LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,555
- Location
- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
Consumer fireworks were banned in Maine in the late forties -- my mother remembers the day her brother lit a cherry bomb in the back seat of the family car going across the Waldo-Hancock Bridge, and couldn't get the window rolled down to throw it our. They couldn't open the back door because the car had suicide doors, and they finally shoved it out the front window just as the thing went off. It could have killed all of them if it had gone off in that closed car -- which likely would have careened into the side of or thru the side of the bridge and into the river 90 feet below. Some fun.
Anyway, aside from the occasional box of sparklers, and kids banging on roll caps with a rock on the sidewalk, consumer fireworks were a very rare thing when I was growing up. They were legal in New Hampshire and in Quebec, so people on road trips would sometimes sneak a pack or two of firecrackers across the border, but I never even heard of bottle rockets until some neighbors got hold of some for the Bicentennial. They were little squibby things that didn't seem much worth the effort.
Up until recently, the worst I'd experience I'd had with fireworks was about twelve years ago when the drug dealers living in the house next door to me got a crate of skyrockets and shot them off directly in front of my house. Our street is barely twelve feet wide, and the houses are generally less than twenty feet apart, and I basically have no front yard at all. So it was like my own little slice of the Blitz out here until they got done. The next morning there were gawping holes melted in the tar where they'd launched the things.
Two years ago they legalized consumer fireworks here in a move that was opposed by all public safety officials in the state. Our town, along with many others, immediately exercised the local option clause and passed municipal bans, but a fat lot of good that did. Over the past week, idiots have been shelling my neighborhood every night, and sometimes even during the day -- something went off yesterday afternoon that sounded like an actual bomb going off, and everybody on the street was out back looking around to see what it was. Eventually someone's going to get killed, or there'll be a disastrous neighborhood fire, and then we'll see who's having fun.
Anyway, aside from the occasional box of sparklers, and kids banging on roll caps with a rock on the sidewalk, consumer fireworks were a very rare thing when I was growing up. They were legal in New Hampshire and in Quebec, so people on road trips would sometimes sneak a pack or two of firecrackers across the border, but I never even heard of bottle rockets until some neighbors got hold of some for the Bicentennial. They were little squibby things that didn't seem much worth the effort.
Up until recently, the worst I'd experience I'd had with fireworks was about twelve years ago when the drug dealers living in the house next door to me got a crate of skyrockets and shot them off directly in front of my house. Our street is barely twelve feet wide, and the houses are generally less than twenty feet apart, and I basically have no front yard at all. So it was like my own little slice of the Blitz out here until they got done. The next morning there were gawping holes melted in the tar where they'd launched the things.
Two years ago they legalized consumer fireworks here in a move that was opposed by all public safety officials in the state. Our town, along with many others, immediately exercised the local option clause and passed municipal bans, but a fat lot of good that did. Over the past week, idiots have been shelling my neighborhood every night, and sometimes even during the day -- something went off yesterday afternoon that sounded like an actual bomb going off, and everybody on the street was out back looking around to see what it was. Eventually someone's going to get killed, or there'll be a disastrous neighborhood fire, and then we'll see who's having fun.
