Sky High: Among the Pyros at One of the Biggest Fireworks Competitions in the World

The 2012 L’International des Feux. Montreal, Canada.

Team Canada sets up mortars in preparation for the big show.

On a warm July night in 2012, I watched the launching of a fireworks display I’d helped to build, and which our team of nine had spent a week installing as a competitive entry in L’International des Feux in Montreal, the most prestigious fireworks competition in the world. Conditions were nearly perfect: The sliver of moon had long since set and high clouds blocked the stars. At showtime, the Ferris wheel at La Ronde amusement park, gaily lit, snuffed itself out one spoke at a time in a countdown for the spectators. When the wheel extinguished entirely, the scene became very dark along the water.

First a series of red flares lit up in succession along the waterfront, then the first round of white candles fanned out into the middle sky, and soon large shells with dense centers like chrysanthemums filled the air above, all of it precisely choreographed to an unusual post-pop soundtrack and not the usual military marches and grand symphonies.

Five of us from Team Canada stood in the control booth, with the other four sitting in the stands a dozen rows below us. We had come together less than a week before: a bodybuilder and fireworks tech-whiz named Zach; Carter, a helicopter pilot from Saskatchewan; a couple of theatrical and production professionals, Daniel and Julie; Sean, so enamored of the pyrotechnic life that he owned a pyro-themed bar back in the Canadian Niagara Falls; Luis, a journeyman pyro from Valencia, Spain, who’d helped design the show; and our two bosses from Sirius Pyrotechnics, Kelly and Patrick. Kelly, a partner in the company, was the field general on the site, keeping tabs on everything. He had spiky hair and the intelligent, slightly menacing affect of a rogue lemur and had once made money organizing raves in Winnipeg. Patrick was the big boss, a bearish, prematurely gray man in his late forties who had spent much of the week holed up in our trailer putting the finishing touches on the design and fielding interview requests, like some mad, sequestered genius. I was a recent graduate of the Fantastic Fireworks school in Pepperstock, England, and a former Marine artillery officer, credentials that made me something of a curiosity. I did the easy stuff.

Just as the display began, Luis stood in the left front corner of the booth and slid open one of the large windows. Though we were a hundred meters away, we could hear the whip-crack of the salutes and feel the shells thumping in our chests. As the fireworks went off, Luis pointed his thick arms into the air and jabbed his fingers at the sky. He knew what was coming. He’d seen it simulated in the ShowSim design software, fiddled with syncing the time code dozens of times during the six months it took to design the display, and now was surrounded by all the accoutrements of twenty-first-century command and control: the FireOne controllers, the networked computers, the nine-pin serial cables. His arms pumped like they were connected to the explosions, punching the sky to make falling, twinkling willows appear out of the dark. He appeared to be conducting the fireworks, but in a very particular way: not into the sky, but out of the sky, ex nihilo, out of a blackness more pure now that our pupils had constricted. Out of nothing he pulled great blossoming orange shells, crossing red candles, and slow-rising girandolas arcing into the sky like parts of the Northern Lights striking out on their own, freestyle, before reaching their final states and winking out forever.

We had spent five days unloading five tons of pyrotechnic product from the truck trailer, putting...