It all started near the end of our senior year of high school — the unofficial Senior Skip Day, to be precise. My best friend and I took off for a bit of joyriding in the Mohican Valley in his overhauled pumpkin orange ’78 Chevy pickup on a beautiful and sunny Tuesday morning in late May.

Graduation was just two weeks off, we had some cash set aside, and so when not scaring old Volvo station wagons as we slid and bounced through the twists and turns of the gravel roads, we aimed for a little fireworks shop you could pass a hundred times without knowing it was there. We signed the “liar’s form,” dropped our cash, and walked out with some packs of saturn missiles, some mini mortars, a six-pack of Black Cat shells, and some fountains, then pointed the nose of the truck towards the cabin and set about trying to get airborne on some of the humps and crossroads. We may also have braced one of the mortars against the truck door and aimed it in the general direction of some cows.

So began our love affair with fireworks. We used some of the goodies at graduation parties (although we had to abort at my friend’s party because a police chopper dropped a spotlight on us before we could start — he lived in the city), and fired the rest off the night of the fourth. My parents lived out in the country, so my dad (himself a fireworks devotee) let us light ’em up after dark. The Black Cat shells were particularly impressive, giving us multi-colored star bursts and aerial crackling. We wanted more, but August had us going our separate ways to different colleges. Still, we agreed to put some money aside for a more impressive show come New Year’s. While watching the stars and screamers burst over the snowy fields, my father made us an offer: He would sponsor us to put on the show to end all shows on July 4.

As soon as college was out we made our pilgrimage back to the Mohican Valley, this time with my father’s credit card and a budget in the hundreds of dollars. Given what we were planning to haul off, we borrowed my mother’s minivan as we weren’t keen on getting any attention directed towards the explosives. Ohio had a peculiar law at the time: You could buy fireworks in the state, but you could not possess or use them without a license. So when you made your purchase you had to fill out what was jokingly called the “liar’s form” — where you stated the exact city and state where you were supposedly taking the booty, and pledged to remove the fireworks from Ohio within 72 hrs. We picked Anchorage, AK. Then we loaded up the car with countless fountains, packs of shells, missiles, firecrackers, and novelties.

Then there were the mortars. Black Cat shells come six to a pack, with a disposable one-inch diameter, eight-inch long cardboard launch tube. We had a couple boxes of those, but some uncounted number of true pro-grade mortars. These are single-use tubes, two to three inches in diameter, each containing just one shell in lengths of about 18 to 20 inches. These arc high into the sky and detonate with chest-jarring concussions. I wonder if we cleaned out the shop. These were mainstay of our planned show, the rest was just filler.

The planned launch site was, in the meantime, kept closely mowed and cleared as we planned out the show sequence. My father had a leftover shipping pallet from a piece of machinery and my friend suggested we chainsaw it into three sections to use as firing platforms. He then used scrap lumber to make slots, so we could just run up and slide the mortar bases in without fear of them tipping. We also made a more rugged launch tube for the smaller Black Cat shells.

On the morning of the fourth, we set up lawn sprinklers all over of the launch field, while my dad hauled brush and scrap into a pile for a bonfire.  My friend and I, meanwhile, made a few dry runs to test our ideas.  In the evening, his family joined mine for a cookout and swim in the pool, but I think we were too nervous to each much.  We kept checking our lighters and spares, and staring at the sky to make the sun go down sooner.

8:30, 8:45, the bonfire was lit, but not dark enough yet…

At 9:30 we gave the go-ahead and began the show. We had the fireworks stored in empty trash cans at a central point, and our three platforms were spread downwind radially, each about 30 yards from us and 20 or so yards from each other. We positioned a mortar on each outer skid, then grabbed the biggest fountain and put it in the center. After a quick high five, we lit and started sprinting towards the mortars. With them touched off, we booked it back to central, listening to sparks and shrieks of the fountains, followed by two booming thuds as the mortars fired.

I don’t know if either he or I remember much of the show’s set pieces and launches. What I do remember is a mad 45 minutes of dashing out to one platform or another (I had left, he had right, we mixed it up on the center), grabbing the spent mortar out of the slot, ramming a new one home, touching it off, and dashing back to central to queue up the next whizbang. We mixed in more fountains and missiles while we caught our breath, but crack, bang, thud, kaboom, whistling, shrieking on and on the whole time. I could see the road a third of a mile off, and cars stopped to watch the spectacle. Neighbors far off sent up a few sympathetic shells, but our show kept on cracking, booming, and filling the air with odor of sulphur, nitrates, and burning magnesium.

In a thick fog of smoke, utterly exhausted, but with the nearby cheers of family and the distant cheers of far-off neighbors, we ended the show with one last large fountain and another double mortar launch, the last of the loot. Then we gathered up all of the spent tubes and empty boxes and fed it all into the bonfire, so no questions would be asked. Even the skids were tossed in at the end.

We never repeated the show at that scale. The following summers we were either working full time, or traveling, or getting married. We had a few smaller shows, but what had been country very quickly became suburbia. My parents’ acreage is still intact, but most of the surrounding lands have been populated by McMansions and busybodies. Their road, once so quiet that cars were a rarity at night, now has a steady stream of traffic at all hours. Too many eyes around, too many people they don’t know anymore, too much risk of trouble for an amateur fireworks extravaganza.

Still, we lay in a few boxes of shells, and sometimes we do find the time to fire them off, even if it means taking a trip to do so. 21 years later, that show is still remembered as the big one: The Great Fireworks Extravaganza of 1995.