In mid afternoon, the National Weather Service in Wakefield, Virginia issued an air quality alert. The Weather Bug app on my Droid relayed this stifling event to me. The message was like a tornado warning except instead of twisting air, there was no air, just ozone. It smelled like a paper mill had cranked up the third shift.
My head was perfectly positioned between the 99º sun bleeding the sky of all color above me and the 450º glowing charcoal below in the grill. Angus burgers were sucking up lush smoke from soaked hickory chips. I was saving the wieners for later so they would not burn. That was the plan anyway.
Cooking the burgers was a fairly simple arrangement: season them and put them on the Weber and let the heat and smoke do the rest. Wieners, however, are delicate little tubes of beasts. I had boiled three different brands, Nathan’s Famous, Boar’s Head and chubby Ball Parks, marinating them in two bottles of Shiner Bock Mesquite Smoked Beer. Only a Texas brewery would bottle a smoked beer. Not much for drinking, in my humble opinion, but great for cooking. The smell brought back memories of my father and Uncle Pete in sauce-stained 1960’s undershirts, pushing meat around on a homemade grill supported by bricks in our backyard.
July 4th, 2010 was a beautiful day until my wieners began their quick descent into what looked like Slim Jims pulled from a burning store. I was heartbroken. But I fought through it. The air quality alert dragged on. About 8 pm, we decided to go to the fireworks display at King’s Dominion, an amusement park north of Richmond. This involved sandwich-making and an ice chest.
We don’t pay for this yearly show of fiery patriotism. We usually mooch it from the side of the road with thousands of other cheap bastards. This year, we wedged into a truck stop parking lot across from King’s Dominion, pulled out our yard chairs, ate sandwiches and waited. About an hour later, we discover the flaw in our plan.
When you park at night, it’s not easy to see everything that might possibly obstruct your view of mooched fireworks. When the first explosion went off, however, we saw them, three fat oaks, just tall enough to blind us from the action – another setback to top the burnt wieners earlier in the day. Blooming pops of sizzling color silhouetted the trees not unlike the view Moses had of the burning bush that was never consumed just before God laid the Ten Commandments on him at Mount Sinai. I was pissed. It got better. While we sat and ate during the hour before the fireworks began, hundreds of people had pulled into the parking lot where we sat, most in pickup trucks, many wearing no shirts – a sure sign of a day of drinking as I have learned from watching episodes of Cops. As the grand finale flooded the night with enough firepower to impress a busload of Afghan rebels, I realized the implications of our location. For the next two hours, we jockeyed and cursed and fought for vehicular position while the police sat in the air conditioned comfort of their cruisers listening to satellite radio or whatever cops listen to when they don’t feel like untangling a pile of angry, semi-drunken rednecks in enough trucks to tow an aircraft carrier. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. could not have improved his car’s position in this crowd. Horns blared. An ambulance came. More yelling. Cans were thrown. Bumpers were dented. Jacked-up tempers added to the air quality alert. In the distance, as if on cue, the National Anthem played sadly.
As I sat watching the sweaty mayhem around me, I realized that this display of hatred of our fellow Americans was what we were celebrating on our nation’s birthday. I saw an opening to gain a few yards, catching a glimpse of a kid, perhaps seven years-old, in the bed of a truck knifing into the lane ahead of me. The little boy held his middle finger up as if saluting the flag and screamed, “Screw you!”
His father, driving like a maniac, had the radio cranked up as loud as it could go as Lee Greenwood sang, “And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free. And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me. And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today. ‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land God bless the U.S.A.”
Yeah.