Crouch, Idaho, 4th of July

In the afternoon I drove north in the company of hordes of other vehicles, up into the mountains, through Horseshoe Bend and along the Payette River, which was crowded too, with red and yellow and blue rafts. At Banks I turned east and followed the Middle Fork of the Payette into Garden Valley, a small  and handsome valley flanked with rounded hills of conifers and sage. Ranch country in the past, now given over mostly to vacation homes.

In 1979, when the ranches were still holding on, Mike’s grandfather (my cousin Kristen’s husband Mike), bought an acre on the river, far up the valley, about seven miles past the town of Crouch. There had been talk of building a dam and filling the valley with a reservoir. A developer even built a golf course up on the side of the valley and called it Terrace Lake, but the dam never happened and today the golf course doesn’t live up to its name.

Eventually Mike’s grandfather built an A-frame shack, and for forty years the family has spent summer weekends on the river, and sometimes they come up in winter too and bring snowmobiles. The shack is untenable now, partially destroyed by a flood some half dozen years ago, but worn down too by time and entropy. The family brings up a small trailer each summer, mows a portion of the rough grass in amongst the lodgepole pines and bushes, then puts up a canopy by the porch of the shack, where they keep coolers and cooking supplies and a stereo. There’s electricity, a fire pit too, but the septic system is currently inoperative. Mike plans to dig it up by hand this summer. The place is raggedy and ramshackle and pretty, and it’s easy to see how one could get attached.

Later, others bought pieces of land around them, and now their parcel is in a neighborhood of a dozen fancy houses, most with huge garages bigger than the companion houses (for RVs, boats, ATVs, trucks, etc.). The grounds of the houses are well manicured, with green close-cut lawns and bits of yard statuary. Mike’s family mows the waist high wild grasses on their plot once or twice a summer, some of it…. People stop by regularly and offer to buy the land, but the answer is no. Kristen said, “We’re the white trash; the neighbors don’t like us, but we have the best spot.” She and Mike and Rylee come up often, and someday they hope to build another house on the land.

I fit my van in between a pair of trees to take advantage of the shade. Rosemary and uncle Mike had already arrived pulling her trailer. Mike’s truck and Shaun’s car were parked off to one side…. The afternoon was hot again, ninety or so. Rylee and Shaun were playing with water guns by the river, and then Shaun jumped off the small bridge that crosses just upstream, though the depth isn’t more than four feet. I got out in the water and stood waist deep in the middle of the fast stream, just able to hold my position. The river was cold but just short of painful….

Around five we all piled into Mike’s truck and drove down the valley to Crouch, a small westerny town, with a general store catering to locals but most of the rest of the businesses—shops and restaurants housed in wood, false-fronted buildings—are for visitors. The town was crowded for the evening’s Fourth of July Festivities, which started with a parade but which was really about a self-service fireworks free-for-all….

The parade was short, a few women on horses, the county commissioner in an open Mercedes, the local governmental entities such as the police in their vehicles, with passengers throwing handfuls of candy out the windows. But water was the theme and star of the parade. A couple buses from rafting companies passed, crowded on top with young people who doused the crowd with water guns and water balloons. This is tradition, and many of the spectators had brought their own water weaponry for fighting back…. Last came a large fire truck, with a firefighter on top wielding one of the big hoses. The water was too powerful to train directly on the crowd, so he shot it up into the air, and thick waterfalls rained down on the street and the people….Such water profligacy was limited to just a portion of the parade route on the edge of town (assuming, I suppose, that not everyone wanted to get wet through), and all the kids went pelting down the street for the water truck, including Shaun with Rylee by the hand…. When the water show ended, and with it the parade, the small town was full of dripping kids and teenagers….

We ate dinner on the deck of one of the restaurants, and before long the real show started. Crouch blocks off the street in the main part of town, a stretch only about a block long with a sort of bay of pavement midway. This street space is given over to setting off fireworks; almost everyone in the crowd of a thousand or so was both participant and spectator. People set up their lawn chairs along the verge of this space, and pulled fireworks from kids’ wagons, from big cardboard boxes, from backpacks and bags. Some moved out into the middle of the street to set off an item, but others went out just a few feet, and sometimes a ground piece would come spinning into the crowd and everyone would scatter, laughing. A constant stream of amblers moved along the edges, sometimes dodging packs of firecrackers and “flowers” and bottle rockets and cones, and all sorts of other fireworks the names of which I do not know.

The unorganized show started slow, a couple hours before dark, and early on many of those setting up and setting off the fireworks were children, usually but not always aided by an adult. In the early part of the evening Shaun and Rylee worked together, but she wasn’t allowed to stray far from the edge. We were situated in the bay, the widest part of the arena, just up the street from a closed, one-pump gas station. I guess they shut everything off, but I don’t know.

The air filled with the smell of gunpowder, and white smoke drifted about. The occasional smoke bomb, orange or purple, would more fully obscure the staging ground.

A stand just behind us was selling one dollar cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and next to the beer was a bandstand occupied by a group of post-sixty men playing rock and country standards. But the whistling and sputtering and explosions of the fireworks, as well as the cheers of the crowd, mostly drowned them out. And periodically a loud boom would rent the air, coming from somewhere behind the buildings across the street. The second time, uncle Mike said, “That’s enough of that.” But the sonic concussions were repeated every fifteen minutes or so, each time making me and most of the crowd duck and flinch. “Mortar!” Shaun yelled in my ringing ear.

A group of uniformed men from the local sheriff’s office hung about in a cluster across the street, but they apparently condoned any and all sort of fireworks practice. Myself, I thought it bad form when a person would shoot a roman candle on a level across at the crowd on the opposite side, but maybe these were accidental firings (“Keep your arm up!” was a common refrain). Rylee had a small, lit roman candle in each hand when someone spoke to her from behind; she turned and the candles turned and with her, and lowered as she lost focus, and a ten-year-old boy just barely danced out of the way of a shooting green ball of fire. A man exclaimed, with great admiration, “whoa, dude, that was so Matrix.” Encouraged, the boy re-enacted his move several times.

After the sun set the pace quickened. At any one moment at least a dozen people were out on the staging ground along the street, more coming and going, and fireworks overlapped, and sometimes those lighting a fuse got caught up in the shooting sparks of another firework.  There was always something to look at, fireworks big and small exploding, some on the ground, some shooting up head high, some spinning in a green glow and bouncing off the power lines, some sailing far into the twilight sky and exploding…. A mesmerizing scene.

As full dark fell, the crowd grew thicker and older and rowdier. Some people on the edge would light hand-held items and throw them out indiscriminately, apparently blind to the person kneeling down to light something, and whom the flung piece would come to a rest and explode beside.  I was on the front line, and I disapproved of the people who would throw things over my shoulder. Sensing movement, I turned around just in time to see a young woman in a sun dress take three running steps and throw something…but it slipped out of her hand and suddenly white sparks were dancing all about her feet and a bit about mine too.

A young unshaven man  in a ball cap, standing beside me, put a bottle rocket in his mouth and moved as if to light it. A girl stepped up close to him and said forcefully, “No!” He took it out of his mouth, pausing, but his male friends egged him on, and he put it back in his mouth and lit it. Luckily, it shot off as it’s supposed to, rather than blowing up in his face; but the sparks from ignition sprayed into his left eye and he bent over with his hands over his face. But no real damage, it turned out. An older man in the crowd stepped over to him and said, “Don’t do that again.” This incident convinced me to move back into the second tier of the crowd, with a line of bodies to protect me. Well, that and a mis-explosion a few minutes before that had peppered my forehead with fiery pellets—from something that was supposed to go up but went sideways instead. After that I put on sunglasses.  Also a hat. Cinders were floating down out of the sky with a disturbing regularity.

Shaun and Mike began to work in earnest, a determined team, putting out the large fireworks they had purchased. They were fearless, striding out into the middle, crushing under their feet the spent cardboard tubes and cartridges… and after lighting their fuses dashing back through the smoke, zigzagging as other fireworks would suddenly ignite in their path…. It seemed miraculous that they could arrive back to safety each time unscathed….

A group of men and women in their twenties suddenly arrived, after dark, carrying big packs, and one could tell right off that they were serious. Five of the men took large boxes, each about two feet square, and placed them in a circle out amongst the rubble and detritus of the night’s prior fireworks. These  were bigger than any before, and we would get them all at once…. The men squatted down in unison and lit their fuses, then ran for the edge of the crowd. After an anticipatory moment, great balls of orange fire began to shoot from each box, screaming hundreds of feet up and exploding in splashy patterns, filling the sky over the town. All necks were craned and people shouted and cheered with pleasure as the colored light shone and flashed on their faces….

The fireworks went on and on, the supply seemingly limitless…. Up and down the street, people lit fuses, jumped away, stood and watched what they had set off…. Rosemary said, over and over, “I’ve never seen anything like this…. This is amazing.” Mike said that this is pretty much how it is every year in Crouch on the Fourth of July.

It was still going on when we trudged up the hill out of town to where Mike had parked the truck. After four uninterrupted hours my eyes were burning from all the smoke, and my lungs ached, and my ears were ringing. I stopped and turned around every time something big went off back behind us in town, not wanting to miss anything, but tired too and ready for to get back to camp and fall into bed….