Happy Fourth!

It's 4 p.m. on the Fourth of July.  Somewhere in the distance, I heard a firecracker explode.  It's the first sound of the Fourth to reach my ears on a gray, chilly Fourth of July in Seattle.

I wonder when I made the transition from a kid who went crazy in his eagerness to get his hands on fireworks, legal or illegal, to a guy with two cats who worries whether an occasional explosion might frighten them into neuroses?

When I was growing up, the battle by adults over fireworks went on year after year, the battle lines moving back and forth erratically.  For us kids, the arguments roiled above our heads, sounding like distant thunder.  We worried only about concrete impacts on our ability to initiate explosions. 

My earliest memories are of seeing fireworks stands everywhere, inside and outside city limits, and drooling at the displays.

My brother and I enjoyed and tolerated the "pretty" fireworks.  They were cool, and added variety to the celebration.  They kept our parents happy.  But what we really wanted was noise and mayhem, as much as possible. 

We lit fuses and threw firecrackers and cherry bombs, delightedly aware that poorly standardized fuses endangered our fingers if we didn't throw them fast enough. We of course threw them at each other. We dropped them into ant hills, becoming ourselves the monsters we secretly feared meeting. We tied fuses together, setting off three or four together. (We occasionally lit a full string, but usually abhorred the waste doing so entailed.)  We even got creative and hid firecrackers under our toy tanks and soldiers, miniature landmines that wrecked havoc on the orderly marching of our troops -- we joyously relived the horrors of World War II and the Korean War in our own back yards, at the beach, on family picnics.

Then there were a couple of years when all fireworks, statewide I suppose, were banned absolutely.  A pall of silence fell over the land. My brother and I went in desperation to the dime store and bought rolls of "caps" -- those paper tapes with small amounts of explosives that you threaded through toy cowboy cap guns --and exploded them all at once by placing the roll on the ground and lowering a baseball bat on it full force.

There were years of county option, when fireworks were illegal in my county but, as you followed the Columbia river downstream, were legal in the adjoining county.  My brother and I, together with other kids in the neighborhood, bicycled en masse the ten or fifteen miles to the county line -- the sales booths began precisely at the line -- and loaded up on contraband to haul back home.

At present, fireworks sales and "discharge" are heavily regulated by the state, with sales and use permitted only on certain dates around the Fourth and again at New Year's.  (RCW 70.77.)  Every jurisdiction in the state may, at its option, enact stricter rules.  My old county -- hurrah! -- has no such additional restrictions.  King County, which includes Seattle, sadly bans both sales and discharge entirely, at all times.

But, of course, Washington is riddled by territories controlled by sovereign Indian tribes, each of  which is fully aware of the commercial advantages inhering in seasonal sales.  Some reservations seem little larger than the fireworks stands that stand upon them.  If you can't get it at some reservation somewhere, it probably no longer is manufactured.

Which suggests that the present complex state of the law creates a dream world for young pyrotechnicians -- it's almost as easy to find a place to buy fireworks in Washington today as it was to find a drink during prohibition. 

And yet -- I've heard one small explosion all day long, as dinner approaches.  I suppose we're more a spectator society today.  There will be beautiful formal fireworks displays this evening, including a mammoth show over Lake Union -- even if it rains.  These displays are well attended by well-behaved crowds.

As the fireworks, in dazzling and colorful splendor, break out across the entire sky, and as stirring music pours forth from the sound system, the kids sit quietly beside their parents, rapidly dismembering mythical monsters and other enemies on their iPhones.