I miss my way of celebrating the Fourth

When I lived in Front Royal, Virginia, right by the Virginian sector of the Appalachian Mountains and right on top of Shenandoah National Park, I created a minor July Fourth tradition for myself, which involved getting in my Honda Fit and rolling along Skyline Drive, a 100-plus-mile-long winding road that roughly paralleled a section of the Appalachian Trail and approached, way to the south, the George Washington National Forest. Along the Drive, every few miles, were these overlooks where you could park your car, brave the local mosquitoes, and look way down into the great, sprawling Shenandoah Valley. As twilight changed into night, you could see the tiny lights of individual and clustered houses—distant neighborhoods that twinkled like fallen stars in the vast bowl of the valley.

And if you got to an overlook right as night was falling on the Fourth, you'd be rewarded with the sudden sparkle of fireworks popping off in those neighborhoods: tiny, random, evanescent swarms that were a joyful reminder of a long-past defiance, one that changed, over the centuries, into a transatlantic friendship with our former rulers. I would drive from overlook to overlook, stopping for several minutes at each one to soak in the modest fireworks display. I could often hear, in a time-delayed way, the soft popping noises of those little bomblets bursting in air. I would normally celebrate this way until I was sure the last firework had exploded in the visible parts of the valley, and then I would quietly drive back home.

This was nothing like standing awash in the crowded, noisy, litter-strewn, drunken bombast of a Washington, DC, fireworks event. There was a subtle magnificence about this sort of celebration—a celebration that not even the people in the valley knew made any cohesive sense. The fireworks were spontaneous, uncoordinated displays of joy, and yet together, they made for their own humble symphony in the night, and I was thankful to all those valley dwellers for their élan and joie de vivre and other French words. Vive la liberté.

We're losing that liberty right now, so this might be a more mindful July the Fourth than most. That said, I wish all my Yankee readers (and anyone else who retains some fellow-feeling for my often-fractious, often-crazy, often-stupid fellows) a very Happy Fourth of July. I'll be celebrating at my boss's residence tomorrow; I'm bringing the pulled-pork BBQ sliders, so I have some coleslaw to make tonight.

A Happy Fourth to all and sundry!