Few reservations about using fireworks illegally

Like the sirens luring moonstruck sailors onto a rocky shore, the vividly colored signs beckoned in the breeze Thursday, draped across trailers and promising thrills and delights just inside.

The kind you can’t get at home.

The crisply dressed man with a goatee walked, blinking, into the bright afternoon sunlight after leaving the dimness of one of these trailers at U.S. Highway 95 and Elder Road, just south of Coeur d’Alene. He and his female companion began stuffing boxes containing a sort of forbidden fruit behind the seats in his shiny red pickup truck when a stranger approached and asked to talk about it.

“Oh man, he sure pegged me,” the man said. “This year I bought twice as much as I normally do because I’m not coming back here next year.” It’s tough on his ethics, he said.

“Yeah, he pegged you good,” his companion said with a smile.

The Spokane man was amused, conflicted and thoughtful, but insistent his name not be revealed. “I’m thinking,” he said slowly, “It wouldn’t be good to have my name in a newspaper when I’ve just bought illegal fireworks.”

The couple were just two people among multitudes to visit one of the several fireworks stands that open for business in early summer on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation.

The fireworks stands sell the sort of aerial rockets and bombs that you can’t even legally possess, much less purchase and blow up, anywhere else. They also sell sparklers and the sort of family friendly whizzers and cracklers sold at the “safe-and-sane” stands that are the only kind allowed to be sold in cities such as Coeur d’Alene. Other cities, such as Spokane, have banned the sale of any kind of fireworks.

Outside the reservation, officials with Coeur d’Alene-area fire departments, police agencies, the U.S. Forest Service and the Idaho Department of Lands held a joint press conference Wednesday to encourage people to watch community fireworks shows or, at least, to buy the safe-and-sane stuff sold at licensed stands in towns outside the reservation.

They warned of fines ranging up to $1,000 and six months in jail for possessing illegal fireworks. They threatened that people who cause a fireworks-sparked wildfire on federal and state rangelands and forests will be pursued to pay the cost of putting it out .

They lectured that police and sheriff’s deputies will immediately confiscate any illegal fireworks.

They know they are a voice in the wilderness.

Recently, a delegation of firefighters spoke to the Idaho Legislature and pitched a statewide ban on fireworks, Coeur d’Alene Fire Department Deputy Chief Dan Cochran said.

“We got beat up bad,” Cochran said. “One prominent legislator stood up and said he goes to Wyoming to buy his fireworks. Another said fireworks are Americana and apple pie.

“That’s what we are up against. It’s a steep, uphill battle,” Cochran said.

Fire officials cite yearly injuries from burns and explosions and the spike in fires they rush to stamp out every Independence Day weekend.

Coeur d’Alene firefighters were called to 13 fires over the long holiday weekend last year, spending nearly $28,000 to extinguish them, officials said Wednesday.

Someone lighting off safe-and-sane fireworks last year found out they can be neither safe nor sane, officials said, when a firework placed on a rotten log ignited the hillside right out the back door of Coeur d’Alene’s Fire Station 3. That one cost $10,000 to put out.

Still, this is the Fourth of July weekend. It’s all about bombs bursting in air, the rocket’s red glare.

That’s what drew the crisply dressed man with the goatee, despite his moral conflict that the high-powered fireworks can be dangerous and a fire hazard if used irresponsibly. Yes, they can be trouble … but there is also the allure, the siren call.

“Ethically I don’t agree with this whole operation, but guests come to my lake place every year, and I am expected to put on a show,” he said.

“Coming here is like going to a strip show,” he said, holding his hands to his temples and assuming the look of someone engaged in forbidden delights even when he knows better.

“I thought you didn’t go to those,” his companion said.

“I don’t,” the man said.

Perhaps his analogy was inspired by the pair of busty bikini-babe parking lot attendants plying their reflective wands just a heartbeat away.

“We used to be in classic cars out on the highway, and we’d wave to people,” Sharon Mitchell, one of the barely clad sirens, said. “But the state police made us stop that. They said we almost caused wrecks.”

So now Mitchell and her friends wave their wands to direct customers to parking spots. And the cars come. The pickups. License plates from Idaho and Washington. The customers are all ages — young guys with ball caps, earrings and tattoos; gray-haired guys; families with kids in tow.

All of them looking for something to make the Fourth a little special as they wedge up against the counter, sometimes two deep.

“This is just a little flow. Come tomorrow and it’ll be a madhouse,” Arna Michael, who has worked at the Indian Country fireworks stand for 15 years, said on Thursday. “Everybody knows about the fines. They come by anyway.”

Like the crisply dressed man with the goatee, Michael also was thoughtful about the paradox of fireworks, but cheerful. For her and other workers, their several weeks behind the counter is not only welcome extra money, but also a hectic and often banter-filled mix of joking with customers, greeting old regulars and gleaning interesting insights into the rhythms of rural life around here.

Turns out, people in a lot of the small farm towns, stubbornly holding onto existence, come to the reservation to buy fireworks for a community Fourth of July display, she said.

In tiny towns from Waverly, Wash., to Potlatch, Idaho, “They put jars out in the stores and people throw their money in and then they send four people here to buy the fireworks and put on a show for their town,” Michael said.

Everybody knows the rules, she said. And the rules are everywhere. Tribal authorities have posted notices that there are only three designated areas to ignite fireworks on the reservation, one each in the towns of Worley, Plummer and Desmet.

“People do dumb stuff and everybody else pays,” she said. “What next, are they going to take the turkey away at Thanksgiving because somebody could choke on the bone, take the Christmas tree away because it could be a fire hazard?”

“The Fourth of July means fireworks. Everybody looks forward to it. You watch the grownups with the big huge ones, you watch the kids with the little ones. It just has to be,” she said.

A couple of guys tossed their purchases into a pickup truck.

“Make sure those are covered! Those can’t be seen,” the bikini babe parking lot attendants yelled cheerily.

Right. You don’t want to attract the other kind of sirens.