Need one spell out that virtually all the competitors are male? Dorothy Blades, a member of a rare all-female team of chunkers called the Dragon Ladies, (whose cannon, hard hats and gloves were all a tastefully matching shade of pink), thinks men crave the sense of power that only blasting a pumpkin into orbit in front of a large crowd can provide. “Plus it's a drinkathon,” she adds.
It is not just that men like shooting things. Many of them also like fiddling with big gadgets. And the Punkin Chunkin shows what can be achieved when hundreds of mechanically adept minds focus on one utterly pointless objective. The hydraulics on those air cannons must be just so, as must the springs on the catapults. The machines' names must be either macho (eg, “Second Amendment”) or crude (eg, “Chunkin Up”). Distances must be measured with a hand-held GPS system that gives readings to the nearest hundredth of a foot. After each pumpkin lands, eager men on quad bikes zoom around looking for the crater and then start triangulating.
All in all, Punkin Chunkin is a symbol of what makes America great. Only in the richest country on earth could regular guys spend tens of thousands of dollars building a pumpkin gun. Only in a nation with such a fine tradition of inventiveness, not to mention martial prowess, would so many choose to. And only in a land of wide open spaces would they be able to practise their chunkin without killing their neighbours. Alas, the 285-acre cornfield where Punkin Chunkin has been held for the past 20 years is soon to be sold and developed. But the chunkers will probably move to Maryland.
