Love American Style

Get out your red, white, and blue bajas and your stars-and-stripes skidz, it’s July 4th in Juneau. Last night at 11:59 p.m., fireworks illuminated crowds of drunken revelers staggering harborside, some even belligerently so! But the fireworks were spectacular, not for magnitude or pyrotechnic prowess, but because each explosion echoed against the sheer cliffs that dwarf downtown and reverberated for several seconds. Pardon the cliché, but it really did sound like a thunderstorm rolling in from over the ridge. The best part was that the behemoth cruise ships (several city blocks long, seriously, and at least six stories high) had to vacate the harbor. Take that, tourists. Of course, there is a very small window of opportunity for fireworks; by the time we got home at around 1:30, dawn was already starting to peak through over the mountains. Well, perhaps not quite dawn, but a lightening, a glimmer of bluing sky.
Today at the parade, volunteer firemen tossed generic taffy to children lining the streets. It was a perfect small town parade, complete with Shriners, bagpipers, camo-wearing troops, and pug owners association members. Though the Filipino-American float had the best music—including a phat glockenspiel beat—I noticed that the guilded breast plates of their “native” costumes were made of thickly spray painted plastic and that most of the dancers wore Nikes or black sweatpants or Harley t-shirts under their gaudily hot-glued feathers. So the volunteer marching band, with its rusty instruments and self-aware campiness (c.f. umbrella hat, 70 year old bleached blonde majorette in sequined suspenders and red spandex) took a special little place in my heart. This is why America is great. Happy Fourth!