Watermelons
A few of the people who worked with me in District 9 in the southwest corner of Arkansas were watermelon farmers. One of them was best friends with the local game warden and they had a friendly competition with their watermelons. Each one would select his best melon to enter it into the county fair in hopes of it being crowned grand champion. This was more important than just a local fair championship because the melons were grown near the town of Hope, Arkansas, and they had a reputation for being the sweetest melons available. This reputation was also valuable, a melon grown around Hope sold for up to $1.00 per melon over their rivals. In fact, there was a report that a Texas grower would bring a trailer full of melons from Texas, park it in Hope overnight then advertise them as Hope melons. This prompted an investigation and started research into a certification program. I moved to Alaska before I ever found out how that turned out.
This friendly competition continued for a few years as each tried to outdo the other. Well, one year my firefighter, one of the tractor plow operators in District 9 whose name I can’t remember now but I will call Joe, was out of the county when the entries were due to the fair. His friend, the game warden, saw that Joe had not submitted an entry that year and out of courtesy, and concern for his friend he submitted one on Joe’s behalf. Joe returned after all the judges had reviewed all the melons and awarded the ribbons.
Knowing that he had not submitted an entry, Joe didn’t go to the fair until the last day and then just to see how the melons were graded that year. His friend won a ribbon, can’t remember which now, but along with the beautiful watermelons was one that looked like a gourd. It had a long neck like a yellow squash, and a deformed mid-section followed by a protruding rear. It was the ugliest melon Joe had ever remembered seeing. He decided that he would not check the name of that poor farmer, now wanting to know who was so desperate to get recognized as a “Hope Melon” producer that they would enter that disfigured thing into a competition containing the best watermelons on the market. But curiosity got the best of him. So, he walked down to the ugly melon to see who could have thought that that melon could compete with the others at the fair. Getting close enough to read the name of the person who grew this melon he saw his own name! He was appalled, but there was nothing he could do. It was the last day of the fair and almost closing time at that. The damage had been done. He should have come to the fair and checked the melons as soon as he got back to the county. That way maybe only a few hundred or so people might have seen “his” melon. As it was, several thousand had seen it! The following weeks he was subjected to increasingly vocal comments, all in good cheer of course, over his “gourdmelon”.
Joe knew immediately who had made the entry for him and they laughed about it as good friends do when they play a practical joke on one another. But Joe was formulating his revenge. The time around the fair was peak harvesting time and Joe’s friend hadn’t picked his melons yet. He was waiting for the price to climb, as it always did, toward the end of season. When the time was right, Joe went to a pay phone and made an anonymous call reporting a night hunter active in the far end of the county. This, of course, resulted in the warden driving there and staking out the road where the poacher was supposed to be operating. While he was gone, Joe went to his melon patch and moved all the melons six or eight inches from where they had been growing. This left depressions in the grass that appeared as if someone had taken half the melons from the field. When the warden got home, after having been up all night, he took a nap. The next day he went to his melon patch to start picking melons and lo and behold he saw the empty depressions in the grass where there should be a melon. He immediately thought that someone had stolen half his crop. Believing that they would be back again, the warden guarded his melon patch all night for the next two to three weeks. The melon thief never returned and Joe finally admitted to his friend what he had done.
Paybacks can really be a terror, but the “gourdmelon farmer” as Joe’s friend was happy to call him got the last laugh in the great watermelon war of Hempstead County.