Backyard Giants Read online

  Though the Wallaces had some monsters in their patch, Ron was trying to be realistic. Their pumpkins were big, but others were bigger. From the most recent pictures he'd seen, he thought Ed Hemphill's 1068 could go 1,600 pounds. It just had the look of a heavy pumpkin, and there were no sag lines at all.

  "The world record isn't going to happen for us this year," Ron said. "Our soil just isn't balanced. It's not where I wanted to be. You're not supposed to take a field of pine trees, work on it in November, and plant it six months later."

  Dick consoled him. "I told Ronnie the other night that the next best thing to us setting the world record ourselves is for somebody else to set it on the 1068."

  The Wallaces didn't have much hope that the Southern New England growers would be repeat world champions. There had been too many slow starts, too much disease. Ron figured the lousy weather alone had trimmed as much as 150 pounds off most of the club's pumpkins. The Rhode Island mafia would deliver some nice fruit, and he hoped for a solid top 10 of 1,000-plus-pounders. But they would be missing the heavyweights they had last year, when Scott Palmer brought his 1,443-pounder and they had three others over 1,300 pounds, with Joe's 1,228-pounder rounding out the top five. The Wallaces knew from conversations with Dave Stelts that the Ohio growers were heavy and deep at the top, with several growers estimating their pumpkins to be over 1,300 pounds, including some potential world-record winners.

  Those who'd had a less-than-stellar season already were busy planning for next year. Steve Connolly, who still had some nice pumpkins, but nothing that matched last year's 1,33 3-pounder, was spending his weekends hauling in fresh compost. Steve Sperry was planning to cut down some trees and rip up part of his yard to put in a new patch. Scott Palmer, who hadn't come close to his miraculous 1,443-pound winner, was thinking about expanding too.

  Starting September 23, the Wallaces would be taking pumpkins to a weigh-off every weekend for three weeks. First there was the Durham Fair in Connecticut. Ron had picked out the smallest 1068 for that event; its measurements put it at 1,040 pounds.

  Then there was Topsfield on Saturday, September 30. Ron would enter a 1068, and his dad would enter the 1370 Rose, which had turned out to be a beautiful red-orange fruit with deep, wide ribs—a pumpkin right out of the pages of a fairy tale. Tops-field was the most prestigious weigh-off in New England, and it would be the place where some dark horses could emerge—the big ones that had been kept under cover. "There's always a surprise or two at the scales," Ron said.

  The following Sunday, Ron would take their 1228 Jutras to the Connecticut club's weigh-off at Pennfield Beach, right on the ocean. Some people thought the 1228 looked like the biggest pumpkin in the Wallace patch. But Ron and his dad thought it would be light—it sounded hollow when they thumped it.

  And then, finally, there would be the club's Frerich Farm weigh-off on October 7. The day was shaping up to be the Final Four of giant pumpkins. The Ohio Valley club would weigh-off that morning, and so would Port Elgin and Altoona in Pennsylvania, as well as several other clubs across the country.

  So just three more weeks. "We're heading down the final stretch," Ron said. "Everybody just wants to get on with it."

  Buddy Conley was sweating it, and his friend Tony Vanderpool was fielding phone calls and running interference. "It's as big as a freakin' king-size bed," Vanderpool panted to one caller. "It's huge."

  The biggest pumpkin Conley had ever grown was 955 pounds. But this year he'd gotten hold of a 1068 seed, and it had outrun everything else in his pumpkin patch. "It's unlike anything I've ever had or anything I've ever seen before," Conley said.

  Conley, 5 2 years old, was a member of the Southern Ohio Giant Pumpkin Growers, friendly rivals to Dave Stelts's Ohio Valley group farther north. He'd been growing giant pumpkins since 1997, and now leased a little piece of land from his brother-in-law to grow four plants. The property was seven miles away from his house, and during the summer, Conley traveled back and forth at least three times a day to tend to his pumpkins. He spent an average of six hours a day in his patch from May to October. "It's a full-time job," he said.

  He'd noticed right away that the 1068 was special. "From day one, I've called it 'the Freak.' " It was growing so fast, he worried it would blow up. One day after a heavy rainstorm, it put on 60 pounds in a single night. "That scared the hell out of me," he said. "But then it slowed back down to about forty pounds a day."

  Conley's 1068 pumpkin was nearly six feet wide, five feet long, and three feet tall. It was a creamy salmon color, with a rough skin covered in heavy cantaloupe veining. The pumpkin was round, but lopsided, with a large hump on one side and a deep rib line on the other. "It's not pretty by any stretch of the imagina­tion," he said. Mice had been nibbling around the pumpkin lately, so Conley had surrounded it with traps. A few years ago a mouse had chewed all the way through his pumpkin and made a nest inside. "So I definitely know they will take one down and it won't take them long to do it." He'd trapped at least 30 of the small rodents in the past month.

  As word had gotten around that he had a big 1068 growing, his phone had started ringing and growers started e-mailing. The pumpkin's OTT measurements put it at a little over 1,300 pounds, but other growers kept saying, if it weighed more and if he could keep it together, then he might have a shot at a world record. It was an intoxicating thought, but one Conley was resisting. "Everybody's saying I've got this world-record potential out there, but it's not measuring world record," he said, holding on tight to his good sense.

  The last thing Conley wanted was to grow the biggest pumpkin of his life and end up disappointed. If his 1068 hit the scales at 1,300 pounds, it would be the biggest pumpkin he'd ever grown, the biggest anyone in his club had ever grown. That should be plenty to make him happy. But the thought of what might be or what might happen tormented him. "The past couple days my stomach has been killing me," he said. "My other half is telling me it's an ulcer. She said, 'You've got more white hair than you did a month ago.'

  "I go to bed and for two hours I'll toss and turn and think. Is it going to be okay in the morning? Which weigh-off do I take it to? Do I go to the Southern Ohio Growers weigh-off? Or do I let it grow another ten days and take it to Circleville? That's a long time to have to hold one together."

  Conley had learned his lesson. He told his friend Vanderpool, "Next year, if it looks like I'm going to have a big nice one, I'm not going to tell anyone. It's just too stressful."

  Another Ohio grower, Tim Parks, was flying under the radar with an even bigger giant. Parks realized what he had in early August, when his pumpkin gained 226 pounds in five days. By late September, it measured an estimated 1,568 pounds. But almost no one knew about it. "There's probably only one, two, maybe four growers who truly know how big my pumpkin is," Parks said. And he wanted to keep it that way until the weigh-off. "You've got this pumpkin growing and you want to go out and scream it to the world," he said. "But it's just easier. You don't have to deal with all the questions and gossip."

  About the middle of September, Ed Hemphill's 1068 pumpkin stopped growing. That worried him a little bit, but other growers had reassured him. Maybe it was just the cool weather. Maybe it had just grown all it was going to grow. Nevertheless, Hemphill started checking extra carefully each morning for signs of trouble. He'd slide the blankets off and stand back and give his pumpkin a quick once-over. Then he'd step closer to examine every inch for cracks and soft spots. He'd run his hands gently over the shell, fingers spread, feeling the bumpy-smooth coolness of the pumpkin skin beneath his palms. And then one day his fingers paused. Something was different. He laid both hands on the spot. It was warm, as if a lightbulb were burning underneath, heating it up. Warm, like horse manure steaming in the winter air. Warm, like a pumpkin going bad from the inside out.

  Hemphill knew with the certainty of sore experience that it was over. "I said, 'Yup. It's rotting.' "

  He went back inside his house and slumped in his favorite chair. He stared at t
he wall for half an hour, slowly, painfully, letting go of all his dreams and hopes. He was in shock. "I was looking for trouble, but I wasn't ready for trouble," he realized. "I knew it could happen, but I didn't think it would. Especially since it was the first time I ever grew a big one."

  Hemphill roused himself from his sulk and went to fetch his tractor with the front-end loader. The pumpkin still looked perfect, so he figured the problem was where he couldn't see it—on the bottom. He maneuvered the edge of the scoop under the pumpkin and lifted it slightly. There it was. A crack in the bottom of the fruit ran right along the edge of that Styrofoam square he'd placed under all his baby pumpkins months before. The Styrofoam had done it again. The 1068 had sagged over the edge of the plastic, creating a pressure point along the bottom where he couldn't see it. For all their girth and weight, giant pumpkins are really fragile. No matter what the cause, Hemphill blamed himself. And that was the hardest part. "I had great plans," he said. "But it all came to an end. I'm a little disappointed, I tell you what."

  Hemphill's season was over. He had started with six prospects and ended with nothing. He walked next door to ask his neighbor to take some last digital pictures of the pumpkin before he said his final good-bye. He salvaged the seeds, then broke it to pieces with the tractor, loaded it into the bucket he used to move manure, hauled it to the edge of the woods that bordered his property, and dumped it. "Bye, bye, pumpkin," he said mournfully.

  Ed moped a few more days. He could hardly bear to think about it, much less tell anyone that he'd lost his sure-thing world-record pumpkin. So for nearly a week, he sat on the news. Then he told another grower and asked him to spread the word.

  After that, there was only one thing Hemphill had to do. "There's no point going around feeling sorry for yourself," he said. The next week he started back to work on his patch. He hauled manure from the local mink farm, spread out some compost and potato waste from his potato garden, and then tilled it all in. "Come May, I'll be ready," he said. "Next year I'm going to prove I can grow a fifteen-hundred-pounder, and I'll keep it together this time. I hope Mr. Wallace will let me have another seed."

  As Ed Hemphill was grappling with his misfortune, Ron and Dick were feeling more hopeful. After the bad weather at the start of the month, September had turned out to be one of the warmest and sunniest in memory. The pumpkins had continued growing, and the Wallaces estimated each one had gained at least 200 pounds during the month. They'd gotten more encouragement at the Durham Fair, where their 1068 entry had weighed 12 percent heavier than estimated and won the contest at 1,174 pounds.

  So now Ron was considerably more upbeat. "This has been the best September we've ever had," he said. His dad's spirits had perked up too. By September 26, the two pumpkins they had picked to take to their club's October 7 weigh-off were an estimated 1,3 50 pounds. Dick was hoping for another few pounds before the pumpkins hit the scales. He was beginning to think they had a lock on finally winning their own weigh-off, unless a ringer showed up with a surprise. "There's even an outside possibility, if you're a dreamer, that with the over-the-chart weights our patch and 1068 seed has put out this year, that even a world-record weight could happen," he said. Although he hadn't forgotten the other big pumpkins out there. "Only to be broken again the same day," he added.

  Dick was deliberately keeping the volume turned down on his enthusiasm. Ron was still nervous and didn't want to advertise that they thought they had a shot at the record. Even after Hemphill's 1068 went down, there was still a pumpkin estimated at more than 1,500 pounds in New York and another in the mid1,3 00s in Michigan. Who knew what might turn up along the West Coast. Nobody ever counted out Jack LaRue. There were Conley and Parks in Ohio, and now whispers were growing about Quinn Werner's pumpkin. Word was that despite his battles with foaming stump slime over the summer, one of his plants had escaped the disease and was growing a pumpkin that might blow everyone out of the water.

  Ron's hopes were still pinned on going heavy. The Wallace pumpkins weren't measuring as big as some of the others, but he knew he had some solid fruit in his garden. "You start putting 10 percent on top of these numbers and you're talking about something pretty special," Ron said.

  But that's as far as he'd go. Ron was still afraid of the jinx. Dick couldn't even get him to talk about his hopes of winning Grower of the Year, a new award offered by the national GPC organization. The person with the largest three pumpkins weighed at GPC sites would win the title, so even if he didn't have the single biggest fruit in the world, he could still reap honors.

  "A few nights ago I said to him, 'Ya know, Ron, you've got a good chance to get Grower of the Year honors from the GPC,'" said Dick. "And he said, 'Aaahh, Dad, I don't want to talk about that.'"

  Dick laughed. He knew his son. "I bet he thinks about it every night before going to bed," he said.

  There'd been more bad news for the Rhodies. Steve Sperry had lost everything in his patch. And in the past few days, Scott Palmer had lost his 1225—his second pumpkin to go down. That left him just one, the pumpkin growing on his 1443, and he was getting nervous that he might lose that one too. He didn't want to risk holding on until October 7, so he'd decided to take his last pumpkin to Topsfield that weekend and skip the club's weigh-off at Frerich's Farm. "As the grower, you gotta do what you gotta do," Ron said. "People will tell you they're sorry and they feel bad for you, but until you've lost one of your own that you've put a year's worth of work into, you can't know what it feels like. So I told Scotty, 'Scotty, I know how you feel.' "

  The Wallace pumpkins were so big now that they were easily seen from the road looming above the bedraggled leaves in the patch. The pumpkins were attracting 25 to 30 people a day. Some stopped and gawked from the road; others walked right up to the patch to take pictures and ask questions, as if the Wallace garden were a tourist attraction. Even a motorcycle gang stopped by one day. One guy actually drove his car across the grass right up next to the patch, ogled the pumpkins a few moments, and then drove off.

  Ron had set some traps for a mouse that had been nibbling on one of his pumpkins at night. There were tiny scrape marks in the skin a few inches above the ground. And he was still worried about the deer doing some damage. They'd torn his makeshift fence to shreds and were making regular appearances in the patch. Ron tried to fight off a feeling of foreboding. In the Wallaces' bitter tradition, this last week in September had been the worst week of the year. "I've lost so many pumpkins between now and the weigh-off," he said, his voice trailing off, unwilling to finish the thought.

  "But hey. They're still growing. The stems look good. I'm already happy with what I did this year. I just want to finish up and get them to the scales."

  Every night now when he got home from work, Ron would grab a flashlight and walk out along the edge of the pumpkin patch to have a look around. The air was chilly now, every breath a frosty puff of white. Autumn had arrived in New England. One night that week the stars had seemed extra bright in the sky, and there was a full moon. "I saw a shooting star right over the middle of the patch," Ron marveled.

  That was a rare moment of serenity. Another year of grinding it out was nearly over. In just eight days, the 2006 season would come to an end one way or another.

  14

  Topsfield

  HEAVY AND PREGNANT with their cargo of giant pumpkins, the pickup trucks began lining up outside the cattle arena at the Tops-field fairgrounds long before the morning air had shaken off its nighttime chill. Brake lights blinked on and off in the gray morning light as the trucks inched forward one at a time through the great barn doors of the arena. Growers rolled down their truck windows to hang an elbow out as they waited patiently for their turn to unload. Some got out to stretch their legs and shake off the torpor of a long drive across New England in the predawn hours. They wandered up and down the line to visit with friends and rivals, warming their hands around plastic cups of steaming coffee, their eyes sliding to the back of each truck in furtive appraisal. />
  It was a sleepy, quiet start to a momentous day. The Rhode Island mafia joined the procession about 6:30 A.M., bringing up the rear of the line. Joe Jutras led the pack in his tall, white company van, loaded with both his own pumpkin and Dick Wallace's entry for the weigh-off. Ron followed in his red Ford 4x4 pickup, followed by Steve Sperry and Peter Rondeau. Scott Palmer wasn't there. The day before, when they were loading their trucks for the fair, they'd picked up Scott's pumpkin and the bottom had fallen out of it—rotten. So that was Scott's story for 2006: from glory to heartbreak in 12 months. He'd finished the season zero for three.

  Ron's pumpkin was noticeably bigger than any other pumpkin in the line, though that didn't necessarily mean much. Plenty of huge pumpkins had come to the scales only to be smacked down by smaller, heavier rivals. But Ron was attracting the attention of the other growers, who already were beginning to lay odds on the day's winner. Ron and Dick had surveyed the fruit in their patch carefully, measuring and thumping and ranking them according to which ones they thought were heaviest. They had five competitive pumpkins left, and they wanted to save the heaviest two for their own weigh-off the following week.

  Dick had settled on the 1370 Rose, the most perfectly shaped orange pumpkin in their patch. He wanted to walk into Topsfield with style. Ron wanted to win, plain and simple. What a vindication that would be, to finally win the top prize at the most prestigious weigh-off in New England. So he'd brought what he and his dad figured was their third-heaviest pumpkin, one of his 1068s, and he hoped it would be enough to do the job. He'd packed it in securely for the two-and-half-hour drive from the patch to Tops-field. The tremendous fruit sat on a wooden pallet, cushioned by a six-inch-thick foam rubber mattress. He'd braced it all around with hay bales and quilts wedged firmly against the walls of the truck bed. Given the pumpkin was more than half a ton, Ron figured he didn't need ropes to hold it down.