July 4 recap

It needs to be said that last night was a great July 4 celebration, not so much for the official fireworks display, but for the incredible amount of ordnance that was sent rocketing into the sky (and into trees, and houses) all over the District of Columbia. According to the Washington Post, in an article titled The Years of Living Dangerously, When Fireworks Were a Blast, most of these devices had to be illegal.

As two examples of what was being replicated on what seemed like every city block, coming up Rhode Island Avenue at around 8 pm, I spotted a whole family -- multiple generations of kids and kids at heart -- shooting off a barrage of bottle rockets that reminded me of the wild tracer bullets fired into the Baghdad air at the start of the Gulf War. Further up the road, a family had parked their 80's-era Oldsmobile at the side of 4th Street NW, and in plain view of a gaggle of DC cops who were occupied tending to a homeless woman, some kids were setting off the first of a tremendous array of firecrackers, pinwheels, and sparklers, while the parents were getting another case of fireworks out of the trunk in preparation for the next round.

Why not just watch the pyrotechnically superior, and legal, display on the Mall? That's not the point. There is something quintessentially DC about the do-it yourself spirit underlying this sloppy, dangerous, but exhilarating display of fireworks bought under the counter at ramshackle red-white-and blue stands, or imported from way out in the wilds of Virginia where explosives control of any kind is unheard of and people still celebrate the 4th by shooting in the air. Unsafe, definitely. But DC wouldn't be the same without it.