The call has gone out. The Whatcom County Parks and Recreation Department is calling for as many volunteers as possible to help with beach cleanup in Birch Bay this morning. It is the kind of thing for which we might volunteer. However, we need to work at the church in Bellingham today and won’t be available. I hope that they get lots of volunteers. It is going to be a big task. The beach was packed with people yesterday. The skies were filled with amateur fireworks for several hours last night. And fireworks leave behind a lot of debris and litter. Bits of paper and cardboard along with quite a bit of plastic is left behind when the pyrotechnics are blasted skyward for the annual nighttime display.

We didn’t go down to the beach to watch. Instead we drove up to the town of Blaine, right on the Canadian border, where there was a professional fireworks display. The waterfront in Blaine is lower than downtown, so folks could line up at a lot of different places to see the show. The fireworks were blasted from a public park on the pier which juts out almost meeting the Semiahmoo spit to form a protective ring around Drayton Harbor. I’m sure that the fireworks make a dramatic display when seen from a distance with the blast reflecting in the water. As we have done before, however, we walked down to the park to watch the display up close. I don’t know how many others walked down there, but I’m sure it was thousands. Those who went early filled all of the parking lots. We didn’t even try to park there, but found a place a block off of main street and walked from there. If nothing else, it sped our departure after the fireworks display.

We saw a bit of our own area’s July 4 craziness in the afternoon. Thinking that the festivities would be an evening phenomenon, we headed down to the beach in our car in the early afternoon intending to park in a familiar spot and walk a little over a mile to the end of the beachfront berm and back. There was no chance of finding any free parking in Birch Bay, however. We ended up driving through the beachfront area and circling back home. With our car in the garage, we walked back down to the beach which was already full of people who had brought tents, shelters, blankets and beach chairs to stake out spots for watching the evening’s festivities. All along the waterfront cars and trucks and campers were packed into all available parking places. Those who wanted to park probably found their place fairly early in the day.

I’m sure that even without a professional fireworks show there was a lot to see down at our beach last night. There is a burn ban on in the county due to dry conditions, but campfires are still allowed. The beach was filled with campfires making a rim of reflections surrounding the water. We could see from our home that the amateur fireworks included many blasts of huge bright bursts. I wonder how many thousands of dollars had been spent at fireworks stands in preparation for the event. There were a couple of vendors selling fireworks in our area. Although it is technically illegal to light fireworks purchased on the reservation off of reservation land, I’m sure that rule is impossible to enforce. How could any enforcement officer trace the origin of the carloads of fireworks that were brought into the bay yesterday? Fireworks are big business on the reservation.

I like to watch the fireworks, but I am not tempted to spend any money at the fireworks stands. I’ve got plenty of ways to spend my money without feeling the urge to turn it into cardboard tubes with fuses that cause explosions. Even with showy rockets that create large bursts of color in the night sky, I find the expense to be unnecessary. I’ll leave the purchasing and lighting of fireworks to others.

Still, I would like to help with the cleanup. Perhaps next year I won’t have to be working on July 5 and will be available to join my neighbors in the important task. That is another thing about fireworks. The ones who light the fuses rarely clean up the debris themselves. It is blasted over a large area and although I haven’t gone down to the beach yet this morning, I’m pretty sure that there is plenty of parking. Several thousand folks who spent the day in Birch Bay yesterday have already gone home. I’m not the only one who has to be at work today. Like all of those revelers, I’ll be going to work a bit short on sleep. Even if I hadn’t stayed up for the fireworks display, sleep before midnight was nearly impossible with all of the booming from fireworks all around our neighborhood. Some of my neighbors were putting on impressive displays. Hopefully there will be plenty of neighbors out with their brooms and garbage cans today. I’m sure the neighborhood is as badly littered as the beach this morning.

In some ways Independence Day is a bit of an oddity among holidays. The focus is on outdoor activities. People celebrate with barbecues, picnics, and days at the beach. There is plenty of drinking and recreational smoking going on. Parades and car shows are other components of community celebrations. Basically, general revelry is the norm. As opposed to many other holidays, the holiday is not attached to Monday or another fixed day of the week. We celebrate on the 4th regardless of what day of the week it occurs. When it is near a weekend, as was the case yesterday, a lot of people arrange to have an extra day off making a long weekend. On there other hand, there were plenty of businesses that were open yesterday. In town hardware stores and grocery stores were doing booming business and were open for business as usual.

Today, however, it is back to the usual. The commute will feature drivers who are more tired than usual. Traffic may be a bit higher with some celebrants still heading home after a long weekend. Be careful out there. We wish everyone safe travels.

And maybe next year I’ll be out there with the good folks who are giving their time to clean things up.