Here comes the boom: Tommy Bolack prepares his arsenal for Farmington fireworks show

FARMINGTON — The shell was only 3 inches in diameter, about twice the size of a chicken egg, making it the smallest projectile in Tommy Bolack’s arsenal of Fourth of July fireworks.

Even so, when it detonated — a full two minutes after he and a visitor to his B-Square Ranch had retreated to a safe position about 50 yards away — the noise was sharp and deafening, the kind you could feel pass through your entire body. It was followed a moment later by a lower-pitch concussion as the original blast reverberated off the walls of the nearby Shannon Cliffs and spread outward.

Bolack’s face split into a wide grin. As a self-professed “thump junkie,” few things on this earth give him as much satisfaction as seeing one of the shells he has assembled in preparation for his annual holiday fireworks show do what it is designed to do — even in the bright light of a near-midday sun as a demonstration of the potency of his projectiles.

“It takes a couple of days to come down off the high when it’s over,” Bolack said of the aftermath of the annual show. “You spend so much time fretting and anticipating and watching every cloud that comes up. But when you light those fuses, it’s out of your hands.”

Bolack’s fireworks display – which he has staged each year since the 1980s — is an enterprise that takes weeks, even months of planning and work. He presents it as a gift to the community, costing him between $14,000 and $16,000 in materials, though he said that figure would be much higher if he purchased all the shells from manufacturers instead of assembling most of them himself from raw materials.

In fact, it’s likely all that prep work that contributes to his sense of satisfaction. Bolack situates himself in an uncooled, unventilated shack where he stores those materials, spending hours and hours assembling 3-inch, 6-inch and 8-inch shells that will be used in the show. He orders the larger 10-inch and 12-inch shells from fireworks manufacturers out of necessity, explaining that he simply doesn’t have time to assemble shells that large.

Putting the smaller shells together allows him to indulge his sense of creativity, he said. In addition to choosing which size he wants to use, Bolack can select from a variety of colors (red, green, blue, yellow, pink and others), and visual and audio effects (whistlers, stars, tiger tails, even chrysanthemums). The name for each of those effects essentially describes what it looks or sounds like.

But the process of assembling the shells is no game.

“Normally, when I am doing fireworks, I am by myself,” he said. “I don’t want any distractions.”

Many of the elements Bolack uses in his projectiles are extremely dangerous, he said, noting he had to obtain a special license to be able to purchase them, and handling them is not something that should be done in a haphazard manner. In fact, he said, one of his shells is much more dangerous than a stick of dynamite, which is largely inert unless it has a fuse attached to it.

“You can throw a stick of dynamite into a fire, and it’ll lie there and slowly burn,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to try that with one of these.”

Bolack said he is a self-taught pyrotechnics expert, recalling that in the 1970s, he used 4,000 pounds of dynamite to blast open a new channel on the San Juan River as it passes through the ranch, an experience that left him with a new appreciation for the power of explosives. Even after retreating to a position a quarter mile away, he said, “You could feel the ground shake,” leading him to wonder how solid the earth beneath his feet really was.

Bolack said his father, the late New Mexico Gov. Tom Bolack, also enjoyed fireworks, so when the latter died in 1998, his son decided to bid him adieu by loading his ashes into a couple of large shells and launching them into the sky above his beloved B-Square Ranch.

“I think he would have liked that,” Bolack said, noting the sendoff was written about in Time magazine. “It seemed like a nice way to spread his ashes on the ranch.”

Bolack conducts his show from the same outcropping each year atop the Shannon Cliffs, a full 350 feet above the river, where he has stationed a line of mortar tubes built by his ranch staff from metal pipe. Thousands of spectators gather not just along nearby U.S. Highway 64 to watch the 30- to 35-minute show, but several miles away. Bolack said people as far away as Kirtland and Aztec have told him the fireworks are visible from there.

One thing they won’t see is a rapid-fire, sky-filling conclusion to the show. Bolack said he is a purist when it comes to his shows, meaning he times the fireworks to go off at a deliberate, steady pace, and he considers splashy finishes to be hotdogging.

“If there’s a grand finale in one of my shows, it means something didn’t work,” he said.

This year’s show is planned for dusk on Tuesday, July 4.

Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or measterling@daily-times.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription: http://bit.ly/2I6TU0e.

This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: Tommy Bolack spends months preparing for Farmington fireworks show