My SoCal Life: Fireworks season in Southern California

Kabooms and crackles and rat-a-tats jangle the Southern California night on countless occasions: New Year’s Eve. Cinco de Mayo. The lunar festival of Tét. Grand kaleidoscopic productions frequently light up the skies over landmarks like Disneyland and the Hollywood Bowl, too.

But the month leading up to the Fourth of July signals our full-blown, round-the-clock fireworks season, week after week of whistling rockets, sizzling sky bursts, and car-alarm-triggering detonations.

Our annual exercise in pyrotechnic excess has become as ritualized here as TV car chases and Santa Ana winds—a collective experience, cutting across class and geography, that alternately stirs awe and dread.

When the amateurs break out the 500-gram aerial repeaters and reloadable mortar kits, we share a surge of vicarious exhilaration, followed by deep worry that something, somewhere in this palm-studded land, is on the verge of going terribly wrong.

I count myself among those who take a twisted pride in L.A.’s love affair with explosives. To be roused by detonations at dawn is to feel like a real Angeleno, proof of your proximity to the restless soul of the city. We tend to dismiss complainers as squeamish newbies or presumptuous gentrifiers; firecrackers, like roosters and coyotes, predate most of us here.

But I also recognize that enough soon becomes enough, that it gets wearisome debating whether the crack-a-lacka we’ve just heard is the sound of glee or gunfire. We know that fireworks can be a bummer, or worse, if you’re an infant or a pet or a combat vet. They spread havoc across a combustible landscape in perpetual drought. And, well, they’re mostly illegal.

The great majority of Southern California cities (including Los Angeles) ban every kind of firework, even the “safe and sane” variety. The result is a contradictory patchwork: municipalities with prohibitions abutting towns that relax the rules to give local nonprofits a chance to cash in.

During the early 2000s, when I served as the commissioner for my son’s baseball league in Monterey Park, we operated a city-sanctioned fireworks stand, selling tens of thousands of dollars of Morning Glory sparklers and American Spirit fountains every summer. Our operation struck me as generally wholesome, except that much of our merchandise ended up in neighboring communities that treated it as contraband.