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As Independence Day nears, I mull over the possibility of celebrating the Fourth in the traditional American way: By blatantly violating ordinances duly passed by my elected representatives in this constitutional republic, namely the laws concerning the possession and discharge of fireworks which fly or explode, preferably both.
But my local connection has moved away, and it's a long drive to New Mexico and an even longer drive to Wyoming. I don't know how the Colorado General Assembly expects us to express our love of our country without even bottle rockets and lady fingers, let alone skyrockets and M-80s, but we have tried.
A few years ago, my brother Tony gave me a small black-powder cannon, in the hope of improving my patriotic disposition. It's about .50 caliber, with a four-inch barrel. Loaded with a thimble or two of black powder and some wadding, it makes an impressive bang.
The problem is that I haven't learned how to fuse this little muzzle-loader. There's a vent hole near the breach, and if you push some powder down it, then ignite the exposed powder, a most satisfying and patriotic explosion results, especially if you use red, white and blue wadding paper.
However, you've got to be standing right there to ignite it, and it fires instantly. You can't light a fuse and then step back a prudent distance. Instead, your ears ring as though you'd been at a ZZ Top concert, and plugs don't help much.
We hit upon a temporary solution one July evening, back when Kirby Perschbacher lived downtown. He had some black powder, I had the cannon, and so we tested the combination in his front yard, right across the street from the Salida police station.
No windows were broken, but the bang was sufficient to
attract every 10-year-old boy in an eight-block radius, all
with the same question: Gee, mister, will you let me
fire your cannon?
As responsible adults, we of course issued warnings about ear damage and said that they should leave immediately if they ever again wanted to be able to hear their teachers assign homework or hear their mothers tell them to clean their rooms.
As normal boys, they paid absolutely no attention to our warnings, although they paid close heed to our instructions about charging, tamping, swabbing, etc.
The result was at least half an hour of tremendous explosions of silver-salute dimensions, all without any real labor or risk of hearing damage on our part.
There are people who despair about the younger generations, but after seeing that American boys still desire to set off explosions, I am not among them.
This need to play with gunpowder must lie deep in the American psyche. In 1806, Lt. Zebulon Pike set off from St. Louis on his famous expedition toward the peak that now bears his name, and in early 1807, he was caught trespassing on Spanish soil in our San Luis Valley; soldiers escorted him to Santa Fe.
There he encountered another American, James Purcell, whom Pike knew as James Pursley. (Before wandering into Santa Fe in June of 1805, Purcell had found a few nuggets in South Park, making him the first American to extract gold from present-day Colorado).
Purcell was working as a carpenter in New Mexico, and
Pike explained that at this he made a great deal of
money, except when working for officers, who paid him
little or nothing. He was a man of strong natural sense
and dauntless intrepidity. He entertained me with numerous
interesting anecdotes of his adventures with the Indians,
and of the jealousy of the Spanish government. He was once
near being hanged for making a few pounds of gunpowder,
which he innocently did as he had been accustomed to do in
Kentucky, but which is a capital crime in these
parts.
Pike served under a commander-in-chief named Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence before becoming this nation's third president. It is obvious that Pike was astonished that any government would be so fearful and despotic as to prevent residents from making a batch of gunpowder, and Jefferson was never known to believe that any government had any business caring about gunpowder.
Now even lady fingers are illegal, and two
eight-year-old boys in New Jersey have criminal records for
possessing a weapon
at school. The weapon
was a sheet of lined notebook paper folded into the shape
of a gun.
I have trouble believing that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration to establish a country where the possession of a folded piece of paper could get you into trouble with the authorities. So my celebration may be a rather muted this year.
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