What's more American than apple pie? How about an M1 Garand or about 5,000 personal fireworks and twice as many bottles of beer? That's what you get when you spend the 4th of July up near Crouch, Idaho.
Every 4th of July Crouch opens up its main street and shuts down the gas pumps. Hundreds of people come out to watch the town firework display and then head for the center of town to try their own. I learned a couple of things that night.
1. Ground bloom flowers work under water.
2. When intoxicated some people will try to light fire crackers in their mouth if you don't stop them.
3. Little kids can still sleep on a street with hundreds of drunk people lighting off fireworks.
4. When you run out of fireworks you can just start burning the used ones.
I wouldn't suggest bringing small children there, but that place is a blast literally. Rette, Quin, and I joined in the fun. I tried tossing a couple of flowers into the air and I must say I did laugh when one ended up going under a camp chair that some guy was sitting on. Normally I'd feel bad, but if you didn't want to be harassed by fireworks you shouldn't have come to Crouch.
One thing I got a new appreciation for was how hard it would be to fight a war with a black powder rifle. My father-in-law, Bart, let me and Quin shoot his and it's quite the process to reload those things. We only got off 5 shots in about 8 minutes, luckily there were no red coats around or we would have been in trouble.
Rette handled the M1 Garand well even though it was almost her size and weight.
All in all it was a great 4th of July. We got to raft, bridge jump, rope swing, shoot stuff, blow stuff up, eat Dutch oven cooking, and be American!
