![]() ![]() In 1986, John Ellsworth, Trey Mellson, Donald "Doc" Pepper and Bill Thompson were hanging around Ellsworth's smithy, looking for an alternative to their previous pastime, anvil tossing, when someone mentioned that a pumpkin-throwing event had been held at a nearby college. It's probable that pumpkin chunkin has existed informally for decades, if not centuries, but it took four Delaware men with too much time on their hands to organize the activity into a competitive event. ![]() "We shot the caricature right between the legs, and oh, man, were his two daughters hooting," McGrath said. 6-7.Ĭhunkin Up has shot at fiberglass port-a-potties, at various vehicles, including an old school bus, and once, memorably, at a billboard containing a caricature of a candidate for public office at a fundraising event. McGrath's Chunkin Up visited Lewis Orchards in Poolesville for the first two weekends in October and Butler's Orchard in Germantown for the final three.įor those who won't have had enough even after Halloween, Clark's Elioak Farm in Ellicott City will brush off their pumpkin catapult Nov. Lawyer's Moonlight Maze in Thurmont provides Maryland residents with the most chunkin opportunities their air cannon operates every weekend from the middle of September through early November. "People were standing in line from the time we started at 11 a.m. "I sat there for 20 minutes with my phone and a stopwatch, and we were getting off a round every 56 seconds," he says. Last weekend, McGrath was operating Chunkin Up at Butler's Orchards in Germantown and decided to time the frequency of the blasts. Lawyer estimates that his farm's visitors go through 2,500 to 3,000 pumpkins on a busy Saturday. Though pumpkin chunkin began as a competitive event in Delaware in 1986, it's only been in the past few years that the popularity of the practice has, well, exploded. These pumpkin projectiles can literally dent steel, not to mention a human skull, and cannon operators are careful to keep spectators off the field.) (Unlike paintball, shooting humans is strictly forbidden. "Sometimes, an individual will see a pumpkin turn into vapor before his very eyes." "We let people actually shoot our cannon," said Tim McGrath of Comus, Md., who carts his pneumatic air cannon with the graphic name of "Chunkin Up" to orchards in Southern Maryland during the fall. The field is littered with stems crooked like beckoning index fingers.Ĭlearly, the Smashing Pumpkins were onto something. The pumpkin disintegrates on contact into a drippy, orange pulp. It's easy to understand why shooting the seedy globes is rapidly becoming a cherished harvest-time rite: The fruit goes airborne with a sonic blast. Whether the weapon of choice is a medieval-looking catapult or an air cannon resembling the world's largest water pistol, pumpkin chunkin, as the practice is called, can be found in Seattle and Virginia, in Arizona, Wisconsin and Maine. "We're going to come back and make it a family tradition." "We could have stood there for hours watching people shoot pumpkins and cheering when they hit something," Connelly said. Then, both hands gripping a giant lever, Connelly threw herself back with all her weight, and the cannon erupted with a mighty "thwock." Owner Jan Lawyer loaded the pumpkin into the chamber and pumped up the air pressure. She recently ventured to Lawyers Moonlight Maze in Thurmont with her husband, a neighbor, and five children ages 8 to 16 to shoot an air cannon at a field of metal sculptures designed to resemble characters from the "Iron Man" movies.įirst, she fiddled with two levers that moved the contraption up and down and right to left, sighting along the barrel. ![]() "There's something about firing a pumpkin at 75 miles an hour that's very transporting," says Karen Connelly, 47, of Catonsville. But the past few years have seen the growth of a new harvest tradition - projectile pumpkins.Īcross the country, families are flocking to roadside farms every autumn to launch orange gourds at ungodly speeds at targets planted in a field hundreds of feet away and watch them go splat. It used to be that Halloween meant hay rides, haunted houses and corn mazes.
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