Small Town - Big Party
Fireworks at the Vita, MB Canada Day Celebration
Small towns incubate creativity. This is one of my not-so-low-stakes hot-takes that I hold.
Factor number one—its lack of proximity to modern entertainment breeds a necessity to create your own amusement. The small town I grew up in had one general store/gas station, a post office, and a small hardware store. There was a 2-room elementary school and three churches. Eliminating boredom meant exploring the miles of gravel road and pasture trails that surrounded the community on my bike in summer. If you wanted to have fun, you would get the other kids together and build a ramp to jump our bikes, play hide and seek in the corn fields, dig elaborate snow forts in the ditches and when the spring runoff filled the ditches we would create boats out of milk cartons and then try sinking them with rocks thrown from the edge of the impromptu river.
A couple times a year the community would gather together on the grounds of the school to play baseball, eat amazing potluck food, and run three-legged, and gunny sack races. These community parties were always a big deal and everyone from miles around would rearrange their calendars in order to throw this party. Canada Day was always one of those days that would be a big deal. No doubt people would pool their money together and buy whatever fireworks Campbell’s General Store had brought in. A few dad’s would get together and fire them off.
Fast forward to this past year. With the weather threatening the small town of Vita, Manitoba decided to have their fireworks display a day early. It proved to be a smart move as the other surrounding municipalities were forced to postpone their fireworks or cancel them altogether. Now Vita puts on quite the show and they take pride in the spectacle of the event. This is no cobbled together show based on donated fireworks. The community takes pride that it is able to welcome hundreds of people for this annual event.
Trudy and I got there early to scope out the lay of the land and pick our spot. Because of the soggy ground we chose a firm part of the high school’s running track. I set up my gear and took a couple of test shots to see if I had the focused dialled in. It is good to do that while there is still light and then make sure that you turn off the auto focus setting. Then it was waiting for the show to start.
Once it started I adjusted the shutter speed to make sure that I was allowing the fireworks to paint its colours against the back of the sensor. The photo in this year’s calendar reminds me of a flower opening up to reveal its inner beauty.
It is also a metaphor for the many small town artists who were given the space to explore their creativity and entertain themselves. The irony is that for many creatives they feel like they have to leave that small community eventually because their engagement in the creative process also exposes them to different ways of seeing the world and moving them further away where they find some support for their new perspectives.
Yet these small towns remain the incubators for creativity.
