At Punkin Chunkin, smashing pumpkins is a celebration of America

There are concerns that strong crosswinds could cut the gourd’s flight short but Team Chucky, straight outta Asbury, New Jersey, thrives on adversity. Spectators behind a fence chant the team’s name as they squint through swirls of windswept dust and the glare of the midday sun.

All eyes are on the 10,000-pound catapult, an orange and black colossus named Chucky III that’s modeled after the siege engines that once defended the Roman Empire.

It’s Day 3 of the World Championship Punkin Chunkin 2016, a post-Halloween charity showdown featuring medieval war machines repurposed as long distance dispensers of squash. The event, which dates back to 1986, is Americana writ large, an autumn duel that celebrates ingenuity, vision, wit, monster armaments and flying foodstuff.

A new president took the reins of the WCPCA at the beginning of 2016 and the lawsuit was dismissed, paving the way for a return to Bridgeville. The organization secured a new insurance policy and implemented new safety rules, restricting the types of vehicles allowed on the field, banning alcohol on the firing line and prohibiting BYOB for daily ticket holders. Safety inspectors examined machines before each throw. Volunteers hoisted up tape barricades to block people from getting too close to the cannons, catapults, trebuchets and centrifugal chuckers.

The weather was good, the mood was giddy and it seemed the stars had aligned for a successful chunk. Less than two hours before the closing ceremony was set to begin, the carnival of science and kitsch took a horrific turn and the scene became a vigil with prayers for the injured.

The specter of danger

Even before the accident, chunkers grappled with the idea that one accident could doom the sport.

“You don’t know the quality of other people’s welding skills,” said Collins, during a phone interview before the event. “You don’t know whether the design is any good. There’s a lot of people that play this game that are normal human beings that treat it like a hobby instead of a full-on obsession. It adds to the danger. The probability that someone gets killed doing this is reasonable. People get killed in NASCAR. Air shows, people get killed. And yet they continue to have them. If something happened at Punkin Chunkin, they may not have the financial backing to continue.”

Dawn Thompson, who made history in 2010 as the first female Punkin Chunkin champ, said that she did not witness the explosion but she’s been out on the field for days helping the farmer clean up his property. The pumpkin trophy still sits near the firing line, a lonely totem that signifies all the promise of the weekend and all the chaos that followed the accident.

“I hope we can do this again next year,” said Thompson, whose winning air cannon was named Hormone Blaster. “I don’t know what the future holds but we want to come back.”