Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Playing With Fire
- Rich Washburn
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
Today America turns two hundred and fifty, and I've got a confession: I love this holiday more than almost any other, and it has almost nothing to do with fireworks and everything to do with fireworks. Let me explain.
I've been building professional-grade firework shows since I was about ten years old, and I'm fifty-one now, so do the math — that's four decades of taking a legal-adjacent hobby entirely too seriously. It started with wooden shipping pallets, five or six of them, everything we could buy or scavenge glued down and wired with fuses cut to different burn speeds — some fast, some slow, a couple in between — so the whole board would go off like it had a script instead of a fuse. Then it got electronic ignition.
Then it got a name in the neighborhood. Then it got completely out of hand. By the time it peaked, the whole neighborhood was in on it. Neighbors would start dropping checks off at my door weeks, sometimes months, before the Fourth. Kids would bring us their old toys and ask us to blow them up. We built more little rigged pirate boats than I can count — a nine-volt battery and a cheap electric motor so it would motor in a straight line across the water, loaded with as much ordnance as we could strap on, sequentially ignited off a candle fuse from the shore. It was Mythbusters for people who never grew out of the fifth grade, and it remains some of the most fun I've ever had as an adult.
One year we somehow ended up behind a refrigerated liquid truck — I had never seen one of those trucks before that day, and I've never seen one since — carrying about twenty-five hundred pounds of fireworks on an open trailer. The head of the local fire department showed up to make sure we were being safe, took one look at the whole operation, and got legitimately furious. Not because it was dangerous. Because we'd pre-wired the entire rig ahead of time so all we had to do out in the field was lay it out and light it, instead of wiring two dozen mortar racks by hand in the Florida July heat like everybody else. I don't feel bad about it. Standing in a field in South Florida in July doing delicate wiring work is a great way to become a puddle.
Then there's the bourbon. I did not intend to smoke a bourbon that night. I couldn't get something lit, so I set my drink down on a nearby surface, got the fuse going, walked away, and about ten seconds later went "oh, crap" and went back for it. It had picked up the smoke and sulfur from whatever I'd just ignited, and it did not taste like a nice oak-smoked cocktail. It tasted like a bourbon poured directly out of hell by a bartender named Satan.
The road trips were their own kind of insane. Every year, a buddy of mine and I would load up and drive the genuinely absurd three-thousand-mile round trip from South Florida to a fireworks wholesaler in rural Indiana for what they call Catalog Day — which is exactly what it sounds like. Hundreds of people show up from all over the country. It's part barbecue, part demolition derby energy, and at night they hand you a catalog listing every shell they're about to light, announce the name over a PA right before they fire it so you can watch the effect and match it to the name in your hand, then check off exactly what you want. You buy it right there, load a U-Haul trailer, and drive it home.
One year that trip started about as rough as it could. Half an hour in, pouring rain, still dark out, we hydroplaned at seventy miles an hour and hit the wall. The GoPro wasn't even rolling, so I never got the crash on video — just my breakfast burrito, crushed flat in my own hand, which in hindsight might have been the better shot anyway. We drove the truck back down home, swapped it out at the dealership for a loaner on the spot, and got right back on the road. That's just what the hobby demands of you sometimes, and we did it anyway — road trip photography through the back roads of America, gas station diners, roadside history nobody stops for, small towns that still feel like 1975, is honestly where I first got serious about photography in the first place.
Some dude showed up and covered the FOP Show for his Youtube channel
That's the completely unhinged, deeply personal side of my patriotism. But I don't just love this country from the outside looking in, or from behind a camera lens either.
I've spent the last several years operating at a lot of different altitudes inside this country's political life, and my photography business is the thing that put me there. I've stood in rooms with a former president, cabinet secretaries, sitting members of Congress, and some of the loudest voices in modern political media — not because I set out to be a political photographer, but because I kept showing up with a camera to things that felt like they mattered, and one thing kept leading to the next. I've photographed boat parades that turned entire waterways into a wall of flags, and truck rallies that shook the ground before they ever made the news. There's a gallery of photos below that'll make it a lot more obvious than I'm willing to spell out here — I'd rather let the pictures do that talking than the paragraph.
The thread that's stuck with me the most, though, runs through an organization called the 917 Society. Their entire mission is putting a pocket copy of the Constitution into the hands of every eighth grader in America — reading the real document, not somebody's summary of it. I've photographed their fundraiser in Nashville, where the keynote speaker stood up in front of a packed room and said freedom isn't rooted in convenience or consensus, it's rooted in the idea that a person is created by God and the government doesn't own them — and the room went dead quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when something true actually lands. I've watched middle schoolers recite the Preamble from memory on that same stage. This past April, I flew to New York with a business partner of mine — an actual direct descendant of George Washington — to retrace, on the exact date, two hundred and thirty-seven years after the fact, the walk Washington made from his inauguration at Federal Hall to St. Paul's Chapel, where he knelt and dedicated the new nation to God. We stood in a room with an original Aitken Bible, the first Bible ever printed in America, authorized by Congress in 1782 for soldiers in the field. You don't walk out of a room like that unchanged.
I've also sat in a dining room with three World War Two veterans at one table, including a man a hundred and four years old who served as a Gunner's Mate aboard the USS Yorktown and watched Japan surrender from the deck of a warship. Sitting across from someone who lived history instead of reading about it puts the phrase "freedom isn't free" in a context no textbook ever will.
All of that — the fireworks, the politics, the Constitution, the veterans — is why last October, a late-night phone call with a friend of mine, three fingers into a bottle of bourbon, talking politics and old D.C. stories, turned into something we now call the Orpheus Project. We're building a permanent, three-layer time capsule of Washington, D.C. at the exact moment America turns two hundred and fifty: a museum-grade photo book and commemorative calendar, a high-resolution XR digital archive of historic sites scanned down to the cracks in the sidewalk, and a real-time media chronicle that runs while we build it, then goes dark forever the second it's done — sealed like amber, so whoever opens it in 2076 or 2176 sees exactly what we saw. We named it after the myth of Orpheus, whose music could stop time. We don't have a lyre. We've got a Leica, some LiDAR, and the same instinct — pause the moment, frame it, save it, before the next one takes its place.
I'm not doing a show tonight. I'm working, which after four decades of doing this every single year without fail, feels almost as strange to type as it does to sit with. But maybe that's fitting for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth one. Because if I'm honest, the actual ritual was never really about the shells going off in the sky. It was about handing a lit fuse to a kid standing next to you, telling them which one to touch first, watching what they do with it, then doing it again the next year. Two hundred and fifty years in, I don't think the country's real job has changed all that much from that. Somebody hands you something that's already burning — a Constitution, a walk Washington once took, a war a hundred-and-four-year-old man survived, a tool with more raw thinking power sitting in your pocket than any generation before us ever had — and the only job that actually matters is not letting it go out on your watch, and handing it to the next person with the fuse already lit.
Happy two-hundred-and-fiftieth, America. I hope your bourbon doesn't get smoked tonight, and if it does, I hope you laugh about it anyway.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital and CIO of Data Power Supply.
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