Why is the Fourth of July crazy?

I witnessed first hand why setting off your own fireworks is illegal in California. No, I didn’t see a forest fire start. No, I didn’t see anybody get injured—but close.

I spent the Fourth at the beach house of a friend’s family friends. I call them my friends, but I don’t want you to think that friends my age are doing way better than I am—even if they are. Anyway, the house is great because from the balcony you can see the fireworks in Santa Cruz and Monterey in the distance. You can also see crazy people set off their own fireworks right on the beach.

We watched for about half an hour as competent amateurs set off their fireworks on the beach. Then a guy walking past told us that he had bought a thousand dollars worth of fireworks and was going to set them off on the beach pretty close to where we were standing. We were kind of excited to see some close up fireworks. All he asked was that we let him know if the police were headed his way so he could run away. He should have asked us not to laugh at him, too.

A few minutes later, we saw him and a buddy trudge out onto the beach and light one: popping noise, smoke trail into the air, ball of light in the sky. He repeated the actions a second time.

The third time, he decided that instead of running from whatever he lit, he would take three steps, drop to his knees, bend over, and cover his head with his hands as if being bombed. It’s a good thing he did that much because those are the first two things you’re supposed to do if you ever catch on fire: stop, drop, and roll. He didn’t catch fire, but the sequence went as follows: popping noise, pregnant pause, ball of light on the ground. Sparks from a full fledged firework flew about thirty yards in each direction.

At first, we gasped and wondered if he was ok. Since we didn’t see a flailing ball of fire where the guy was, we decided he was fine. We released our collective breath and decided it was then fine to laugh at him. Sometimes idiocy is comical. Two of his first five attempts at fireworks ended with fireworks literally on the beach. After those, the guy and his friend moved their launch spot closer to the ocean. That didn’t do much except make us feel like there was less of a chance of our house catching fire. About half of his attempts during the night gave us a very local display, which was nice because then we didn’t have to crane our necks. Fortunately, nobody was hurt.

We were left wondering if he just didn’t know what he was doing or if he had spent that $1000 on fireworks in 1980. Either way, a sane person would have figured out what was going wrong after the first 3 duds or simply abandoned ship rather than risk getting burned on a beach at night.

God bless America and the crazies that entertain us.