My father was in the Navy and there were two consequences of that for me. One, I would always refer to the bathroom as “the head,” and two, I didn’t step onto an airplane until I was a teenager.
See, the Navy sent my father home from Iceland during a thunderstorm in a plane that he described as a flying dinghy, and he vowed that, if he made it out alive, he would produce athletic sons and he would never fly again. He kept one of those promises.
Our vacations, therefore, always started and ended with an almost never-ending drive. That proposition is considerably more tolerable now, when everyone has their own personal, magic rectangle filled with every conceivable form of entertainment. In the 1980s, however, all we had was Car Bingo, a cassette tape of Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man, and a passenger cabin full of second-hand smoke from my dad’s Kool Mild 100s.
When I was 7, my family decided to go to Disney World, and tracking out our route on a paper map made it feel like we were Lewis and Clark, about to explore strange and uncivilized lands like “South Carolina” and “Georgia.” That it would take a full 24 hours to do the drive gave me a lot of insight into how the Apollo astronauts must have felt, crushed into a tin can for days, farther away from home than anyone has ever been. It was going to be miserable.
There was only one thought that made 24 hours lying in the back seat with my brother (it was the ’80s, seatbelts were as rare as smoke-free restaurants) tolerable: at some point, my father promised, we would reach the lawless and regulation-free parts of America. The parts that sold fireworks.
If you’re a teenager and you’re reading this (which, since it doesn’t have any TikTok dances, I kinda doubt it), you’re well aware that possessing a Roman candle in the great state of New Jersey is as illegal as grand theft auto.
OK, maybe not that illegal, but it sometimes saddens the 13-year-old in me that our state is still stuck selling anemic little sparklers and those weird ash-snakes (my least favorite “firework,” by the way. They were dots that you set on the ground, lit on fire, and then watched as they ashed themselves into snake-like columns. They were about as joyful as black licorice, but they were all we had, so we pretended that they were Red Vines).
Anyway, there was nothing better for an ’80s kid than heading behind a house, preferably in a damp and dark part of the woods, and lighting off an armory’s worth of contraband firecrackers, jumping jacks, Roman candles and air spinners.
The power of fireworks became mythical, and you always had that one friend who would talk about M80s, especially, as if they had the power of neutron bombs, with descriptions of them blowing up trees, taking out toilets and stopping a Soviet tank dead in its tracks. And you couldn’t refute him, either, because fireworks couldn’t be sold in New Jersey, so an M80 might as well have been a Playboy magazine or a lightsaber, completely out of reach.
That is, except when your plane-adverse father is a maniac who wants to drive the entire length of I-95 and you have the chance to stop and buy fireworks on the way back to Jersey.
I can remember walking through fireworks shops set up along the interstate, that, in hindsight, were one errant scraped-fender spark away from turning into tinder boxes. But, to a 7-year-old and his 5-year-old brother: They. Were. Glorious.
When Jodie Foster tearfully whispers, “They should have sent a poet,” in Contact, she was describing what it felt like to be an elementary school kid from a fireworks-free state staring at an old barn in South Carolina, filled to the brim with military-grade explosives being sold as fun for children.
The laws in our state have since loosened somewhat, and I can imagine a day in the future when you’ll cartwheel out of Costco with 200 bottle rockets and a rotisserie chicken, but for all my griping, I can’t help but look back fondly on those times when the simple act of driving to a different state opened up a whole new world.
So, as you celebrate America by our time-honored tradition of eating red meat and watching things explode in the sky, let’s take a moment to appreciate that we’re a big, bumpy collection of states, each with their own weird laws, and those differences are worth celebrating, too. I mean, after all, isn’t it fun watching people from Iowa try to navigate a jug handle or get yelled at for trying to pump their own gas?
