Does Independence Day Come Only at Night?

"There is something inherently awesome about a country which celebrates both the sacrifices of its bravest citizens and its independence from tyranny with explosives, red meat and booze."

-- Yancy Caruthers
Capt. USAR (retired)
US Embassy, Peru

Because my wife and I are insane party animals, we're spending the 4th with my mother-in-law, two of Tonya's sisters, and their families. There will be no alcohol, but there will be potato salad. Vast vats of the stuff. The mere mention of the word potato makes my wife grin and her eyes grow large in a sort of pre-maniacal-laugh that absolutely scares the bejabbers out of me. I'm not sure it's healthy to like potatoes that much, but it makes her happy, I guess.

Oddly, I don't remember too much about this holiday from when I was a kid. Dad didn't like it. Well, that's not really true. Dad didn't like buying fireworks. He much preferred to hand me a $10 bill and a match.

"But that's not the same thing," I whined.

"Oh, believe me, it is."

We would end up driving to a couple of fireworks stands in West Plains, Missouri. "I want this," I would say and attempt to pick up a box approximately the same size as the turret of an M4 Sherman tank and with a name like Apocalyptic Meteor Storm Home Defense System. Mom would gently say, "No. We would have to sell our home and our car twice to afford that." I usually ended up with one of those little brown paper bags that kids once used for lunch sacks, devoured the contents, and immediately turned into a hand puppet. (Which means that I got fireworks and a puppet.) Dad seemed to like bottle rockets, though. I wasn't allowed to touch them, but Dad always mounted a glass Coke bottle onto the back porch and launched rockets over the field, toward the pond.

The hogs occasionally looked up from their mud wallow at the edge of the water and smacked their jaws a couple of times, as if to say, "You know, the lightning bugs are louder than I remembered."

Mom and Dad moved us to Picher, Oklahoma, when I was fifteen. Picher was an old mining town, where my friend Rusty introduced me to chat piles. He liked to ride his dirt bike over them. My talent seemed to be falling and burying myself knee-deep in loose limestone. For those who have never seen a chat pile, they are waste products from the mines, dumped sporadically throughout the town in huge gray gravel piles. I once cast the reel from an old typing ribbon off one of the cliffs. The ribbon was 500 feet long. It did not reach the bottom. Years later, the EPA explained to us these mountains were composed largely of lead and other elements extremely toxic to humans. In fact, I believe the US military is considering replacing the stealth bomber with a plane that can simply dump a chat pile in the middle of enemy territory.

There is a actually a great YouTube video that shows the first chat pile Rusty took me to at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FooSO_w2_H0.

Obviously, a chat pile seemed like the perfect -- if mildly poisonous -- place to watch fireworks displays. So, each 4th of July, I scaled one to the very peak, which weight and pressure over the last fifty years had solidified into a material that shared both the properties of concrete and that stuff that coats Wolverine's claws. At the top, I doubt the winds ever dropped below 70 mph, but there was always a rusty iron girder sticking up somewhere that I could hold onto.

I didn't have a single firework of my own. Not a bottle rocket nor champagne popper. Not even a brown paper bag buddy to watch with me, but....

As the thin, amber line of sunset slipped below the horizon, I began to see distant bright colored plumes exploding in silence. Light patterns stormed over Baxter Springs, Kansas, which was answered by Miami, Oklahoma, and Joplin, Missouri. Covering hundreds of square miles, the display was a secret network of communications between the towns that no one at ground level knew existed. It was majestic, like seeing the tops of clouds for the first time. Of course, it was also like watching Star Wars with the mute button on, but that was cool, too.

So, to Yancy Caruthers, Leo Davis, Nathan McReynolds, Laura Reyes, and a million or so of their fellow soldiers, thank you. Thank you for when you say, "I'm going to work," you really mean protecting Mom and Dad's farm from when I was a kid and the roughly 4 million square miles surround it. Thank you living in places that most people can't imagine, even in nightmares, just to allow me the freedom to have climbed those chat piles and watch America celebrate (although doing so today, I believe, is felony trespassing). And thank you for that little brown bag that helped ensure that I did not own a single Tonka toy without serious cherry bomb damage.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.