generations ago.
The denizens of this lake, like horseshoe crabs migrating to their ancestral beach to spawn, pile onto their boats come sundown. They move by feel and instinct toward the center of the lake. Nobody ever really organizes the big firework show, and there isn’t a single authority overseeing its execution. Dozens of disparate group chats, Facebook, and the hourly weather forecast dictate the insane impulses that ultimately craft one of the most insane displays in America. Viewers crowd about their pontoons or set up adirondacks on the beach to catch sight of the show. The bravest and stupidest among them will seek the true center of madness, spots directly underneath the arching blasts. This is perhaps the only place in the country where you can have the quantity and quality of a professional fireworks show launched directly over your head.
This recent Fourth of July was special because it actually happened on the weekend. Usually the holiday falls on a Wednesday or something so folks wait until the following weekend to have their fun, but this year we got a rare Sunday Fourth. The problem was, however, that we had just suffered an intense heatwave and the good weather was spent. It showered intermittently throughout the day, and normally folks aren’t too keen on losing hundreds of dollars worth of cardboard and gunpowder to a storm. Emphasis on “normally.” You might recall that we are just getting over a global pandemic, and the people of the lake weren’t intending to wait inside any longer.
The action started around eight if my memory serves me. The sky had confined itself to an early dusk after a swath of grey clouds moved in. We had gotten some sun earlier in the day and had some good swimming, but showers ruled in the end. We had pretty much given up for the night when a brief break in the drizzle awakened a sensation within me, and the other lake dwellers felt it too. A familiar popping noise began to churn in the distance and I knew it was starting. Rousing the other folks was the hard part–the bad weather had made them lethargic and they had already given up the firework show in their minds. It took a lot of hollering, but the party was eventually corralled into the boat and we were off.
The growing sound of the firework barrage urged us onward despite the fresh sheets of rain and a blanket haze of mist. We ploughed through that black water as fast as the junker would carry us, parting fog as we went. The rain picked up, and I was terrified we’d miss the show. The red and green indicators of fellow boaters and the thunderous flash of fireworks amidst clouds of smoke and fog guided our way as we made a straight shot for the center of the lake. We slowed as we approached the nucleus of chaos, mindful of striking the other boats that had begun to lump together and drop anchor. We weren’t going to nest at a safe distance with them. We were after the heart of the action, a conspicuously empty patch of water just below where the fireworks fly. Many of the watchers had evidently grown skittish, for few boats moved to fill this space. The water directly in front of my grandfather’s house was empty, of course, though it needn’t have been this year. Uncle Kenny wasn’t going to be tossing any explosives into the water this year.
We hesitated for a moment at the edge of the boat herd and decided to push forward into no man’s land. A lot of the folks had moved to the lake recently, and this strange Fourth would be one of their first. Somebody had to show them how to take a little risk. Well, the second we moved forward, the cop that lives across from my grandfather started lighting off his payload (see, taxpayer funded fireworks!). They went off right over our heads, and the familiar deadened sensation in my ears returned. Hearing damage is a staple of this event. Getting soaked usually isn’t, but I embraced it.
Standing on the deck of the pontoon in a rainstorm as blast after blast is lobbed over your head is an experience. A friend of mine likes to say that the Fourth reminds us of our revolutionary heritage. The shower of fireworks, the deafening explosions from all sides, is about as close to the physical experience of gunpowder warfare as most suburban Americans will ever get. We joke about Apocalypse Now. While it would be silly to say watching fireworks a little too closely is akin to experiencing the Vietnam War from a river boat, The lake fireworks show really does capture some of that chaos. There is a danger to it. My cousin still can’t hear out of one ear because a box of fireworks exploded next to him. Despite the stupid danger, we continue to uphold the tradition. It makes us feel something. There is a rawness to exploding things that seems to never get old, and after Covid-19, the lake dwellers were hungry for it. They would have set those things off in a blizzard.
Ethically speaking, should we be blasting all of this plastic into the atmosphere? Definitely not. You aren’t going to convince these guys, though.