Like the rest of the Americans in this red state, I like fireworks. Like most of the rest of America, you can't light them off in my town. So we drive five miles east to the fierce little town of East Helena. The official display is the same as you find anywhere, say, in Montpelier, Vermont where they practice studious and orderly patriotism; it starts at dark, pops and dazzles for about twenty minutes, climaxes and falls silent. But East Helena, now there's a town. Formed around the lead smelter roughly 105 years ago, East Helena was paradise found to the immigrants who got jobs here and brought brothers, sisters, cousins and wives over; Slovenians mostly, their kids have not yet forgotten just how great it is to live in plenty and relative freedom. People still make poticia here. Yellow ribbons of wood, each painted with the name of a kid from East Helena serving in the military, hang from the street lights all along Main Street. Last night we saw American flags everywhere, even tied to radio antennae on cars risking Main Street. And I say risking because, besides the official fireworks, East Helena allows shooting off any legal firework anywhere in the city. They don't necessarily bother themselves about clearance from vegetation or houses or moving vehicles, and for some reason, most everybody living on Main had the wherewithal to buy an extravaganza. Or maybe they formed a buyers coop to get wholesale pricing. Those East Helenans, they are go-getters. One teenager at the park told me her family saved recycling all year long, cashed it in and bought fireworks.
It was, and I use this word in the spirit in which I first heard it misused in the Eighties, AWESOME. We parked behind City Hall and lit our puny, safe, fountains, sparklers, smoke bombs and ground flowers on asphalt away from anything flammable. (Safety first, we've got kids in the minivan, dontchaknow) For blocks around, people lit off massive, multicolored rockets; mammoth fountains; gunpower and dye whirling, hissing, zhizzing, dazzling everywhere. I saw one guy leaning over lighting a rocket fuse by putting his head nearly to the ground and poking his lit cigarette through the rocket's legs, without removing it from his mouth. Before the first official firework torched off, the air was thick and gray. Fire engines raced hither and yon. My eyes strained. It went on an hour and a half. "Look, Paul, Look, Olivia - look, look!" I pointed north, east, south, west, - there, there, and there, trying to see everything and show them everything. By ten, they'd had enough - the same way I felt when touring St. Mark's in Venice - there's so much that after a certain point the brain can admit no more. And the excitement of being allowed to stay up and eat Choco Tacos had worn off.
My politics may be different than the people who hung the signs, but we stand together supporting our troops. Though we'd do things very differently from one another given a day to run the country, we love our country. We're grateful, we children of immigrants, one or four generations removed. And fireworks is a grand way to show it.
