How to: Put on a FIREWORKS show

For the past ten years, I have been a seasonal employee at Young Explosives. It's my favorite gig. We set up and shoot professional fireworks displays all over this part of the state. If you watched a fireworks show on the 4th of July in Rochester or any surrounding town, it was Young Explosives firing the shells.

I'll try to explain the best I can how we do it.

First, you get a big ass truck and load it with heavy shit. Said heaviness includes racks made of wood and HDP. HDP is High Density Pipe, I think. It's pipe. Also in the heavy shit are the actual fireworks in boxes, tools, shovels, more wood, fire extinguishers and lots o' safety gear.

Then, you drive the truck to the middle of no where. You have to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away from the crowd you're trying to please. You can probably figure out why.

Meeting the truck is a team of rag-tag nutjobs (like myself) who want to risk life and limb blowing shit up. There are a few types of shooters at our company; I will generalize them now. First type is the firemen / EMT guys. My take on them is that they had to be a part of the firemen squad close to the fireworks before they worked for the company and absolutely, positively, had to be a part of blowing shit up. Second type of shooter is a Nascar / Blue Collar / Grizzled guy. These guys take down trees, plumb, build their own house, drive a truck and beat the crap out of anyone who looks at them crosseyed. And then the third type (myself included) are the geeky, technical types who probably played with fire as children.

So you get these guys all together and first off, it's a riot. We laugh our asses off. We're all a little nuts to want to do this. I mean, it's F'ing DANGEROUS. We're basically playing with mortars here, some as big as sixteen inches in diameter. Some of them are so volatile that if you drop one, it goes off. If one goes off when it's not supposed to, outside the tube, you're in deep shit. It can light any other shells around and crate basically the worst parts of the bible in front of you.

So we're careful. We hammer the racks together into different configurations depending on terrain, space and they way we want it to look in the air. This is ass busting, hard work for us nerds. The grizzled guys do it without breaking a sweat.

Then we load the shells oh so gently into the pipes. The fuse sticks out the top. We light them either by hand, with a road flare, or electronically with wiring and a little box of buttons at the end of a cord. Lighting them by hand is AWESOME. You touch the flare flame to the fuse. It's slow burning like a cannon for a couple inches. Then it hit's this crazy shit called 'black match' that is flat, black and burns at 15 feet per second. There's only about a foot and half of it between the cannon fuse and the shell so it's almost instantaneous. BOOM! first explosion to get the shell out of the pipe and into the air. This is when your body starts telling you that you are in fact in DANGER and probably going to die. Your mind talks you out of the natural chemicals being pumped into your brain that kick in when you think you are in danger. So it's this internal fight between mind and body, fight or flight... adrenaline... whatever. And it's the biggest rush you can ever get without a doctor.

So we fire them. FAST. Hitting one fuse after another. BOOM! It rains fire down on us. Debris is everywhere, on fire, falling from the sky. BOOM! We have to be completely covered, head to toe, including a hard hat. Flaming crap still burns your clothes and gets down your neck. It's loud as hell and we're shouting at each other to light this, run here, uncover that. It's madness. BOOM! the ground shakes.

And the most ironic part is this. We don't get to see fireworks. Ever. You can't stand there and watch the damn sky. You have to keep focused on the ground, your surroundings... the pseudo warlike atmosphere your entire being is telling you to run from is a little more important than flashy colors and further explosions in the air. I haven't seen a fireworks show in ten years because I'm always right underneath trying not to loose a hand.

When it's over, sometimes we can hear the crowd cheer. Sometimes we're too far away. We put out little ground fires, check to make sure everyone still has a head attached to their shoulders and get right back to work. Now we take all those racks apart and tetris them back into the truck. We rake. And rake. And rake. Then once that's done, we do a little raking.

A couple weeks later a check shows up in the mail. But I'm pretty sure no one really cares that much about the check.