{"id":1402,"date":"2012-07-06T22:55:39","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T16:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=1402"},"modified":"2012-07-06T22:55:39","modified_gmt":"2012-07-06T16:55:39","slug":"fireworks-for-summer-people-a-tale-of-summer-mayhem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/07\/06\/fireworks-for-summer-people-a-tale-of-summer-mayhem\/","title":{"rendered":"Fireworks for Summer People: A Tale of Summer Mayhem"},"content":{"rendered":"

So seeing as we’re living through the worst wildfire season in Colorado history, our annual fireworks show in the town of Westcliffe was canceled due to a Stage 2 fire ban. I missed it. As a kid, fireworks were a big deal on July 4th weekend, our own little rocket launchers and mortar rounds with which to shell the Summer People. (Now I am<\/em> a Summer Person.) Here’s a story of that world gone by.
\nFIREWORKS FOR THE SUMMER PEOPLE
\n\u201cWe never meant to hurt anybody.\u201d When push came to shove, that\u2019s what we said. And sure, that\u2019s what they all say: facing an indictment, pleading for bail, for leniency from Judge Judy or a fleshy, gruff honorable presiding justice o\u2019 the peace in Goliad or Victoria, Texas. It\u2019s what you say, too, when you\u2019re simply trying to wriggle off the noose of \u201cdisciplinary action.\u201d It was July 4th<\/sup> years ago and we could have hurt someone, badly. That we didn\u2019t mean to seemed crucial to us and a likely story to the others, the Summer People.
\nThe trouble began with bottle rockets. We never thought them particularly dangerous. We\u2019d affect a casual sangfroid as we\u2019d hold the stick and light the fuse on the firecracker-sized tip, wait for it to burn close, then toss it in the air and watch the fizzing golden sparks as they shot into the sky to explode in a dramatic but hardly life-threatening pop. We bought them at a gaudily painted plywood stand off Highway 35 that always appeared around that time of year, decorated with a snarling Black Cat image, manned by a jowly old cuss who seemed indifferent about selling us enough gunpowder to launch an airstrike on Aransas Pass. That particular year we bought them by the gross, which, if my memory serves me, is a dozen dozen. 144. And we had several gross.
\nWhy so many? Pure foolishness. The thrill of watching a fiery explosion. We were local kids in a resort community full of part-time people, families who owned weekend homes, families who came now and then to fish and ski and sail, sunburn their shoulders and noses and define their tan lines, make a nuisance with their outboard motors and drink too much from Friday to Sunday, then had back to their \u201creal lives\u201d in Houston or San Antonio come Sunday evening or late Monday on a three-day weekend. To them our town was a weekend getaway. To us it was mundane, humdrum home. We local teens tended to say, \u201cThis town is so dead,\u201d or \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to do in this dump.\u201d We longed to split that burg. Meanwhile the Summer People rushed down every weekend to do nothing and revel in it, chatting up the convenience store aisles with three-martini gusto.
\nTheir children, our coevals, were the objects of slight derision coupled with much envy and curiosity. They tended to be moneyed city kids who we always suspected were disdainful of our small-town, local-yokel status. Still they admired our dark tans and sailing prowess, as we envied the automatic glamour of their department-store, name-brand lives in big cities. Somehow ours only seemed an imitation of life, of their glamorous existence, like a cheap imitation perfume that doesn\u2019t have an aroma, it just stinks.
\nSo we were rivals. On the 4th<\/sup> of July, during the heady festivities of barbecuing pork or beef or mackeral even, a gang of them clustered on the pier parallel to ours, some fifty yards away, and we thought for a prank of sorts we\u2019d aim our bottle rockets their way and try to arc them to explode with a dramatic pop and hopefully unlethal spray of sparks right above their heads. Some of the kids on the opposite pier were girls and this caught our attention: We actually believed this would display our potential affection or dateworthiness via a kind of brutal caveman charm. Grog like girl. See? Grog explode fire. Girl come run to seek protection from fire god.
\nOnly the plan backfired. The evening was lovely, with fireworks blooming and exploding throughout the neighborhood: no sissy laws against it where we lived, outside any city limits. Red and green roman candle bursts against the black, velvet Elvis, star-spangled sky, reflected along with a tremulous line of moon spangles on the surface of Copano Bay. The night was alive with oohs and ahhs and good cheer. That is until a too-well-aimed bottle rocket zizzed from our pier in a fizzing rainbow arc and exploded right above our big city rivals heads, the explosive pop echoed by frightened teenage screams.
\nFirst there was a hush. A saltier version of \u201cOh, dang,\u201d escaped our lips. Then our neighbors loosed an angry shout of What the hell did we think we were doing? Martini-holding parents emerged from the house next door and glowered our way from their balconies. A few minutes later my best friend\u2019s mother came stomping down the pier toward her son and his hoodlum friends (myself included), threatening either grounding him for life or taking away his car keys, a double-kiss of death.
\nWe went to apologize. What else could we do? We weren\u2019t bad kids. Really. We were just thoughtless. We walked over to the\u00a0 neighbors with our tails between our legs, heads bowed, our whimpered postures befitting the beta-wolf status of the local yokels that we were. We didn\u2019t mean to do it. Honest.
\nI limped along at the back of the pack, my ankle sprained and swollen enormous from another Jackass-type stunt gone wrong. That was pretty much standard operating procedure for our small-town life. Pranks were how we killed time. And for hick-town kids who envied life in the big cities of Houston or San Antonio, there always seemed to be too much time to kill. So earlier in the day I had jumped aboard a moving skiboat from my parents\u2019 pier, and landed awkwardly. My best friend, Ralph, just shook his head, adding, \u201cBill? You know, you have the coordination of a hard boiled egg.\u201d
\nThe sprained ankle got me off the hook for the bottle rocket semi-assault, blame-wise. My friends at the front of the pack got more dirty looks and what-kind-of-crazy-stunt-was-thats than Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin in \u201cThe Wild Ones.\u201d It took me a few minutes to catch up with them and reach the end of the pier. I hobbled up like a puny Tiny Tim Cratchett, poor little crippled boy, shuffling into the awkward silence in the interval between apologies offered before acceptance received. The attention turned on my Elephant Man ankle and obvious portable agony.
\nOne of the girls asked, \u201cWhat happened to you?\u201d
\nI told them, wincing as I tried to keep weight off the foot. Then I added one more apology to the mix. It did the trick. A gang of hoodlum teenagers shooting bottle rockets at your head is something to be feared; a limping, apologetic kid with a bum ankle on July 4th<\/sup> is something to be pitied.
\nAnother girl urged me to sit down in one of their folding chairs. What? Was I \u00a0a crazy person or something? \u201cYou\u2019re just going to make it worse if you keep walking around on it like that.\u201d I nodded, took a seat, and thanked her. Everyone stared at me and the mood lightened. One of the guys said, \u201cYou jumped from your pier into the boat? While it was moving? Good shot, Oswald.\u201d
\nRalph laughed. \u201cYou should have seen him. It was like Hawaii Five-O gone wrong.\u201d
\nAnother kid asked where we were from. \u201cHere,\u201d we said.
\nThat must be fantastic, they said.
\nWe shrugged. \u201cI guess you could look at it that way.\u201d
\nWe ended the night by promising to take them sailing the next day (a ploy we aimed at the girls), and sharing with them our huge bundle of bottle rockets. We took turns lobbing them into the bay, doing our annual homage to Francis Scott Key and his rockets red glare. It was Independence Day, after all, and we were celebrating. Safely. Which was a bit dull for us, but we weren\u2019t asking for any more trouble. We didn\u2019t want to be grounded. Or have our car keys taken away. That would be the worst. We\u2019d be stuck there for life.
\n_____________________________________
\nLastly, here’s a cloud shaped like a woodpecker over my house.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So seeing as we’re living through the worst wildfire season in Colorado history, our annual fireworks show in the town of Westcliffe was canceled due to a Stage 2 fire ban. I missed it. As a kid, fireworks were a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24,29,38],"tags":[62,89,95,197],"class_list":["post-1402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-photography","category-the-west","category-writing","tag-climate-change","tag-fore","tag-good-fiction","tag-wildfires"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}