Posted by Jim at July 3rd, 2005

Here’s a memory from my not particularly wild or crazy college years:

During my first (second?) summer of working on Hope College’s grounds crew, someone decided to host a fourth of July party. This party was not technically on the fourth of July, but I think that it was on the weekend before. That was close enough.

So anyway, on some weekend night that was close to the fourth, the group of us gathered at a house near campus and sat down to watch a couple films and drink a moderate amount of beer.

The films (in case anyone cares) were Caddyshack and Strange Brew. It seemed that half the times I went to someone’s house to watch a movie that summer they were showing “Strange Brew”–a movie that is funny, but not 3 times in a summer worth of funny. On the bright side, I hadn’t seen “Caddyshack” before.

Sometime around midnight, we walked out into the backyard and one of the guys unveiled the rocket. It was four feet high and made of cardboard. It was powered by bottle rockets. I don’t know how many there were, but probably at least 50. They filled the end where you’d expect them to be, but he’d also placed several additional clusters of bottle rockets alongside the body.

After that, he lit the fuses and it shot up, disappearing into the night.

In memory, what impresses me most about that rocket is that we didn’t set it off in a field. We were close to the middle of Holland, Michigan, an area where houses crowd the edges of their lots and backyards are small. A place not unlike the section of Grand Rapids I live in now.

Sometimes I wonder where that rocket landed.