Loose Leaf Notes

I probably won’t be seeing fireworks this year because I’m busy getting ready for my youngest son Dylan’s wedding this weekend, but I saw enough of them last year while in Hull, Massachusetts, visiting my family to satisfy me for two years. Below is an encore post from then:

Here, in the South Shore of Boston, every other person is proudly donned in some sort of Red Sox apparel, forks are called “fawks,” cars are “cahs,” and it’s common to spend over $1,000 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment. Here, navigating a traffic rotary, a circular grassy intersection where all points on the compass meet, is like square dancing in a foreign country where the dances aren’t called but your expected to know the moves, and when former Cambridge resident Ben Affleck gets married, it makes the front page of the Boston Herald.

Here, in Hull, where my parents live 4 houses down from Nantasket Beach, you can see as many as 3 lighthouses on a clear day, and after sunset on the July 4th weekend something reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party occurs.

Recovering from an all day cook-out and pool party held at my brother Joey’s house, my brother John, visiting from Minneapolis, and I were taking it easy at my mother’s house. He was reading a book on the front porch and I was watching a movie when the familiar boom of fireworks began. Thinking it was kids setting off bottle rockets, I casually finished the movie before becoming curious enough about the continuous uproar to follow it down to the beach. I was completely unprepared for what I found.

Fireworks are illegal for Massachusetts citizens to possess, let alone to set off. In the past, Hullonians watched official firework displays, set off from offshore barges or from the local playground field. But then, even those were deemed by the powers that be unsafe or too costly, and so, being the freedom-loving and independent Yankees they are, Hullonians took matters into their own hands. Here’s what I saw on the beach…

Spectacular fireworks, as professional as the ones that small towns display, were going off continuously and in both directions for as far as the eye could see. There were Revolutionary War-like bonfire encampments from horizon to horizon along the 5 mile stretch of beach. Groups of people were gathered and some were still coming out of their houses, as though an invasion from Mars might be occurring.

I arrived at the beach and my brother, John, was already there. “Have you ever seen anything like this in your entire life?!” he shouted over the noise. It was hard to know where to look with so many showers of exploding colors going off simultaneously. Not only were they going off along the length of Nantasket Beach, but we could see them from as far away as Boston and Revere Beach to the left, and Scituate to the right.

The anarchy went on for a couple of hours. All the police could do was occasionally walk the beach, making sure that no one was igniting the smuggled-in fireworks close to beachfront houses.

The funny part was that both John and I were on the beach until 7:00 p.m. before the fireworks started, and there was no bonfire preparation going on, no sign of what was coming. The next morning the beach was immaculate, as if the whole thing never happened.

We didn’t expect to see firework photos or read about the display in the newspapers the next day, and we didn’t. “The only evidence of it that you might eventually read about is how much it cost the town to clean-up,” my brother John suggested.

“Prohibition never works. It just fuels the fire,” I answered.