Boom-Boom

Does the Fourth of July still mean anything? What is that?

My mother-in-law's backyard resembles a tiny golf course, or would if anyone built golf courses just over the highway from two-hundred foot tall black slag piles left over from a century of smelting lead east of Helena, Montana. They don't, of course. Golf courses are built closer to capital flows than to the means of their production. So her yard is just a yard, no matter how smooth and green.

From 1888 to 2001, the Mexican-owned ASARCO Corporation and its predecessors spewed smoky, airborne lead, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals from a large facility my husband tells me glowed and made strange noises through the night. It sat less than a half mile by beeline from my mother-in-law’s back yard, creating whatever jobs it could not yet automate and producing ton after ton of industrial source materials destined for products to be sold to buyers far removed from their new toy’s lead and arsenic soaked origins.

When ASARCO (originally the A. S. & R. Company) was done smelting ore just south of her town, over on the far side of the huge slag pile still sitting there, it handed everything but its well-tucked, bankruptcy-sheltered profits back over to the State and Federal taxpayers to clean up on their behalf¹. Which was apparently our responsibility because the corporation had created some jobs for awhile or something. Because the workers made the mess? Perhaps this makes more sense by thinking of it as cleaning up after children. The kids have run off to hide but the house is still a mess and you need to get dinner on the table. To date, ASARCO has caused 26 Superfund-scale heavy industrial pollution impact sites across the USA² by extracting and processing ores from the earth to make raw materials for the things we buy. Leaving their mess to all of us. But, for some reason we tend not to imagine or remember slag piles while filling our shopping carts. The stores and manufacturers of course prefer we just keep shopping. In Montana we have no sales tax. All the tax bills come later.

The slag piles ASARCO left behind in East Helena run several hundred feet high, making them an excellent site for launching fireworks on the Fourth of July. This is a long local tradition. East Helena hosts the best fireworks show in the area, and has for many years, particularly as it is enhanced by several pre-shows and post-shows scattered across this little town just east of our Capitol.

There are few if any limits on the fireworks you can buy on American Indian reservations, as they are sovereign nations³ mostly subject to their own laws alone. Many Tribes will sell whatever white people want to buy (hand crafted jewelry, gambling, cigarettes, high-power fireworks). Which can make for occasionally tense but lucrative relationships caught up in a whole lot of history, mutual need, and human desire. I can hardly blame the Tribes for selling whatever they can source and white people want to buy. We caused their poverty. So, I am not too concerned with how they choose to go about solving their money problems, especially when we are happy to spend millions of our tax dollars cleaning up after folks like ASARCO.

These fireworks bought out on one of the seven American Indian reservations in Montana are not your standard cones and sparklers. They are the entry-level or better versions of what you might see at a "big" fireworks show. They can easily blow your hand off or set a whole tree alight in front of your house or next door at your neighbor’s. In my fifteen or so years of Independence Day celebrations in this smooth green back yard I have never yet seen less than five or so households within a few blocks spraying the sky with two-hundred yard high chrysanthemums and shimmering forty-foot towers of silvery sparks. All providing a very different holiday experience from my many years in Portland, Oregon, where fireworks are simply banned.

There is often a misfire or two, too, signaled by bright phosphorescent glows pulsing much too low to the ground somewhere down and around the corner, sometimes followed by distant sirens. The town reeks of sulphur for hours. Not many dogs bark. Most go hide by themselves, or by their humans, who may well also terrified by remembering their own past explosions. Everyone else seems to have a pretty good time. The whole evening shouts of a long and fiercely-held tradition.

All the neighborhood pre-shows pause once the big show starts. As dusk finally slips into dark, off in the distance a set of deep, tubular ka-thumps roll down the slag pile and over the highway. Then there goes the sky, suddenly lit up like a casino, bathing us all in one big, noisy, colorful glow. Colors shining down from far higher than a mere two-hundred yards, like those over above the neighbor’s house.

Fireworks technology slowly and steadily improves. Nowadays, the standard chrysanthemums — many more red than blue in recent years, for some reason (cough) — could easily engulf the block surrounding each small house where parents and their kids have been blowing shit up for the past hour while dusk settles in. Several blocks, even. Some of these richly prismatic booms could engulf the whole town were they not being shot off the top of an arsenic-laden slag pile five hundred yards over there across the highway. For half an hour or so all these big explosions in the sky rise and fall in rolling, thunderous waves. Some curling into waterfalls, others wriggling like dancing bees, and still others just bigger and yet bigger combinations of the same vast, sky-bursting, pop’n’crackle flowers that may remind us of hot dogs and ice cream but we all know smell like farts. For the past few years, East Helena has ended its yearly show with a set of blasts designed to look like glowing nuclear mushroom clouds. It takes a dystopian humor to appreciate this grim finish. Better to laugh than cry?

This back yard where my local family enjoys our ribs and dogs and wings is so close to all the action we see bits of burnt paper casing fall slowly onto the grass. At some early evening point each year one of my mother-in-law’s sons discreetly makes sure the garden hose is hooked up and ready to go. But there has never yet been a problem, for us. Nearby ambulances, yes, but never yet a fire truck to her yard. We just line our lawn chairs down the side of her westerly stucco wall and let the ribs settle in under the cake as we offer our oohs and aahs and “oh, I really like those ones” up in homage to our national celebration of the refusal of monarchy. Our collective denial of dictatorship. A celebration of a set of legally protected freedoms many Americans take for granted because, unlike the immigrants streaming over our borders, most of us were born here and have never lived anywhere different. We have never yet seen our freedoms vanish in a coup. Others have. We might do well to dwell on this a bit.

It would be all too obvious to notice the irony of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars scattering chemical firework residue across a town which has already had its yards scraped up and replaced due to heavy metal smelter residue. There are plenty of folks happy to ban fireworks in places far from East Helena, Montana⁴. The further irony is in how most of those folks who would happily ban fireworks don’t think twice about booking a flight⁵ to wherever, maybe Bozeman because Yellowstone is hip these days. Folks happy to burn four thousand or so gallons per hour of jet fuel directly into the upper atmosphere, to get them where they want to be.

Contrasting ironies like these tend to pop up in conversation if you challenge the annual joy of fireworks in a place like East Helena. Which is a historically working-class town three physical, and about three-hundred mental, miles from its much richer namesake to the west: the “Queen City” of Helena, proper, our State Capitol, a former gold rush town that once had the largest concentration of millionaires in America until most left to dig more money somewhere else.

Perhaps because poor folk tend to approach money differently than the rich. Pools of money, whether carefully saved or suddenly won, are not reliable when you are poor. Pools of money are the result of either hard, hard work or some unexpected magic. So it makes very human sense to want something big or magical in return, when the time comes to drain that pool.

The memories made by lighting up the sky to delight your family are both big and magical. Which is quite a good investment for someone who may only ever fly a few times in their whole life, if that. And, if the memories come laced with a reminder of some freedoms most Americans take for granted, all the better.

1. ASARCO East Helena Slag Pile

https://www.mtenvironmentaltrust.org/east-helena/east-helena-slag-pile/ 

2. ASARCO Superfund Sites in the USA

https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/case-summary-epa-funded-sites-and-communities-asarco-bankruptcy-settlement

3. What is Tribal Sovereignty?

Video on Tribal Sovereignty

4. City of Portland fireworks ban

https://www.portland.gov/fire/your-safety/fireworks-banned-portland

5. Carbon emissions from air travel

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24091-y