DIY Fourth of July

My favorite Independence Day memories happened up in Bellevue, Nebraska. My dad and I would go to professional shows, sure, but several years we’d also go walking around the neighborhoods as hundreds of households launched their own pyrotechnics. I remember walking along a street on a hill and seeing the rest of a subdivision laid out below on one side, bursts of sparks continually popping up here and there like whack-a-moles. (A TV station yesterday caught an spectacular version of this in Los Angeles).

Fireworks have plenty of drawbacks, with all of the pollution and anxiety and injuries they can cause for people and other creatures. I still find a lot to love in the pops sounding in every direction as crickets and cicadas buzz and lightning bugs flicker, the haze in the streetlights below the stars, the simple fact that all sorts of people are making their own little contributions to the night’s biggest show. You could hardly ask for more summer than that.

My Fourth of July this year was filled with this sort of amateur celebration, which often makes up for lack of scale with charm and camaraderie. Earlier in the day, I followed a neighborhood parade just a few blocks away from home near downtown Rogers. It’d been a few years since I’d caught one for the holiday.

Thanks for looking, and I hope your holiday was safe and happy.

Dan

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Fire and rain

Fireworks still work when it’s raining, if you ever wondered.

This Fourth of July weekend brought a little heat and more humidity to northwest Arkansas, but mostly it brought rain. I had hoped Monday evening to wander around my neighborhood and catch people putting on their own shows, but an approaching storm mostly put a damper on that idea.

(Don’t hold Roman candles, by the way.)

Gentle, off-and-on rain lasted through Tuesday evening, forcing the crowd at Bentonville’s huge Orchards Park to clump under umbrellas, gazebos and their folding chairs.

After half an hour of this with no slowing in the rainfall, the show began anyway, triumphantly exploding in the darkness without a preliminary word from the organizers. The bombs vaporized the falling water, shrouding their streamers in a dramatic cloak of steam and smoke. I like to evoke space or the deep ocean with firework shots, and this nebula of mist didn’t hurt.

It was a great show as always, and these photos don’t do it complete justice. You might see a metaphor in the fact that it went on undiminished by the weather. In any case, I hope the country’s 241st birthday was a good one for you, too.

Thanks for looking.

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One day, two cities

Northwest Arkansas on Saturday hosted two very different displays of pride in identity and in community.

The bigger and flashier of the two, as you might’ve guessed, was the annual pride parade in Fayetteville, a rowdy celebration of the diversity of human sexuality and gender identity. You can always count on this march to be overloaded with cheers and hugs, and this year seemed particularly extravagant.

One intriguing part of the occasion came after the parade itself, when the column of participants and onlookers marched back to the Fayetteville square and flooded the simultaneous farmers market, taking some couples dancing to live music by surprise.

Another party was getting started around the same time on the other end of northwest Arkansas. Sulphur Springs, a town of a few hundred people just south of the Missouri border, celebrated Independence Day a week and a half early.

I wrote about Sulphur Springs back in April and how it has shrunk while the rest of the region explodes. The locals blame small-town politics and drug problems in recent years and an unlucky location for the loss, but they’re also trying to breathe new life into the place, and recent Census numbers show it might be working. This weekend was the fourth annual Sulphur Day, an all-day festival that brings in several hundred people for a parade and fireworks in the park that dominates the town’s center. I’d been looking forward to going since I first heard about it.

Now, Pride and Sulphur Days clearly have a lot of space between them in more ways than one. The crowds at each probably didn’t overlap much. When I told one Sulphur Springs resident about Fayetteville’s parade, she said simply, “Well, it is what it is.” The distance between the groups shows itself in, among other things, a presidential administration that’s taken a very different approach gay and transgender issues than the last one.

The distance is complicated and serious, more so than I can adequately address here. But I hope it isn’t for nothing that the two cities are in the same metro in the same state in the same country, and they both found some reasons to be proud of it. I’m more of a city guy, but it was a lovely evening in Sulphur Springs with some nice people, alligator tacos and thousands of lightning bugs.

Thanks for looking,

Dan

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The Big 240

Last year I called fireworks urchins and corals, but after trying out the zoomed-in schtick again for the show at Bentonville’s Orchards Park, the imagery I had in mind was more cosmic. Stars flashed in and out of existence and competed for space as short-lived comets drifted through smoky nebulae and inky darkness. The smoke from a thousand more displays hung like a veil over the entire drive back to Fayetteville. Happy national 240th birthday, everybody. And thanks for lookin’.