Steve Moseley

Recently we all enjoyed our most significant summer holiday in America.

The Fourth of July has a lot of things going for it, but there are exceptions: ruined vision, melted digits, tortured pets and traumatized vets among them.

Still and all it remains, at least in my view, a national asset for the blanket celebration of patriotism it offers all of us —red or blue — even if self-indulgent and a tad superficial.

The worst Independence Day for me happened many years ago outside Powell.

My buddies on the volunteer fire department treated their community to a fireworks spectacular each year in an open space at the edge of town. Acres of trucks both massive and manly (this was Wyoming, remember) sprinkled with a smattering of cars gathered around a small bump in the flat terrain into which a pit had been dug. This is where the spectacular display was fired high into the night sky by the fellows in yellow.

Everything was going smoothly as I captured the spectacle in photos for the Powell Tribune … until it wasn’t.

Suddenly, as an aerial feature was spectacularly filling the night sky above in a bouquet of bursts, white fire, smoke and horrific noise exploded upward from the bowels of the pit itself. The same pit in which perhaps a half-dozen of Powell’s finest, working in practiced unison, grabbed rockets from barrels then loaded and ignited the high-powered pyrotechnics from a bank of tubes.

Shows then were hands-on and primitive by comparison to the computer-choreographed displays we enjoy today.

An errant spark was all it took.

In the minutes after, a chilling pall of silence fell over the scene. Raucous celebration, kids leaping about in joy and folks shooting off personal fireworks stopped — literally in a flash.

The next sound I recall was the siren shrieking in panic as the near-by ambulance plowed into the lingering smoke.

No one was killed but there were serious injuries, including severely burned skin in places where fire melted bunker gear.

As I recall, two or three Powell firemen spent a day or two in the hospital. Several others were treated and released, but I promise every one of them came away shell-shocked and shaken. Ears ringing. Me too.

By some miracle I captured the double-burst moment on camera using an intermittent time exposure technique.

In 70 years aboard planet Earth there have been many July 4 memories, all of which fade to black in comparison to that awful, terrifying night in northwest Wyoming.

(Steve Moseley is a former Powell Tribune sports editor who now writes for the York, Nebraska, News-Times. This column was first published in the News-Times on Tuesday, July 7.)