Entry posted by Sumiki
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A grocery store near where I live had a massive fireworks sale many years ago. Of course, in North Carolina you can't just go and buy real fireworks - although many people make a trek south to bring back the goods for their Fourth of July and New Year's parties. Thus, the grocery-brand stuff was nearly always on sale and went on a huge clearance. Fortunately, we stocked up, since we never saw them for sale again.
We shot all of the small ones off. At most, they shot sparks and colors up about ten feet, with some occasional sounds. It's great fun when you're twelve but more of a dud at eighteen.
Nine of these fireworks remained in a paper bag in the garage, stuck up on a shelf and left behind various detritus for a great long time. Some of them must be at least six years old. We'd been saving them for some big occasions, but many big occasions had come and left without us even thinking of touching that bag.
Earlier today, my dad and I went outside with paper plates, the fireworks, and some long tools, and spent the better part of half an hour coercing the black powder out of the innards of these fireworks. We dumped the powder through a broken funnel and into a cleaned, dried-out lemonade container. It came up to about a fifth of the way up the container, which had held around a gallon of lemonade when it was purchased.
After dinner and significant time in the pool, we headed back outside because we wanted to light this thing on fire.
Don't try this. I never have before and I never will again, and I will describe exactly why.
After thoroughly dousing the entire area with water, we began the process of setting our contraption off. To light it, we wadded up a massive amount of paper towels into a gigantic fuse and lit it. The paper towels melted a little bit of the plastic container, but would not keep aflame past a certain point. Take two was a relight of the existing nub, but even that proved impossible.
Night had fallen and we were fast becoming frustrated. I retrieved three sparklers from the basement in an attempt to figure out what was going on, and they indeed elucidated the issue: there wasn't enough air in the container to keep the flame going long enough for it to hit the powder at the bottom.
On our final try, a paper bag was retrieved, doused in citronella fluid, put underneath the half-melted lemonade container and set on fire. It burned slowly, then gained traction as it advanced on the powder.
At first, nothing happened. My first thought was that it wouldn't be hot enough to melt out the bottom of the container and ignite the powder.
Then it began to pop. It did so once at first, enough to make me think that the entire thing was nothing but a dud. Then the flames grew wider, and wider still, as powder that had been dormant so long finally came into contact with the very flame that had so eluded it.
A massive tower of fire, three feet wide and easily twenty feet high, shot up into the night sky, carrying along a gigantic plume of smoke. The sparklers disintegrated and were carried up, crackling up along with the colors that had been imbued in its constituent fireworks so long ago.
As soon as it had shot up, it died down again, leaving the remains of what appeared from a distance to be a small campfire - albeit one that crackled and popped quite more than the usual.
It was at this point that my mom opened the kitchen window and yelled "YOU TWO ARE NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN!"
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