Kirby: Give me blast, crackle and pop

Robert Kirby is on vacation. This is a reprint of an earlier column.

 

Fireworks have improved in the near half-century since I was a kid. The sputtering and fizzling rockets of my youth have evolved into sky artillery that could bring down a space station. The king of all fireworks when I was a kid was something called the Green Howler. It cost a fortune, almost an entire dollar, but was a must-have item for anyone interested in defying authority.

We bought one and set it off after the sun went down. It screeched skyward, popped into a desultory shower of vegetable-colored sparks, came down and bounced off a barn. It was cool. We bragged about it for a month.

Last night, Bammer's nephews ignited a $50 skyrocket that shook the house as it lifted off and startled a flight of F-16s out of Hill Air Force Base when it finally detonated 15 miles away over Magna.

That was just the warm-up act. The real show is tonight, when they plan to light an entire crate of what they call Mad Gorillas. They are supposedly made and sold in Texas, but it looks suspiciously like repackaged dynamite to me.

These are, of course, illegal fireworks. Utah is basically closed to anything larger and louder than snappers, which have to be the worst firework joke ever. They are an insult to the average teenage American pyromaniac.

The directions on a box of scary-sounding Wolf Pack Bang Snaps say not to put them in your mouth.

This sounds encouraging but the truth is that my cat won't even wake up when I bounce them off his head.

More serious fireworks are available a few miles northeast of the Utah-Wyoming border, and the fact that the stuff is illegal in Utah doesn't stop 99 percent of it from showing up here.

In Evanston, Wyo., you can buy fireworks that have to be Cold War-era surplus military ordnance. In the annual summer arms race, entire convoys of minivans bring the stuff into local neighborhoods.

One thing hasn't changed. The Chinese names of fireworks are still hilarious. My personal favorite this year is a firework called Golden Pine Forest, which is exactly what you get during a forest fire started by one.

There is the mighty Roaring Lion, the confused sounding Warhead Rocket Fountain, the artsy Peach Flowering in Spring and the Tijuana Tremor, which sounds East L.A. but is nevertheless made in China.

If China really wants to target the cheesy U.S. fireworks market, they need patriotic names like Fiery Taliban Torment and Shrieking Iraqi Oil Well.

Now that I have an impressionable grandson, my wife (also daughter, son-in-law, bishop, neighbors, fire department and the police) says I can only buy and light legal fireworks.

For the record, legal means the firework cannot explode, shoot into the sky, hose liquid fire or blow a hole in the ground larger than a hippopotamus. In other words, boring.

This is no way to raise an American. I would object more strenuously, but time and technology are on my side. My grandson Gage is also half Kirby. Just imagine what kind of fireworks he'll be sneaking around with when he's a teenager. We'll probably need radiation suits.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com.