I tell reporters to look for every side of a story and be respectful to everyone. This is very much the case with the peninsula’s raging fireworks controversy.

Delayed by a day because July 4 falls on a Tuesday when we normally print the Chinook Observer, on Thursday, July 6, we’ll have a complete roundup of how the holiday went, for better or worse.

As Pacific County commissioners wrestled late last week with whether to impose an emergency ban on consumer fireworks, I thought of:

• Wildfire danger. Most people don’t realize that our dense beach-pine forest and dune grass are relatively recent arrivals. There is a significant risk that someday with the wrong wind, a fire could sweep north or south and cause awful destruction. And this has been an extremely dry spring and early summer.

• Danger to sensitive humans, wildlife and pets. Noise trauma is no joke.

• Pollution. Toxic smoke and litter on our normally pristine beaches makes me angry.

• Tradition and expectations. A sudden ban would have left vendors stuck with inventory, while many people had already bought fireworks anticipating they could use them.

• Enforcement. Long Beach Police, the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office and Washington Fish and Wildlife law officers would have little chance of keeping control after a sudden unexpected ban. And without a ban or enforcement on the beach by Washington State Parks, a ban would be a sham.

• And, darn it, I’m still a boy at heart. Years ago, I wrote about fireworks:

Looking back to boyhood in the 1960s, the month leading up to the 4th of July ranked higher than Christmas; Christmas was a one-shot deal, whereas my friends and I usually wheedled fireworks from our parents for weeks before the actual holiday.

We all lived on or near an Indian reservation, so perhaps I have a skewed idea of just what was available back then, but the fireworks stands I remember were half-block-long Aladdin’s Cave sorts of affairs, stacked to the rafters with thousands of tissue-wrapped treasures from Taiwan. Dragons, tigers, wizards and cobras — I saw them all for the first time on fireworks packages.

There were stacks upon stacks of firecrackers of different brands and lengths, and bundles of bottle rockets ranging from dull blobs on bamboo slivers that only zipped up into the air, to more interesting ones that flew and exploded, to others the size of broom handles that we rarely bought because they cost an astronomical 30 cents apiece.

There were smoke bombs and Roman candles and flying saucers and booby traps that popped when your mom broke the string stretched across the doorway. There were “snakes,” little gray pellets that when ignited squirmed across the sidewalk releasing sulfur fumes and leaving stains finally erased only by winter snows.

Our fireworks were rarely a nighttime activity; we bought them for a bang, not pretty colors. My big brother Greg was a set-em-all-off-at-once kind of guy who’d hang a 500-cracker string from a tree branch, light it and run. I was more of a demolition engineer, poking individual firecrackers into ant hills to see how the ants reacted when they went off. (Paying my karmic dues, as an adult I can’t even bring myself to squish a sugar ant crawling across the kitchen counter.)

We were amazingly stupid. By all rights, an entire generation of men ought to be wearing eye patches and missing parts of our thumbs and index fingers.

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