PERPETUAL COUNTDOWN.

The true tale of a whole town obsessed with one day.

The dear people of Bristol, Rhode Island are collectively fanatical about the Fourth of July. It’s their claim to fame, their yearly flash of excitement, of bedlam, of public drunkenness, and of community events organized with careful Yankee efficiency. It’s the Bristol way to celebrate it with gusto, even furor, and countless miles of red, white and blue fabric.

Bristol is a small, largely white town on a beautiful bay. It’s got a lot of gorgeous old houses, and the coastline nudges the town gently, producing an air of sleepy wealth. In many ways, it’s a quintessential coastal New England town: a quaint downtown area with shops and town buildings is ringed by well-manicured suburban homes with basketball hoops and SUVs in driveways. But Bristol’s July 4th celebration is its moment of uniqueness, a short but hard-partying break from its usual reticence.

The entire year is spent counting down to The Fourth, as it’s called by residents. Bristol is the home of the oldest and largest Independence Day parade in America, and up around it has sprung a yearly ritual that traps every Bristolian, from infancy to old age, in its drunken grasp. Organizing each year’s celebration begins practically on the fifth of July of the previous year. In March, the local paper begins publishing a countdown of days until The Fourth. The median lines on the road along the parade route are painted red, white, and blue. Property along the parade route is coveted, and people who own houses there are considered worth befriending. People and events in Bristol are evaluated according to their proximity to The Fourth, as in “I haven’t seen Frank for three years; remember, he came down for The Fourth in ‘05 with Joanie and Todd?” Leading up to the big day every year, residents unfurl their American flags, hang up the bunting, dust off lawn chairs, water their lawns, buy outrageous amounts of beer and food, and gather a palpably urgent excitement. Young people living elsewhere fly homeward.

The crush arrives in full America-lovin’ force on July 3. The bars fill up, people drink on sidewalks and yell at passers-by, and dudes mount huge American flags on the backs of their pickup trucks. The party goes on all night, with people staying up long enough to stake out spots for laying out their parade-watching blankets (an action allowed, by town law, only after 5 AM) and crash for a few hours, rising to eat pancakes and rush outside to await the first sign of the parade.

The famous parade itself lasts about four hours—the town must uphold its reputation for largesse, resulting in longer parades year by year—and includes such highlights as slick sportscars, old fire engines, the governor, teen beauty queens, and legions and legions of high school bands, none of whom seem ever to play. Yet it’s safe to say just about everybody in Bristol watches the parade, if for no other reason than the fact that one can’t get out of town as of 7 o’clock the night before.

After the parade, sweaty men in flag t-shirts, along with their tanned, short-shorted ladyfriends, make their way to the hundreds of concurrent barbecues around town, where party-prolonging is the order of the day. Loving America is all well and good, but the focus of the modern Bristol Fourth of July is placed more on food (preferably of the ribs/hot dogs strain), beer (light—gotta keep moving), back-slappin’ (“Ay, buddy, how ‘ah ya?”), sex-seeking (“Lotta good-lookin’ ladies around today”), and a general feel-good, don’t-stress-yourself-out kind of vibe. Then again, that’s our lovable America for you these days. Things change pretty slowly in Bristol—slowly enough that even as our country and our planet hurtle toward vague, unknowable disasters, we can hang out in eighties excess—and it feels like the right thing to do.