Backyard Giants Page 24

  Whittier nodded sympathetically. His wheel-shaped pumpkin had weighed 1,058 pounds—enough for fifth place, and a lot more than the 800 pounds he expected. But he was a little let down about it not weighing the 1,100-plus pounds Dick's measuring technique had suggested.

  "Heyyyyy, Ronnie!" Dick yelled, waving his son over. It was time for pictures with the winning pumpkins. Ron took up position behind his 1068, now adorned with a jumbo-sized blue ribbon. His lips stretched stiffly into a grimacelike smile. His jaw was sore from all the teeth-grinding he'd been doing lately in his sleep. "Hey, Ronnie!" Now it was George Hoomis, one of the directors of the New England Pumpkin Growers Association. "You know what they say," Hoomis shouted at him, "Rhode Island: the smallest state, the biggest pumpkins!"

  Ron's face relaxed into a happy grin as the cameras flashed. "Yeah, that's what they can say now, baby!" he crowed. "It's about time."

  When the furor had died down and the championship pumpkin was safely ensconced on its climate-controlled throne in the Tops-field Fruit and Vegetable Barn, Ron had driven straight to the office. "Club members don't care about pumpkin weigh-offs," he said. "I've got to stay on top of things. I was out half of Friday and most of Saturday and I'll be out most of Sunday. I had to return phone calls, set stuff up—the maintenance guy was out this week, carpet cleaning needed to be scheduled. I was excited and happy about winning, but I wasn't going to stand there and talk about it all day. I had to get to work."

  Winning first place at Topsfield had been a rare taste of triumph, but that wasn't the prize Ron was really after. He hadn't come close to a world-record weight at Topsfield. He hadn't even broken the New England record, which was still held by Scott Palmer. The fact was, Topsfield was a local weigh-off, and there were lots of local weigh-offs—hundreds, actually. Topsfield wouldn't get him the orange jacket. And it wouldn't get him into the record books. Everyone would forget the Topsfield winner as soon as a new winner was crowned the next year. Ron wanted to be a world champion. He wouldn't rest until that happened.

  And the season was far from over. Ron was still hoping to win Grower of the Year, which meant he had to get three really big pumpkins to the scales at three GPC-certified weigh-offs. Tops-field was the first. He needed two more. The next chance would be at Pennfield Beach in Connecticut the very next day. Then he'd have a six-day break—six more days that the Wallaces' last two, biggest pumpkins had to hold together—before the final weigh-off. If there was going to be a new world record that year, it was probably going to happen October 7. But who knew? Already, one of the pumpkins that had been taping over 1,500 pounds in New York had proved to be a dramatic disappointment. Growers with the New York club had gathered for their weigh-off the same Saturday as Topsfield's, fully expecting to see a new world record set and the fall of the 1,500-pound barrier. But the pumpkin had been a balloon—a hot-air balloon—floating on the scale at just 1,091 pounds. It hadn't even won the weigh-off, placing third behind a 1,225-pounder.

  Everyone felt bad for the grower, but also secretly happy that the game remained wide open. So Ron was up at dawn again the Sunday after Topsfield, loading another pumpkin for the Connecticut weigh-off. Joe Jutras was competing too, and this time they were joined by club members Mike Oliver and Fred Macari. A storm front had moved through overnight, bringing in black clouds and heavy rain. The friends rendezvoused at the Wallace house at 9 A.M., their pumpkins already loaded in their trucks. Then they set off in the pouring rain for the two-hour drive along the southern New England coast.

  There are few things in this world as strange as the sight of a caravan of pickups carrying giant pumpkins down the freeway. As the procession zoomed down the road in the rain at 70 mph, the creamy-orange pumpkins glowed like beacons through the gray haze. Joe Jutras led the way in his white van. He drove in the slow lane to stay out of the way of faster drivers, but the pumpkins still clogged traffic. Drivers in passing cars hit their brakes and gaped at the fascinating deformity of the gargantuan fruit. Despite the slippery roads and driving rain, some drivers fumbled for cell phone cameras at 70 mph, risking their lives to snap pictures of a sight they knew they would never be able to describe in words.

  The weigh-off proceeded despite the rain. It was a much smaller affair than Topsfield, not much more than a gathering of local enthusiasts in the parking lot of a beachside community center in Fairfield. Connecticut growers had suffered as much as anyone, and only a dozen pumpkins were registered for the weigh-off, five of them from Rhode Island.

  If Ron's Topsfield entry was considered big, his Pennfield one was certifiably huge. Grown on a 1228 Jutras seed, it was the only pumpkin that season (after the 500 Wallace blew up) to rival the 1068s in size. Several people told Ron they thought it was the biggest in the patch. It was another one of the cream-colored fruits that boasted more heavy-fleshed squash genetics. It was broad and deep, with a high hump in the middle. But the 1228 was actually measuring a bit smaller than the Wallace's three biggest 1068s, including the Topsfield winner, and it thumped hollow—"like a drum," Ron said.

  Joe Jutras had brought a pumpkin he'd grown with the 1354 Checkon seed. It was noticeably smaller than Ron's, measuring an estimated 1,064 pounds, while Ron's pumpkin was measuring close to 1,300. Joe had a fondness for orange, but his pumpkin that day was lumpy and pale, with roughly veined skin. He'd named it Winky, because it had bulged and sagged over itself on the blossom end, the way a fat man's belly overlaps his trousers. The crease gave it a "winking" effect, for those who had a lot of imagination.

  Vermont grower Mark Breznick had brought what he thought was a 1,000-plus pounder, and Ed Giarrusso, a newer grower from Providence, Rhode Island, was hoping to cross the 1,000pound mark for the first time.

  Anyone eyeballing these pumpkins would have placed their bets on Ron's, and his was again slated to go to the scale last. Giarrusso got his 1,000-pounder, and Breznick's weighed 1,023 pounds. Joe's was 1,169 pounds—a whopping 10 percent more than its estimate. But Ron's pumpkin, just as he and his dad had thought, went light, coming in at 1,140 pounds.

  It was Joe's turn to be on top. "This is my first win," he told a local television news crew that was covering the weigh-off. "I've been traveling with the Wallace boys, and it's been kind of hard to beat 'em."

  "This pumpkin doesn't look nearly as big as the other one," Joe acknowledged. "So you can't go by size. You go by genetics and—" he banged his palm on the side of the pumpkin—"by the thump. If you bang these things and they're hard, you know it's going heavy."

  Ron and Dick weren't too disappointed. Ron still racked up an 1,140-pound pumpkin to go with his 1,347-pounder, which gave him a respectable 1,243 average so far in his bid to win Grower of the Year. And the Wallaces were pleased for Joe, who had put just as much time and effort into his garden as they had into theirs.

  With Pennfield over, the focus shifted to October 7. "There's only one question people are asking now," Ron said. "Who's going to have the biggest pumpkin?"

  Meanwhile in the Ohio Valley, Dave Stelts was talking trash. "I'm not worried about Rhode Island," Dave boasted. "As Paulie said to Rocky, 'I don't sweat you.' "

  Dave's own attempt at a champion season had imploded, but that didn't stop him from beating the drum for his club. "The boys from R.I. are going down to the big guns from the Ohio Valley," he wrote in an October 3 message titled "Let's talk some SMACK!" on BigPumpkins.com. Now that most of the growers who had set out to grow a competitive pumpkin had resigned themselves to watching from the sidelines, the whole of giant-pumpkin land was waiting to see if a new world record would emerge on October 7, not to mention the world's first 1,500pound pumpkin. The two Ohio clubs and Port Elgin would hold weigh-offs that morning, and the Rhode Island club's would start at 1 P.M. Everyone expected the year's champion to be decided by the end of the weekend, even though a handful of other weigh-offs would be held over coming weeks, most on the West Coast. On Columbus Day, Monday, October 9, Sherry LaRue was taking her 1068 to Half Moon Bay, Cali
fornia, the biggest weigh-off on the West Coast.

  Word was everywhere now that Ohio had two pumpkins likely to be over 1,500 pounds, and another one that could get there if it was lucky. Growers knew, too, that the Wallaces had been holding their best for last—two pumpkins that were supposed to be bigger than the 1,347-pounder Ron weighed at Topsfield. But most believed it would take a small miracle for Dick or Ron to sail past the armada of Ohio giants. And no one saw the Southern New England club delivering the kind of big numbers it had the year before. The Ohio Valley, instead, was predicted to step in and claim bragging rights as the best giant-pumpkin growing club in the world. Ohio's Quinn Werner, who was thought to have at least two pumpkins over 1,300 pounds, might pull ahead of Ron for Grower of the Year.

  Ron kept his own counsel, as usual. But Dick waded in to the smack talk with relish. "It's about time Ohio got back into the hunt," he answered Dave on the Internet message board. "I just hope all those 13 and 1400 pounders don't turn out to be balloons. It would be a shame for little Rhody to spank your butts—AGAIN."

  After all, if there was one thing that Dick had learned from 16 years of disappointment, it was that anything could happen once the pumpkins hit the scales.

  15

  It Is What It Is

  DONALD SALISBURY, A SKINNY, 6oish man with a baseball cap perched on his head and a frizzy gray beard sticking out from his chin, worked the controls of his tractor like a conductor directing a symphony. The tractor bumped into gear and headed straight for Ron Wallace's giant pumpkin with its bucket scoop lifted high in the air. The old engine grumbled and growled, belching white smoke from a narrow steam pipe that rose from its rusty chassis. The tractor lurched, the bucket wobbled, something, somewhere, groaned.

  "Whooaaaa! Oh! Oh!" hollered Jeff Blais, trying to make himself heard over the roar of the tractor and waving his hands back and forth in a stop signal. "You gotta go up and tip it forward . . . Come up a little bit. Okay . . . okay . . . now, let it come forward." Salisbury, the farmer from down the street who always seemed ready to answer the Wallaces' calls for assistance, sat calmly atop the tractor, ignoring Blais's urgent shouts and gestures with the unruffled confidence of a man who knew his tractor better than he knew his wife. There was a rattle and a bang as the bucket moved into position in front of the pumpkin resting on its wooden pallet. Salisbury had fitted the front of his loading bucket with a forklift attachment, and with surgical precision, he maneuvered the shaking, jerking fork tines into the narrow spaces beneath the pallet, then lifted the whole thing toward the sky.

  All this wasn't especially good for Dick's heart. He watched anxiously as the giant pumpkin wobbled into the air on top of the pallet at the end of the fork tines attached to the bucket connected to the old tractor driven by Mr. Salisbury. Dick's forehead was creased in a deep frown of concentration, his eyes narrowed. Every grower knew the potential horrors of pumpkin-picking time. An Australian grower and poet, Tony Hickman, even wrote a poem about it:

  I'll never forget Blossom

  She Met with Bad Luck

  On the way to the weigh-off

  She rolled off the truck.

  Ron was at work, so Dick was overseeing the pumpkin loading by himself that evening, with the help of Salisbury and Jeff Blais, who had donned one of his favorite T-shirts for the event, one of Dick's PumpkinToons: MY LIFE IS GIANT PUMPKINS—JUST ASK MY X-WIFE, it said.

  The next day, Friday, a half-dozen Rhodies were in line to have their pumpkins picked and loaded for Saturday's weigh-off. Several growers would team up and make the rounds from patch to patch. That would take all day, so the Wallaces had decided to get their pumpkins out of the way Thursday night. They had borrowed a flatbed trailer that was big enough to carry both the pumpkins together. Dick and Blais would load them up in the evening, and then Dick would drive them to the weigh-off site the next day while Ron helped the other growers load.

  Harvesting and loading a giant pumpkin into a truck is not so different from the task ancient Egyptians faced when moving great blocks of stone to build the pyramids. Growers usually use a tall tripod fitted with a block and tackle, which they position directly over the pumpkin in the garden. The chain running down from the pulley is hooked to a two-tier metal lifting ring that sits atop the pumpkin like a hat. Straps attached to the ring run down along the sides of the pumpkin, gripping it like an octopus. A rope is strung through loops on the bottom of the straps, encircling the pumpkin's base and cinching tight to secure it. Then, slowly, the pumpkin is winched into the air so that a pickup truck can back up between the tripod legs beneath it. The pumpkin is lowered onto a pallet in the back of the pickup and voila: It's loaded and ready for the trip to the weigh-off, where a forklift will take care of the unloading.

  Dick and Jeff used a tripod and winch to lift each of the Wallace pumpkins onto a pallet in the garden. But then, since they were loading the pumpkins on a trailer instead of into a pickup, Salisbury and his tractor took over. It took a tedious, nerve-racking hour to pick and load both the fruits. Dick and Jeff sprawled on their bellies in the soft garden dirt, fastening the lifting harness to the pumpkins, which had been cut from the vine with one swift slice of a small knife. Then Salisbury used his tractor to lift the pumpkins onto wooden pallets padded with old sofa cushions right there in the patch. Finally, he loaded both pumpkin and pallet onto the trailer.

  About a foot of vine was left on each side of the stems. Later, Dick would attach bags of water to these whiskers to keep the pumpkin hydrated. The vine would siphon the water from the bag, helping prevent any weight loss. Or so the theory went.

  Finished with the loading, Dick walked back to the barn to check on some equipment they would need the next day. He passed by the emptied pumpkin patch without a glance. There wasn't much to see. The vines were all trampled and torn. Weeds already were beginning to cover the dirt. In the middle of the mess there was one bright spot: the Cleome, spider flower, that Dick had asked Ron to leave earlier in the summer. Ron had never followed through with his vow to yank it, and it stood tall and proud, bursting with its pale purple flowers, now queen of the garden.

  "Well," Dick said, "they're on the trailer. There's nothing wrong with them. I didn't have to pose for pictures with my saw on my shoulder."

  But he didn't sound happy. He sounded tired. He sounded stressed. He sounded like he was ready for it all to be over.

  Steve Daletas, the former world-record holder from Oregon, was a guest of honor for the Rhode Island mafia's "Phat Friday"—the name they'd given their day of pumpkin picking and loading before their weigh-off. The name was inspired by the Mardi Gras day of revelry, and usually it was an occasion of much beer drinking and good fun, with all the growers in a cheerful state of anticipation. This year, though, no one was in a partying mood.

  It had been a bad year for too many of them. In a reversal of fortune, Ron and Dick were the only ones in the club, except for maybe Peter Rondeau, who believed they had managed to grow a personal best. Steve Sperry had nothing to bring to the weigh-off at all. Neither did Scott Palmer. But both men had still taken the day off work to help pick and load the other growers' pumpkins.

  "It's the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," Scott deadpanned, making light of his misfortune. But really, it had hurt more than that. After he had lost his 1225 a couple of weeks before, Scott had been worried about losing his 1443 too. "I went out there to tape it and I bumped into it and it felt like it moved, and I thought, 'That's not right.' That pumpkin is taping over eleven hundred pounds. How can it move with me just bumping into it? It shouldn't be moving."

  Scott's wife, Shelley, was in denial. "Oh, there's nothing wrong with it," she had assured him. But the next night Scott had gone out for his evening pumpkin check and it seemed to be moving a little more. "I figure, that's gotta be bad. Nothing's leaking or anything, but it seemed like it just wasn't right."

  Sure enough, when the crew arrived to lift the pumpkin to load it for Topsfield, its bottom f
ell out. "We picked it up, and blllpppptl" Scott said. "Ahhh well. Next year we'll get 'em."

  The Phat Friday lifting team met at Ron's house at 10 A.M., and set out from there for Joe Jutras's house, the first stop of the day. Joe greeted the growers as they arrived in his driveway, then led the way to the back of the house through his empty garden to his last, best pumpkin. It was grown from the same seed, the 1228 Jutras, as the pumpkin that Ron had taken to the Pennfield weigh-off—the one that had weighed so much lighter than expected. That was worrying Joe. He pointed to one, bulky end of the cream-colored pumpkin."It's very thick right there," he said hopefully. "That sounds good there."

  Ron leaned over Joe's pumpkin, encircling it with his arms in a bear hug, then gave it a smart slap. "Oh, yeah. That sounds great," Ron agreed. "What are you taping on this?

  Joe told him it was 1,125 pounds.

  "I think you can come close to twelve hundred pounds out of this, Joe."

  The tripod was hauled out of Ron's pickup truck and set up over the pumpkin. With the plants crushed and trampled, the patch bristled with the remains of bamboo sticks that had been propping up the leaves. The growers worked swiftly to wrap the pumpkin in its harness and hook it to the chain. Mike Oliver began hauling on the chain, which rattled and clanked as it began slowly lifting the pumpkin from its bed of dirt.

  As the fruit cleared the ground, Ron dropped to his hands and knees to peer beneath it. What a grower wants to see is a flat bottom. Sometimes the underside of a pumpkin grew curved, like an upside-down bowl, which could trim 20 or 30 pounds off the final weight. "You're in good shape, Joe," Ron announced. "Nice bottom."