Op-Ed: July 4: Our interdependent holiday

The Fourth of July I remember most vividly from my childhood in Riverside was an anarchic celebration on a huge green field where my brother almost lost an eye. I must have been 10, with four younger siblings, and my dad had driven us over the city line to Colton, where fireworks were legal, sold at wooden stands. We went to a local park, which was full of people, and in the gathering darkness I held a sparkler, which thrilled me in a primitive way, its scent of gunpowder and the whispering sparks that flew into the air.

Then we heard the screams of Piccolo Petes, and the boom of M80s and the hollow roar of Roman candles. It was one of these that misfired and sent out a spark that landed close to my brother’s eye. Strangers rushed toward him, helped him find us amid the chaos.

That same brother came to the first Independence Day at the house where I’ve lived for 28 years now — and many thereafter. The street dead-ends into an arroyo, which overlooks the Santa Ana River and Mt. Rubidoux, from which the city sends up its annual fireworks display. It thrills thousands of residents who gather on my street, on all the streets nearby, in church parking lots and the middle school playing field and the new city park, in yards and on the public parking strips of grass and swaying palm. This scene plays out all over America, in tiny towns and the largest cities.

This is the holiday of streets parties, of neighborhood potlucks and barbecues, of what we know as independence — but looks more like interdependence. My three daughters remember the neighbor who made ice cream on his porch, and the neighbor whose band played on a makeshift stage, turning a street near ours into a classic rock party. We remember when he leaped off the hood of a truck and broke his leg on the asphalt. In the field at the end of our block, hundreds of us gathered, boomboxes and car radios tuned to the station playing music along with the fireworks.

Our taxes paid for the fireworks and elaborate set-up, for the city trucks that hauled away the trash, the EMTs who took injured revelers to the hospitals, and the firefighters who put out the fires.

My brother watched for the fires: After the peony explosions, the dark red in the dry brush amid the boulders. My children learned to count them. Sometimes only two or three, quickly extinguished, and sometimes eight or nine, and one that might flare in the wind to a large conflagration that lasted long after the trailing smoke of the fireworks themselves had disappeared. The firetrucks were always parked right there, on the mountain, ready.

Fireworks were invented in 7th century China, during the Tang Dynasty, as a way to chase away the evil spirits that might linger in the sky. Is this what we do on Independence Day? Chase away that which we believe might harm us?

Every national holiday I’ve witnessed has featured fireworks, all over the world. On Bastille Day in France, my daughters and I sat outside a stone house in a tiny village to see what we could of the municipal fireworks show. On National Day in Switzerland, my mother’s native country, we left another tiny village and tramped up a hill, where our cousins set off huge fireworks that would be illegal where we live. We were astonished that there was no fire in the wheat or the corn. Each village built a bonfire, and we watched them burn from a distance, all around us in the dark. On Canada Day on Prince Edward Island, descendants of people who fled the Scottish Highlands in 1773 set off fireworks from the dune grass and sand, or from lobster boats in the glittering water.

The French celebrate the storming of the Bastille prison and the (temporary) end of the monarchy; the Swiss how three provinces banded together against encroaching invaders; the Canadians the drawing together of disparate territories into a nation. On our Independence Day, we celebrate our liberation from Britain — chasing away the British Army — but we do it by joining together.

Big cities and small towns in America set up their pyrotechnics, and parents and strangers watch children hold up sparklers, alert for danger, while firefighters wait, while law enforcement and hospital staff and park employees and rangers watch the explosions, the delicate anemones in the sky, in case someone like my brother or my neighbor needs help, in the darkness.

Susan Straight has published 10 books, including “A Million Nightingales,” featuring a woman born into slavery in 1776.

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