Of course, it’s a fairly common occurrence for conditions to be too dry for fireworks. Here in Southeast Alaska, though, it sometimes gets too wet for fireworks. This happens when the ground is so saturated with rain that you can’t find a stable spot to put things down. In conditions like this, you might light your enormous roman candle, step back, only to have it flop over in the mud and plow straight into the crowd. In the thirty-odd years I have lived on Prince of Wales Island, we have had the city fireworks cancelled a handful of times on account of too much rain.

When I was a child, our Fourth of July celebration was hugely important. Fireworks were apparently illegal in Virginia, and North Carolina as well, because every summer we would pile into my Aunt Evelyn’s VW beetle and drive all the way to Dillon, South Carolina to buy what we required. How did we all fit plus fireworks? I can’t recall, but it must have been interesting.

Once in possession of our hearts’ desire, we would then drive back to our three-hundred-acre farm, where the pyrotechnic police evidently never ventured. We had the perfect spot for setting off fireworks: a reservoir in the shape of a small hill, with a flat concrete top, overlooking the open fields of the pasture. My older cousins always did the honors, but everybody danced around with sparklers, probably while not wearing shoes. We had a bucket of water for disposing of burnt sparklers. When the show started, the horses and cows would crook their tails and gallop for cover, while the dogs cowered and ran for Uncle Brooks’ house. He would always let them in at times like this, even though nobody else would.

When my kids were growing up in Craig, we would always buy fireworks at one of several local stands. One time, at a stand near Hollis, a helicopter hovered and then landed in a nearby clearing. We watched, with at least one of us wondering if the feds were here to conduct a raid. It was, however, the pilot/owner of a helicopter-logging operation, who had stopped on his way home to buy some fireworks for his family.

We don’t buy fireworks anymore, nor do we try to brave the crowd of vehicles who head out to the ballpark for Craig’s Fourth of July production. If properly motivated, I might sit out in the back yard and watch the light show from a distance, but this past Fourth I slept through the whole thing. And I’m ok with that.