The Exploding Holiday

by Tracy Hensley Bumpus  

I like the Fourth of July. Believe it or not, it was always my favorite holiday as a kid, even better than Christmas, I think. The Fourth was usually a big to-do with my family and any kind of to-do with my family was unusual just because of the rarity of such. We didn’t do a lot of big get-togethers so I usually enjoyed those that actually occurred. Christmas was nice but the Fourth had two things that I really liked – homemade, hand-cranked ice cream and the danger of losing body parts in an explosion.

 

The ice-cream is self-explanatory. It wasn’t until I grew up that I figured out the physics of how the cranking and the cold actually made ice-cream. I just figured the cranking bit was something to keep us kids busy (which it probably was) and the ice was something to make the cranking harder to do.

 

See, my dad never bought crushed ice for the ice-cream maker. Shoot, I don’t think they even sold the stuff in our county. No, we had to make it with the regular kind of ice that was the size of rocks from a gravel road. Those things inevitably got stuck under the cylinder thing in the ice-cream maker and required a lot of reversals, banging, and poking with a long, flat-head screwdriver to get unstuck. It made an interminable process even longer.

 

The result was always worth it. Mom never made regular ice cream with eggs and cream. If it had to be cooked, Mom didn’t make it which was also the reason I spent most of my childhood eating out in restaurants. No, Mom made ice cream with regular milk, vanilla, and sugar. The result was very similar to snow cream and was fantastic. Of course, since we only got it once a year that made it even more special.

 

My other favorite thing about the Fourth is the threat to life and limb. There were two major ways to hurt yourself on the Fourth. The first was if you went to the Kiwanis fireworks show at the high school stadium and fell down the bleachers. I’ve done that – more than once. The risk of that happening went up if there was a sudden, unexpected lightning storm in the middle of the show that caused the entire population of the county to start running for their cars in a torrential downpour.

 

One of my most vivid Fourth of July memories is one of seeing my mom running in a torrential downpour in front of me headed for the car holding a program over her beehive hairdo. Lightning was snapping everywhere and Daddy had a death grip on my hand. We had made it to the back of the concession stand and were crossing the grass when Mom tripped headlong, face first into a water-filled ditch. Dad and I forgot the storm and doubled over laughing. Mom didn’t see the humor. I have to give her credit though – she saved the ‘do. The rest of her was a muddy polyester mess but that ‘do made it through. I suspect it was the build-up of Aqua-Net that made the difference.

 

Thereafter every Fourth, we always talked about the lightning storm when Mom fell in the ditch. It became a family legend. We have many family legends that revolve around the Fourth, mainly because my older brother had a condition that makes for an exciting experience – he loved home fireworks and he was blind as a bat in the dark.

 

Brother was thirteen years older than I and had always worn Coke-bottle glasses. He could barely see in the daylight but in any dim light, he was completely night-blind. He’d never seen a star. He had to be led into and out of the movie theater. When he was in the Navy, he was not allowed on the ship’s deck after twilight for fear he would walk off the side. He was completely and totally blind in the dark. That didn’t stop either him or my dad from putting on a massive fireworks display on our street every year. In fact, it added to the excitement!

 

The day before the Fourth, Dad, Brother and I would head down to the fireworks stand and load up two large grocery sacks (they were the paper kind back then) with all kinds of fireworks. It was cool because they usually let me pick everything out being the spoiled rotten baby girl I was. Of course, I’d get the girly stuff like sparklers and lady fingers but we’d also get Roman candles, showers-of-sparks, bottle rockets, regular Black Cats, chasers and whistlers. Cherry bombs, smoke bombs, and stink bombs were my brother’s favorites because they could be shot off before dark. M-80’s were Dad’s favorites and he had a stock-pile of them for years after they were made illegal. All total, Dad probably spent a hundred bucks on fireworks every year and that was when you could get a box of sparklers for a quarter and a gross of bottle rockets for two bucks. You can imagine the massive amount of firepower we had.

 

When I was ten or so, Brother was in on leave from the Navy for the holiday. We were just getting started and the lightning bugs were just starting to come up out of the grass. For those of you who live in the South, you’ll realize that means there was still some light, at least enough to see fuses without flashlights. Or so we thought.

 

Brother was attempting to light a mortar shot and had just gotten the fuse going when, being blind, he tripped and knocked the mortar over. Dad yelled out “Incoming!” and bolted. Ice tea cups flew and lawn chairs tumbled as family and neighbors evacuated the area. My best friend Laura and I took cover in a ditch. Mom passed us doing about 35 with her cigarette clamped between her lips in an attempt to get around the side of the house to safety. We’d never seen grownups move so fast in our entire lives. Brother stood stock-still while the entire neighborhood made for cover around him. He later said he figured his odds of not getting shot were better than his odds of not running into a tree so he just froze. Turns out the only casualty was the neighbor’s cat who got a singed tail and lost three lives out of sheer terror when the mortar round missed its ass by millimeters. I swear that cat flew like Superman.

 

Brother always had close calls with fireworks but it didn’t deter him and it made for great entertainment for the rest of us. One year he lit a Roman candle and was holding it out in front of him like all the safety experts tell you not to do. The fact that he was holding it out in front of him turned out not to be the problem. The problem was he had it turned around backwards and shot himself in the stomach. After two shots, he got a clue and dropped it. Burned a hole straight through his shirt and made a big red mark on his belly. When he dropped it, it shot off toward Mom who again passed us doing 30 (she was older that year) trying to get around the corner of the house. 

 

The Fourth before his wedding, Brother had his fiancée Susan to our house for the holiday. Susan, bless her sweet Baptist heart, hates fireworks; she is absolutely terrified of them. But, in her attempt to be a part of the family, she compromised that year and decided to sit in the car in the driveway while we shot off the annual display. She settled herself into her yellow Datsun and felt safe with the windows rolled up and the doors all locked. All was going well and the display was good, if a tad boring. Susan, feeling a bit comforted, not to mention sweaty walled up in an enclosed Datsun in July in Tennessee, decided to crack her window about an inch. Brother lit off a chaser right about then and a legend was made.

 

That chaser did the absolute impossible and flew a beeline directly through that one-inch gap in that window and got in the car with Susan. I couldn’t see her face but I could see the chaser going round and round inside that car and the screams that emanated from the interior were those of someone in free fall without a parachute. She couldn’t get out because she had locked the doors. She couldn’t get away and she couldn’t hide in a two-door subcompact of the seventies. Those of us watching could just see fire bouncing off walls and windows, and see the Datsun rocking as she tried to fight the thing off.

 

Of course, none of us were any help. We couldn’t even stand up because we were laughing so hard. When the chaser finally burned out and she was able to unlock the door, that sweet Baptist girl emerged cussing like a sailor. Her denim skirt was burned in multiple places and her perfectly hot-rollered hair was smoking in several quadrants. For twenty years thereafter, Susan spent the Fourth of July locked in the window-less bathroom at our house from 4:00 pm onward.

 

After he was married and had children of his own, Brother was still fun on the Fourth. I was with him and his kids one year in an undeveloped cul-de-sac of their neighborhood as they were putting on their own homegrown display. Brother had just lit a chaser and was backing away when he disappeared altogether. We all ran over to see what had happened to him to discover he had backed away too far in the dark and had fallen into a six-foot ditch flat on his back. Lucky for him, it was full of muddy water or he could have been hurt.  

 

You know, now that I think about it, the Fourth of July and ditches seem to have some sort of weird connection for our family. I bet Susan wishes she had taken the ditch instead of the Datsun. At least she could have run for her life like Mom did.

 

The fireworks bug has been genetically passed to my son. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), my son now lives in Arizona with his family where fireworks are illegal. However, being related to my brother and dad, he may or may not obtain some fireworks from Mexico to entertain his girls and in-laws. Not many ditches in Arizona, though.

 

I saw on the news this afternoon that 37 people were hurt nationwide by fireworks this year. Heck, that’s not bad. I don’t see what gets safety people into such a tizzy about fireworks. I survived 42 years of near proximity to a blind man with a punk in his hand surrounded by explosives. If I made it through unscathed, the odds are good that most other people will. Unless of course, you are stuck in a yellow Datsun with the doors locked.