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Bone-crunching. Gut-punching Tooth-rattling. Ear-splitting. Nerve-shattering. The ultrasonic booms break the night’s calm just as we retire to bed. Our frightened cats scuttle and scramble for impossible cover as we wearily rise and stumble back to awareness, to vigilance. We’ll need our wits about us for a spell, in case the wildfires come for us tonight. Setting off fireworks from a brush-choked hill in a redwood forest on a hot July evening? It’s the height of folly, of madness, of supreme selfishness. These thrill seekers could burn the whole town down. We live in a fuel zone, a brittle, brown, dry state. There are signs posted, emails petitions circulated, calls to the Sheriff made. And yet they persist. So the explosions mean that we get to stare wild-eyed at the dark ridge set against the vast indigo sky for a tense hour or two, ready to load our cars with our most prized possessions and vital documents, and traverse a hair-pinned, pitch black mountain road through walls of flame, to supposed safety. There’s nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the show, all the while contemplating pitchforks and…torches.