A STORY WORTH TELLING
Holiday lights are the best when colorful decorations delight and fireworks illuminate the night.
While I was fascinated by fireworks as a kid, I’m even more mesmerized these days by drone light shows. These are mindboggling artistic exhibitions at night using lighted drones flying with computer precision.
My son, Lee, became a skilled drone pilot a few years ago.
Marveling at his breathtaking nighttime photos of lights on the horizon intrigued me to give it a try.
Snagging a drone on sale, I headed for an empty field near my house loaded with instructions and optimism.
“This lever is up; this one is down … I’ve got this.”
Enthusiasm turned to confusion on the first real test flight.
“Was that the right stick forward or the left one back?”
I watched as the just-out-of-the-box bird flew away, ignoring my futile attempts at any control. I was still watching when it disappeared into the trees on the far side of the field.
A couple of hours of fighting briars and poison ivy, scanning treetops and crawling through brush piles proved pointless. I called off my doomed drone search at dusk.
Follow-up expeditions listening for the beeping locator beacon the owner’s manual assured would sound if the drone was “accidentally” lost yielded not a peep.
“Guess I’ll leave the drones to Lee,” I conceded.
As a youngster, my son also loved fireworks with a passion. Every holiday, he stashed money away anticipating the opening of the first fireworks stand.
The year of his most memorable fireworks show, he amassed an arsenal capable of defending the southern shores of our Lake Murvaul home against any invasion.
Dark descended as he opened the large plastic bucket full of “buy-one-get-a-dozenfree” bargains.
Spectators unfolded lawn chairs and opened refreshment coolers.
The Lake Murvaul holiday fireworks shoreline displays border on legendary.
“Oohs” and “aahs” arose from the darkness as brilliant, colorful displays began lighting the night, painting the water with shimmering reflections.
Lee started with small “twirly-thingies” whizzing upward. All was bliss until one ember drifted down and landed in the arsenal bucket.
That’s when the “really big show” began and all hands retreated. Curiosity, however, got the best of me. Looking back at the inferno, I saw several things.
I witnessed a fireworks display the likes of which I’m pretty sure had never before been seen on the lake, perhaps never since: Rockets shooting in one direction, buzz bombs going off in another.
The light was blinding.
The noise was deafening.
Not since Wolf Blitzer’s CNN coverage of the invasion of Iraq had I witnessed such ferocious firepower.
I saw neighbors hunkering down, dodging bottle rockets as they folded lawn chairs and scrambled for safety.
Then I saw a broom in the boathouse.
Wielding the makeshift shovel, I braved the rogue pyrotechnics show, pushing what was left off the pier and into the water.
With a muffled sizzle, the mass of embers, melted plastic and detonating devices sank in a cloud of steam that lingered over the murky depths.
Almost as fast as it had started, Lee’s fireworks show ended. The silence was deafening.
Not one frog or cricket was heard. Someone applauded. Then another. The clapping spread around the cove.
Lee was devastated.
He had just watched weeks of allowance and pay for chores go up in a flash and die in a puff of smoke.
There was talk for days afterward.
“Did you see that over there on the south shore the other night?”
Everyone was pretty sure it was the most spectacular event since lightning hit the oil storage tanks on FM 1970.
It was still being talked about years later, the day we moved from the lake.
Lee recovered, earned a degree in computer networking and is tech savvy in ways I won’t pretend to understand. I haven’t asked him about fireworks lately. But who knows?
He may consider replacing fireworks with this amazing new field of nighttime light shows.
Not me, though. I never found my runaway drone.
Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
