I can now chalk up Watchung as a town I’ve almost been arrested in. I’m really surpised we got nailed, we had everything going for us. Well… not really. At first, we couldn’t find the Watchung reservation. We kept getting lost, and disoriented. Not too mention I decided, for some silly reason, to bring my brother with us.
Once we finally we got to Watchung, it was really awesome. We pulled up to a clearing in the forest where all you could see was the trees and hundreds of fireflys in the trees and bushes around. It was an AWESOME sight. I can’t think of a better way to compliment it than fireworks.
So, we break out a home made mortar, and decide to start the night’s festivities with a HUGE bottle rocket. They are called ‘pounders’ because they weigh one pound. So we’re all standing there, lighting this thing. I start running away. Dan finally gets it lit, and starts to run away. At this point, I was ready to see it fly away into the night sky. No such luck: the thing exploded on the ground REALLY fast, and REALLY loud. Scared the shit out of me. I was close enough to be like … shit.
After that we got everything going smoothly. Well not really….. We set off a whole bunch of fireworks that were really awesome. Then, someone was like, let’s set off this roman missle command candle thing. So, they light it and it starts shooting stuff. Very cool. Then it fell over…and started shooting it’s missle command things at us. As I was running away from this stupid thing, I hit Josh’s car mirror and sheered it right off the car. Someone was pushing me though.
We set off a whole bunch more fireworks. This time with more concern about where they are pointing and whatnot. Finally, we used all of the flying fireworks, and moved to a parking lot to set off the ones that said “Light on smooth flat surface”
This was probably some of the best fireworks of the night. Their were some unexpected winners in this category. It was quite the show. However, as we were pulling into the parking lot, I was getting the worst deja-vous or something. I had this dream a while back of Jon, Andy, Harry, and Myself doing fireworks. As we were driving into this parking lot, It looked JUST like the dream. So I was unable to shutup about how I felt like I’d been here before, and it ended up in cops. Everyone just kind of told me to shutup.
WELL GUESS WHAT?! Cops. Even though we had the scanner set for the watchung police, and even though we had been careful to not piss off anyone all night, this COUNTY COP was doing a REGULAR PATROL through the park. Deja vous! He was quite the character, but nothing like the Madison cops. So he took all our ID’s and whatnot. Generally he wasn’t too mean to us, and even a little bit funny. (Cops are people too.) When he rolled up we weren’t even doing any fireworks, we were inbetween blasts. So we were totally honest with him and he took our fireworks and gave us a ticket. (This is what you get for not running away.) So everyone is going to throw in 8 dollars or whatever it eventually comes out to be to cover the ticket. This cop was not pleased though. Are cops allowed to be upset over this? He was clearly upset we ruined his “quiet night”.
The best quote of the night:
Josh: “We even brought a fire extinguisher”
Cop: “Have you ever SEEN a forest fire?”
-Joshua Ziering