MISQUAH — The Independence Day committee met Thursday at the Legion and finalized plans for the Fourth of July celebration, which will, the committee is pleased to report, closely resemble the celebration held last year, and the year before, and for as long as anyone can reliably remember — a continuity the committee regards not as a failure of imagination but as the entire point.

The parade steps off at 9 a.m. down Main Street, the route unchanged on the unimprovable grounds that Main Street is, in the relevant stretch, the only street. Lineup forms at 8:30 by the elevator. Entries remain welcome — “floats, tractors, the fire truck, the horses if Sundberg’s feeling it, and the one unicycle, as always,” committee chair Sandy Bergstrom said, referring to a fixture of the parade whose rider and provenance the committee has stopped questioning.

The land parade has made that trip every Fourth since 1946, when a dozen returning servicemen rode a hay wagon from the elevator to the church and the town decided, on the spot, that it had a tradition. It has since survived two repavings, the ’88 drought, and the year the horses got loose during the invocation, which the committee still declines to discuss on the record. “Eighty years, one street, no surprises,” Bergstrom said. “You can’t buy that. You can only keep it.”

The day continues with the Lions’ chicken feed at noon in the park, kids’ races at the school at two, the Mud Lake Association’s pie table “for as long as the pie lasts, which is never as long as you’d hope,” and fireworks over Big Pelican at dusk, fired from the Loon Ridge point by fire chief Gary Sundberg and his brother-in-law — the same two men who have done it since 2003, decline to train a replacement, and consider the matter settled. The fireworks themselves are funded, as ever, by donations and the winter meat raffle, the town’s sky paid for, in a real sense, months in advance and in sausage.

The fireworks run about eighteen minutes and cost, in a good year, a little over four thousand dollars — money raised, as it has been for years, by the Northern Tap’s winter meat raffle, which is why longtime spectators speak of the finale in units of pork. “People ask if we could do twenty-five minutes,” Sundberg said. “Sure. Sell more raffle tickets in January and stand back.” The snow fence goes up on the point the morning of the third, and Sundberg asks, annually and without much hope, that nobody bring “supplementary” fireworks of their own.

New to the program this year: the boat parade goes official. The waterborne procession that has trailed the holiday for decades as a spontaneous, unjudged conga line will run for the first time as a sanctioned event — lineup at 11:30 at the Loon Lake public landing, a slow no-wake lap of Big Pelican at noon, Alderman Lloyd Bunde presiding as grand marshal on the strength of his acknowledged authority over the proper boat wave. Registration is free at Tim’s; decoration is encouraged; judging, Bergstrom confirmed, “will not occur, because judging leads to feelings.”

The committee reminds residents that the geese have not been consulted about the fireworks and are expected to have opinions, loudly, from the seventh fairway. Donations toward the fireworks fund may be left at the bank, at Tim’s, or “with anybody on the committee you happen to see, which will be all of us, everywhere, for the next two weeks.” The full schedule will be posted at the Co-op, the Daybreak, and the church, in case, Bergstrom noted, “you forget the parade is on Main Street, which you won’t, but we like to be thorough.”