Brian MacKinnon Brown, the north-end produce guy, was severely injured in a fireworks-related accident last week. He and his family need a little extra help right now.

First, fireworks

Summer struck with a vengeance on this past boom-boom weekend. Not only was the heat exceptional, the tourists bringing military style rockets and explosives heated up the tempers of many of us locals. Why we must be required to continue to put up with strangers arriving to desecrate our beach is way beyond me. As many of us have said, our motto should be — We whore our beach for bucks.

The people selling fireworks on the Peninsula should 1) be required to tithe 50% of their sales to the clean up and 2) spend one hour per every $100 of sales on the beach picking up the nasty remnants. One of us locals could be assigned to each person on the fireworks vendor teams to make sure they “serve their time.” Maybe that would convince them to take their wares elsewhere. Also, I would assign local business owners into the same beach cleanup regime, especially the ones unwilling to say no to fireworks. If you benefit from continuing this insanity, you should be the ones responsible for cleaning up the mess. But how much better it would be to simply be done with this problem!

If you have fireworks horror stories about your sleepless nights, your cowering animals, wild animals, clean up, noise, or any other general mayhem, please send your documentation to betterbeachesandbyways@gmail.com. Much obliged.

Our amazing Timberland Library

Now let me rave a little about our amazing library system. I’ve always been a book lover since hearing my mom read my sis and I “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic” and other enthralling tales. So I can never say enough about having a local library, and especially our Timberland chain which is so forward thinking. During this last weekend of high temps, it even served as a cooling center. With unlimited entry access, a monthly copying and printing budget for everyone, Internet, borrowing from other libraries, meeting rooms, and so many other features — not withstanding that you can also read books, magazines and newspapers there — OMG, why doesn’t everyone have a Timberland Library card?

I use my card is so many ways, and here’s another one: the online library application called Libby allows anyone with any library card to read or listen to books and borrow magazines. I’ve been using my Timberland/Libby combo to listen to books lately and I want to mention a couple outstanding recent reads.

Tragedies for tragic times

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have said they aren’t “stuck” on the International Space Station (ISS). No, they’re just waiting for Boeing to do a few more analytic tests on the CST-100 Starliner before they jump aboard and head home. OK, whatever you say. I’d want to wait too until all the booster rockets were A-OK!

As Terry Virts, retired Air Force colonel and NASA astronaut, put it, “This is the one human astronaut test flight. And then after this, it’s going to be operational. So they need to make sure they’re certified. And they had a problem while they were docking. Some of the small rocket motors that control the spacecraft didn’t work. And some of the helium, which is a gas that we use to make the propulsion that — it pressurizes the propellant. There were some small helium leaks.”

Sounds bad to me, but what do I know? What I do know is that space is dangerous and fascinating; and if you, like me, love that kind of adventure, you’ll love this, “Challenger, A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on The Edge of Space,” by Adam Higginbotham. By now, we all know about the O-rings; but Adam digs into the details — from inside views of the families, the engineers who wanted to stop the flight, and the science — in totally captivating ways. You’ll feel like you’re there watching on TV, as many of us were, as the inevitable disaster nears. It’s spectacular and terrifying.

Another book which had me on the edge of my seat — again, even though we know the end of the story, is Hampton Sides, “In the Kingdom of Ice, The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeanette.” Hampton is a historian, journalist, and author who captures the whole of the tale — from its faulty beginnings based on the wacky notion of German August Peterman that once a ship broke through the ice, a temperate climate and “open polar sea” would be found circling the north pole. Navy lieutenant George Washington DeLong and his crew of 33 set off well-supplied with everything but the correct information. Only a few survived to tell the tale

Finally in my series of tragedies for tragic times, also consider “Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania,” by talented and sometime Seattle resident, Erik Larson. As in these other true-life tales, the story is not new, and most of the facts are known, but not all! — the beauty of each and every one of these stories is how the author unwinds the drama, the craft of the writing, and the engaging way we are brought into the lives of these real men and women on their paths of destiny.

Laughter and ribaldry

I have to admit, I didn’t realize I was on a true-life tragedy binge until I sat down to capture some of the recent books I’ve enjoyed. But now that I see it all writ out — it makes sense. These times are strange, desultory, heart-breaking, and nerve-wracking. I can only hope we have some smart and talented authors who will be able to explain to future people what it was like to be living through these tragic times.

But let me end with one note of fun and frivolity: “Shakespeare, The Man Who Pays the Rent,” is a new rollicking book by Judi Dench with help from Brendan O’Hea. Definitely get the audio version so you can revel in Judi’s accent and her spontaneous laughter as these two Shakespearian actors reminisce their way through some of the Bard’s major plays and their behind-the-scenes antics. I’m not just saying I loved it because I love literature: Judi Dench is a treasure — whether she’s in “As You Like It” or playing M in her eight 007 movies ending with “Spectre”: she’s bawdy, down to earth, funny and refreshingly human in all the best ways.

Lastly, fireworks

Dear friends, Brian MacKinnon Brown, our Yakima produce guy, who travels over the mountains every week to bring us fresh everything, managed to blast off the fingers of his left hand last week; and he has pins in his right hand. So he won’t be working for awhile.

If you’d like to help the family, please send checks to Traci Brown, PO Box 743, Ilwaco, WA, 98624. Neither Brian nor Traci asked me to do this. I’m including this note because Brian’s a great guy and might need a little extra help right now. (See my story about Brian from Aug. 10, 2020: https://tinyurl.com/j7appepd).