The Biggest Boom

Not with a whimper, but a bang

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

7/17/05

http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

The place is fulla tourists. There were so many cars and trucks I didn’t recognize in the parking lot of our local market that I shut off my engine and pulled the keys out of the ignition before going in. (Some of the guys tried locking their cars, those that had lockable cars. That left the problem of how to turn off the engine and pull the keys out of the ignition, so it never caught on.)

Tourists everywhere. Crossing the local highway is risky, and often entails waits of several minutes for a clearing in the traffic. In the winter, a blind snail with bipolar disorder can get across that road safely, but now, it’s taking your life in your hands to try it.

It’s been a boom tourist season. Local businesses are roaring, and even the dour Indians who own most of motel row are seen smiling in public. Mount Shasta had an estimated 12,000 visitors – four times the town’s population – for the fourth of July this year. I took one look at the traffic that Friday afternoon and resolved not to come within ten miles of the place for the rest of the weekend. The funny thing is that everyone figured we would have a crap tourist season this year on account of the high gas prices. With gasoline here at $2.70 a gallon for unleaded regular and threatening to hit $4 by the end of the year, everyone figured the tourists would just stay home this summer. Instead, they’ve driven the 250 miles plus (we’re 250 miles from anywhere) anyway.

On fourth of July, Mount Shasta has a big fireworks display up at the resort, but nobody in my neighborhood ever bothers with it. Siskiyou County is a "safe and sane" county, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the way people drive. What that means is that fireworks are allowed to be sold, but they have to be pretty limited in what they can do. That means that they don’t do much except look kinda pretty for thirty seconds and then gutter out. But everyone puts in about $25 each, and what we end up with is a show that makes the kids happy and makes for a pleasantly fun evening. One of the guys hit on the idea of taking a balloon, filling it with acetylene, and sticking it in a nest of crumpled up newspaper and lighting the paper. The resulting shrapnel-free boom can be heard across town and doesn’t pose a fire risk, although you can get home and pretty much tell where the cat was standing and which direction he fled in when it went off from the location of the puddle.

But this year was a little different. Everybody had a Stash. The Stash consisted of fireworks brought back in the trunks of cars from Mexico, from Colorado, and from other places where life is cheap and people aren’t safe and sane. We’re talking bottle rockets, and sky bombs, and M-80s, and cherry bombs. We’re talking serious explosives here, fireworks that you can see from six blocks away, fireworks that can blow whole limbs off, fireworks that can kill you.

Fireworks that can make you go "ooooh!" and "ahhhh!"

We live in the middle of a pine forest, and usually the rainy season has been over for three months by the time 4^th of July rolls around. Which means that setting off sky-rockets and the like is utter madness. The forest is already tinder dry, and the local fire chief lives close enough by that he’s going to notice any violations of both common sense and the law, and will come prepared to jam both his caulk boots down the throat of anyone who engages in such stupid behavior as might cause a forest fire. It’s a very expensive ticket.

But this year was different. The rains kept up right up until the middle of June, leaving us with lush, green lawns and floral displays that would’ve looked more at home in England than in the semi-arid west. The forest was still well hydrated, the undergrowth and bracken still green.

So everyone pulled out their "Stash" fireworks, and we made a party of it. I don’t think it was pre-planned but people seemed to know. Usually we have 40 or 50 people at one of those little street gatherings. This year, we had over 100. Friends and relatives, mostly.

We set off a couple of sky rockets early, to see if that would lure the fire chief out. It didn’t, so as evening progressed, we lit off the rest of the arsenal. The fire chief never did show up, so it fell under the category of Siskiyou Law: "if a cop didn’t see you, then you didn’t break the law."

Now, my neighborhood doesn’t consist of a bunch of scofflaws, and even the libertarian ones who think they have a gawd-given right to give their four-year-olds quarter-sticks of dynamite to play with agree that the fire safety rules about fireworks make good sense. So even with the favorable climatological conditions, I still came home thinking that what we did was, while maybe not feckless exactly, certainly out of character.

And I have a feeling that nobody has anything left in those Stashes, either. Just as I have a feeling that a lot of tourists here this summer aren’t expecting to make it back next summer.

There’s a kind of a last hurrah quality to everything right now. At a fireworks show, they save the biggest and noisiest ones for last, and that’s kind of what we did. It wasn’t just the low-risk fire conditions; we’ve had other years like that. And gas prices killed tourism when the prices were a full buck a gallon below what they are today.

The country as a whole is in the biggest boom in its history, a real estate boom that defies belief. My house is worth 8 times what I paid for it in 1993. I heard on the radio this morning that the average home in LA is going for $470,000. We’re talking a pastel-colored dump in the endless stucco desert of the San Fernando Valley here, folks. Almost half a million. And incredulous sellers report getting a dozen bids driving the price up higher in the first week.

This is a boom far larger than the high-tech boom of the nineties (which never did amount to more than 2% of the total economy). This is a boom involving trillions in wholly imaginary dollars that are being borrowed against at a rate never seen before to maintain a life that neither production, income, nor extended credit can sustain any longer. The Sac Bee had an article on "gold collar" workers; people who make maybe $10 or $15 an hour, but who go out and buy things like $600 handbags because they feel a deep-seated need to have such a possession. These "gold collar workers" (wearing different types of collars of a different type of gold) make up as much as 10% of the 18-25 demographic, according to the studies cited. Similarly, people pay half a million for two-bedroom dumps not because the house is worth that, but just so they can say they own such an expensive house – and borrow, at low, low, variable rate interest – against it in order to maintain a fin de siecle lifestyle.

OK, maybe I’m just projecting a personal mood on several unrelated events. That’s entirely possible. Maybe this "end of the party" thing is coming from within for whatever reason.

You can ask yourself, though, if you’ve noticed the same thing.

People are using up their Stash, they’re saving the biggest bangs for the last.

I believe they sense it’s the end of an era.