Fourth of July in Montana

Well, I've realized that my opportunities to update this, or indeed to write in my old-fashioned journal (i.e., by hand) are much more limited than I've expected. So I'm giving myself the latitude to post stuff here randomly. The longer narration will be continued and updated when I can do so.

Anyways, so here it is, July 5th. We've been lucky enough to spend the last 3 days in Glacier National Park. GNP is located along the Canadian border, in western Montana. Actually, it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is located west of the Blackfeet nation; more on that later. GNP is unbelievable; more on that later, too My topic for this post is pretty simple: Fourth of July celebrations in Montana.

Montana has no restrictions (that I've seen; few if any) on firecrackers and the like, so we expected some pretty rousing shows last night. We're from the Boston area, which has amazing fireworks shows on the Esplanade every year, so maybe we're a little bit spoiled. Still, when we were told we could see the fireworks from our hotel room's back door (it's really a motel room, but who's counting; St. Mary's Lodge, nice place, letting me use their wifi right now; great restaurant -- thanks again for stellar service, Soren!), as I say, we were told to step outside our door and just watch. Okay. We did. So did a few others on either side of us. (Which was funny: Sam was wearing his Zdeno Chara Bruins tee shirt, and it turns out our "neighbors" on one side were big Canucks fans. Happily, they were gracious and not vindictively-minded. ;-)

It was not all that exciting. Finally close to 10:45 or so there was a blast of 15 minutes or so that was pretty cool after all. We were satisfied, and ushered the kids off to bed.

(Aisde: yes, that's 11 pm bedtime for an 8 and 10 year old. And not just 11 pm, but 11 pm MST, which is 1 am in the time zone, EST, they are accustomed to. Yikes.)

Five minutes later, the real fireworks began, or so it seemed. Intermittently, huge blasts kept going off for quite some time. Not in any organized fashion, unfortunately. It seemed like Joe Average Montanan was taking this opportunity to blast off a few noisemakers just for the heck of it. Hey, I thought, that's fine; it's the Fourth of July.

Well, by the time it was the Fifth of July, I was ready for it to stop. Amazingly, the kids had passed out into glorious slumbers by then. But no, on and on. The last blast I heard was at 5 am. I have concluded that Montanans have taken a very rational approach to their fireworks, actually, reserving the right to use them only in the dark. Since it doesn't get dark around here until almost 11 pm, and begins to light after 5 am, this makes a certain amount of sense.

And so passed the Fourth, and began the Fifth, in Montana.