That's fourteen 200g cakes, fourteen 500g cakes, and fourteen 3" mortars. My sister shot some rather amusing video that I'll be able to pass along once I have the chance to get it transferred, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it. More accurately put, you'll have to take one word for it - phenomenal.
You'll notice that Lake Huron is nowhere to be seen in the picture above. This part of the deal didn't occur without a bit of controversy. After the family headed out this afternoon for a parade and a visit to the beach, neither of which held any interest for me, I managed to catch a nice nap. When you go to bed for the night at 5:30am, an afternoon nap on the next day is always a good thing. After they returned, my youngest brother and I headed over to my aunt's place to scope out the lay of the land. We had a lot of work to do in order to get the fireworks ready, so we needed to have an idea of what we would be facing.
My aunt has a strip of property that runs right down to the waterfront. There's an area that once was part of the lake, but now is mostly cattails and mud. The geologists tell us that the earth has been springing back since the glaciers receded, so the lowlands are constantly rising and forcing more water out into the oceans. Al Gore tells us that our cars and deodorant are the cause, but either way, the lake is smaller than it once was. That's a fact. Our hope was that we would be able to set up the fireworks on the dry lake bed. After today's scouting session, I had to nix this idea. There was no solid ground over which my brother and I would be able to walk. Everything was swampy and inconsistent. It would be impossible for us to get out there and set up the display.
Since we wouldn't be able to get out into the cattails, we were forced to look for a launching spot back on shore. My aunt's lake frontage is rather narrow, but the house next door is unoccupied, leaving some extra space in which to work. We examined the area from various angles and tried to figure out how we could make it happen. In conclusion - we could not make it happen. There were tall trees overhanging the area and there were no wide open spaces.
Since my aunt had been looking forward to our visit this evening, she was rather disappointed to hear that we would be forced to seek another location. In the end, this other location turned out to be a farm that is owned by one of my father's drinking buddies. Given that this would be the venue, in place of her sister's house, my mother was less than pleased. What are you gonna do though? I do get a kick out of fire and explosions and such, but I'm not about to put people in unnecessary danger. I needed a lot of space and the farm provided a lot of space. End of discussion.
My brother and I had a combined zero years of experience in the pyrotechnic field before today. We had a lot of fireworks though and a bunch of people who wanted to see them explode. We loaded three big sheets of plywood into our father's truck and piled the fireworks on top, then headed over to Tony's farm. We had a general idea of how we wanted to organize the show, so we divided the fireworks into three groups and then got to work with the fuses. We had some cannon fuse that burned very slowly. We had some Perfect Fuse™ that burned at a quick but steady pace. And we had some quick-burning fuse that covered three feet in less than a second. A foot of this one here, eighteen inches of that one there... we set up what we hoped would be an entertaining display.
After heading back over to my parents' place and waiting for nightfall, it was time to haul everyone over to the farm and see the show. My brother simply had to light one fuse, walk away, and hope for the best. If we had done a good enough job of wiring everything, then the single main fuse would proceed steadily through the three firing stations and everyone would have a good time. We hoped that this would be the case but we really didn't know for sure. Neither of us had ever tried such a task before tonight.
After about a minute of waiting for the initial segment of cannon fuse to reach the first cake, we saw our first few mortars heading into the sky. One after another, the segments of fuse worked exactly as we had intended - sometimes picking up the pace and sometimes slowing it down. Once the final barrage had exploded and received a round of applause, we each looked at each other with a grin of satisfaction. Flawless performance. First try. Feels pretty good man, I can't deny it.
Of course I should take at least a moment now and recall the meaning of the "bombs bursting in air" aspect of this holiday. Still an impressive story to me, no matter how many years go by and no matter how twisted my country's perspective becomes. Happy Independence Day everyone.
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