Welcome to the Punkin Chunkin.

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   Downstate Delaware can be best described as Indiana with a beach -- mile after flat mile of corn and soybeans. And, at this time of year, pumpkins.

   Now farm folks are by nature inventive -- when something breaks, you gotta fix it yourself. And so it came to pass that a friendly competition arose among friends to build the contraption which would fling a 10-pound pumpkin the farthest. One story says it started between two blacksmiths tired of the standard anvil-heaving competitions, but the precise origin isn't what's important here.

   Things got serious when the Aludium q36 Modulator showed up.

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   The town of Lewes (pronounced Lewis) is a magnificently preserved colonial Dutch maritime town. Its Chamber of Commerce wound up sponsoring the Punking Chunkin as it outgrew its simple cornfield origins.

   Morton, Illinois, on the other hand, is home to a factory that processes 80 percent of all the nation's pumpkins each year. When they heard about the competition in lower, slower Delaware, it was time to go to war.

   The rules for punkin chunkin are simple -- the pumpkin has to weigh between eight to 10 pounds, the pumpkin has to leave the machine intact, no part of the machine can cross the firing line, and oh yeah, no explosives.

   Doesn't say anything about no machines.

   The Aludium q36 Modulator, designed with help from engineers from Bradley University and named after a Marvin the Martian cartoon, came in from Illinois weighing 20 tons -- its 80-foot barrel elevated by hydraulic cylinders and aimed by an onboard computer. Powered by a monster air compressor, the pumpkin exits the barrel at 600 miles per hour.

   And flies for more than half a mile.

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   For the record, there are various categories (youth, centrifugal, human powered), but in all the arms race continues. The human-powered record started at 50 feet and now stands at 581. The centrifugal champ, a truck-mounted slinger named "Bad to the Bone" in honor of Delaware native George Thurogood, has chunked a pumpkin more than 2,000 feet.

   An example: one of the original record-setters came from one of the original blacksmiths. He built a truck-mounted crossbow out of railroad car springs; took a compressor to cock it. Turns out measuring the distance is fairly easy. Just look for the crater.

   The first weekend of every November will find all kinds of these huge, unwieldy machines in a row (the local joke calls it Desert Squash). This year, expectations were high; the locals had retaken the record, thanks to a camoflage monster called the Universal Soldier (and a 3,718 foot heave) only to see it snatched away with a '98 record heave of more than 4,000-feet by those Illinois interlopers.

   The goal this year -- a record one-mile chunk -- went unmet and Mother Nature was blamed for no distance exceeding 3,694 feet. Seems the pumpkins had been caught in an early frost and were too mushy to withstand maximum escape velocities. That left a lot of contestants sounding like Chicago Cub fans: Wait til next year.

   And probably some pumpkins praying for frost.

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   G.L. Marshall believes the web needs a Charles Kuralt.

(Nov. 99)