Been thinking about: Fireworks and summer sweat

The rain poured down just beyond the garage doors, dirty cement glistening in the late, dark summertime somewhere between light and dusk. Bare incandescent lightbulb shown over saws and level, hammers, screws, nails, fishing rods, my dad’s red hammer. Old 1960s’ refrigerator, stocked with beer and leftovers, with a freezer desperately in need of defrosting hummed. It was July sometime in the early 1990s. I paused. Perhaps the twilight made this moment profound, though if someone had looked at me, a plump 12-year-old staring at the rain, they would have seen nothing of note. Whatever the reason, I’ve never forgotten that singular moment, even as I was just headed to the refrigerator for leftover cherry pie.

Another summer, another evening, but the condensation beaded on the cement floor the same, this time the floor of the fireworks store. Country music blared from the old Dollar General Store radio perched up high as I browsed the fireworks just a day or two before Independence Day. Firework names are memorable, beguiling, but in a very certain sort of way:

Thunder Bomb, Crackling Bullet, Khaotic Kaboom, Pyro Candy, Witchcraft, Hula Girls, Naughty Boys.

No matter how you cut it, the appeal of fireworks is obvious — they are dangerous, unpredictable and outside the boundaries of a safe, tempered society. Moreover, fireworks speak to that strange part of a boy’s soul that yearns for danger and challenge. I should know. I’ve bought my fair share of fireworks. Missouri has a certain state line appeal to those of us who grew up in Iowa or Illinois where wholesale mortar shells are illegal. I’m reasonably confident that the Illinois statute of limitations has run out after so many decades so I can speak of a certain night in which a box of Missouri fireworks were set off in a law abiding Illinois county, before which my best friend and I had drunk a Fellowship-of-the-Ring portion of Guinness each. “Looked like somebody down your way was shooting off fireworks,” my neighbor said the next week. “Yep, sure did,” I replied blandly, “Not sure where they were.”

Twelve-year old me would never have taken such a risk, but as I made my way from TV to cherry pie and back to TV, I couldn’t shake the idea I was somehow missing something terribly important. Twelve-year-olds are always on the cusp of something though they know not what. And I was just nabbing pie between the commercial breaks of a TV movie about a boxer who defied all the odds. I have no idea the film title, which isn’t really important. What is important was the boxer’s rise to the challenge, his willingness to defy the odds, to buck the system, and win when everybody was sure he was down for the count. It was also the first time I was fully aware of masculine strength and aesthetic and, while I didn’t exactly understand, I knew I wanted to embody it. Mostly raised by my mom — and with my older sisters as guides, —I wasn’t exactly a paragon of manly boyhood. As was commonplace for my generation, my dad was busy with his career elsewhere.

Masculinity is an uncomfortable thing for our generation. While we’ve spent so much time making sure girls understand they can by anything they want (and I firmly believe they can), we come surprisingly short of ready answers for boys who, more often than not, want to become men more than anything else. Our generations have largely assumed that such things would happen by nature (and we’re far too surprised when things go wrong). Boys becoming men is not something that happens without us.

After that boxing movie in 1990, I started doing things I am pretty sure my family generally considered… weird. I filled a feed sack with damp hay and hung it from the limb of an Osage orange, making a makeshift punching bag, which I proceeded to hit. A lot. I started hill sprints barefoot, and then added endurance runs and hurdles, although my hurdles were all lawn chairs dragged out of the barn. I pushed myself until I sweated through my shirt, over and over and then borrowed my brother-in-law’s weights and my mom’s antique sitting bench to do my best impression of dumbbell bench presses. For the most part, my family did their best to ignore me. I was the first boy in a generation to come along and consequently an anomaly. 

Back in the fireworks store, I’m sweating through my shirt and enjoying myself a little too much though asking myself, “Why exactly do I want to buy all these?” Truth is, buying and shooting off fireworks is fun. But why? Since time immemorial, boys and men have defined themselves by pushing boundaries, challenging themselves, pushing themselves, and placing themselves into dangerous situations to prove they can get out of danger. Sometimes they don’t. Too many teen boys die each year from accidents that look, to adults, like pointless thrill seeking, but we miss the larger meaning. Boys don’t just naturally, automatically, become men. We must be initiated or we push ourselves to self-initiate. The poet Robert Bly may have been one of the most effete men to ever lecture on masculinity, but he hit the nail on the head when he referenced ancient societies’ boyhood initiation rites, lamenting modern industrialization’s divorce between father and son. Say what you will about Bly, he understood even back in the 1970s that boys were in big trouble.

A number of years back, I was speaking about a new section of StateoftheOzarks dedicated to masculinity. One now-former member sniffed, “And I assume you will also be celebrating girls on your magazine?” I paused, thinking of the rising rates of suicide in men, the loneliness culture, the vast number of boys placed on prescription drugs simply for having lots of energy and not acting like girls, and the fact that problems with men are just given the label “toxic masculinity” as though being male was itself a pathology. The callousness of society is profound, though sometimes my conspiracy mind leans into certain ideas —

Men, when we are un-initiated, unsure of ourselves, stuck in perpetual childhood, unwilling to take risk, to buck mal-authority, left as obese shadows of our potential selves, are easy slaves to a system that values obedience over everything else. The system-bucking American virtues that tamed a wild nation, gave the middle finger to all of European governance (and risked their lives to do so), ushered in grand technology like the railroad and air power, won the Second World War, and roared muscle cars into a Route 66 sunset, these are cowboy ideals we’re often told are passé, best written off as embarrassment, or simple myth. 

Truth is, men are hard to tame. But well-initiated men understand morality, ethics, values and strive to forever transcend puerile toxicity. But to do that, each new generation of boys need us to guide them, perhaps with the gym, perhaps with fireworks, definitely with discipline, love and a deep appreciation for the differences between boys and men, between men and women. These are Ozarks values told in fireworks and sweat and, as we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, let us not forget ever again.