Things that go boom in the night.
Jerry Gerth ignites another July 4th fireworks show.
July 2004 | Journeys
Confessions of a Recovering Pyromaniac
by Gar Smith
It may have begun with my first encounter with a birthday candle or a holiday sparkler. Whatever the reason, from an early age, I acquired an unnatural love of loud noises and meaningless bursts of light.
In grammar school, I built bottle rockets. In high school I joined the Rocket Club. On the sun-cracked desert of Edwards Dry Lake, we commandeered abandoned Air Force bunkers to launch our creations. Most fizzled. But there came a day when everything worked perfectly. We watched in slack-jawed awe as one gleaming missile vanished into the blue atop an arrow-straight chalk-line of smoke. Unfortunately, the rocket nearly nailed a NASA spotter plane. That was the day the government grounded our budding careers as rocket scientists.
I turned to making homebrew fireworks with magnesium filings cadged from my dad’s machine shop. I ground my own charcoal and pestered the neighborhood pharmacist for saltpeter to mix gunpowder. When night fell, I dazzled my sister’s friends with flaming exhibitions that left blackened stigmata on the concrete test-bed of our suburban driveway.
In college, when a classmate revealed plans to earn a State Pyrotechnician’s license, my fate was sealed. We both apprenticed with Jerry Gerth of Astro-Pyrotechnics. Now, instead of watching from a safe distance, I would be helping set up Independence Day shows at the San Francisco Marina and the Oakland Coliseum.
Every July 4th show used to feature “set pieces” — a nearly forgotten art form that created burning pictures using thousands of small, intricately fused roman candles nailed onto patterns of twisted wicker wired to wooden grids and lashed to metal scaffolds. Ours went far beyond facsimiles of Old Glory and blazing profiles of Abe Lincoln.
One year, we staged “The Earthquake and Fire of San Francisco.” Putting aside our road flares, we impersonated a mob of hapless San Franciscans running in mock terror as our set-piece City shook with bomb blasts, ignited with a million jets of flame and slowly burned to ashes. For a full, shell-shocked minute, the stadium sat in darkness. Then, far up a wall, gunpowder flashed, drawing an image in the night of a burning phoenix, wings aflame, rising from the ashes. The next year, Jerry topped himself by staging “The Battle of Britain,” complete with German “buzz-bombs” crashing into a fire-etched image of Big Ben. I remember watching the County Fire Marshall running from his front-row seat, as some of the bombs broke free and bounded across the infield grass like fiery-tailed jackrabbits.
San Francisco hired us to produce the July 4th show from Alcatraz Island one summer. We only managed to fire a dozen skyrockets before the fog closed in and the show was cancelled. (Adding to the indignity, we discovered that a piece of flaming debris had set fire to part of the island. We spent the next 20 minutes stomping out ankle-high tufts of flame with our boots.) That was my last year as a pyromaniac: It was the year I encountered a new passion — environmentalism.
Skyrockets may bear picturesque names — Chrysanthemum, Peony, Willow, Saturn, Strobe, and Salute — but the dirty truth is that fireworks pose a threat to nature and human health. The black powder that lifts and blasts skyrockets into patterns of glowing sparks contains carcinogenic sulfur-coal compounds. The dazzling colors are the spawn of toxic compounds — red (strontium, lithium), blue (copper), yellow-orange (sodium chloride), green (boric acid, radioactive barium), purple (potassium, rubidium), white (magnesium, titanium, aluminum). Swedish scientists estimate that the Millennium fireworks shows shot 124 tons of lead into the air above European Union countries.
Fireworks contain more than 100 additives, including lead tetraoxide, ammonium perchlorate, hexachloroethane, iodine, methylene chloride, polyethylene, tungsten, zinc chromate and polyvinyl chloride. Fireworks fallout poses a risk for people with asthma, metal allergies, and chemical sensitivities. Children are particularly vulnerable.
So what is it that draws us into the night to watch red trails of sparks climb into the sky and vanish for a heartbeat before erupting into animated dandelions of toxic, glowing dust? I have a theory. Fire is our defense against the dark. When dragons dance through Chinatown, we understand that the firecrackers bursting underfoot are scaring away evil spirits. Candles, campfires, flashlights, skyrockets, AK-47s and cruise missiles all serve a similar function: They are flaming wands to keep the Unknown at bay.
And the dark, star-strung sky is the ultimate Unknown — a mystery of such magnitude that attempting to comprehend it can steer logical minds towards madness. While the sun may warm our days, the night holds the eternal cold glow of death. Perhaps we throw flames into the night to briefly obliterate the indifferent gaze of those distant burning stars — a sound-and-fury sideshow to “mark our territory” beneath the Infinite. If so, even the more artistic spectacles may amount to little more than chemically enhanced barking at the moon.
We need to relearn how to gaze into the Infinite without going mad. It requires letting go of certainty, shelving our self-importance, and ditching our addiction to shock and awe. Too many of us have become flag-waving fire worshipers, and we have forgotten the stars.
—Gar Smith is CG’s Associate Editor
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