A Garden of Marvels Read online

  Next up is the motor-driven-pumpkin race, which I am sorry to report goes off without a hitch. Only the largest of pumpkins, the thousand-pounders, can support the wooden platform that rings the gunwales and bears the weight of an outboard engine. Some of these giants are big enough that their pilots, all of whom are male, can stand up in the pumpkin and steer. Several boats have superstructures that all but obscure the vegetal nature of their craft. There’s one that looks like a psychedelic Boston Whaler; another could pass for one of the skiffs anchored in the harbor. One pumpkin is surrounded by what looks like a giant black bat wing. I see that the engines are of varying sizes.

  The men throttle up and the boats are off on a course that calls for five laps around a buoy about 150 yards from the dock. Most of the men take on that determined, forward-leaning pose you might see in a Winslow Homer painting of a fisherman plowing through the frothing waves of a Nor’easter. I am rooting, however, for the captain of an unadorned pumpkin that looks like a gigantic, buff-colored cauldron. He is a slight man with a long gray beard and a round belly. Dressed in an orange T-shirt, green suspenders, and a black Greek fisherman’s cap, he perches perfectly upright and calm at the helm, as if teleported from a church pew. The cauldron, riding high in the water and with only a Mercury 3.3-horsepower engine, is passed by everyone, and soon is lapped by all the boats, even the underpowered bat wing whose captain is standing and pretending to lash the sides of his craft as if it were a horse. The cauldron bobbles from side to side in the passing wakes, but the sea captain steers straight on, serene and unperturbed.

  My favorite eventually arrives dead last and at least two laps behind the others. It is clear to me that horsepower is the decisive factor in the race—the winner has a fifteen-horsepower Evinrude—and I comment to Ted that there should be a rule limiting the size of the engines. He tells me that no right-thinking Mainer would consider such a thing: May the man with the biggest machine win.

  After the races, I happen upon the owner of the whale, Peter Geiger. Geiger, who has driven up from Lewiston, Maine, where he is the editor and owner of the Farmers’ Almanac, was also a victor at last year’s regatta, which he won paddling a pumpkin decked out as a NASA space shuttle. One of the keys to success in a pumpkin race, he explains, is getting the right-sized pumpkin and getting it balanced properly. At first, his whale had listed to one side, which is why he cut hunks off one side of the cockpit. Sometimes people take on bags of sand at the last minute for the same reason. A few years ago, he had an 870-pound pumpkin, and the boat, painted as a cow, was so big and unbalanced that every time he got in it, it flipped him over into the water. I shudder at the thought: The water temperature in October is in the mid-fifties.

  After the races, Ted and I wander through Damariscotta, one of the loveliest villages in Maine. The Pumpkinfest has taken over the town. Lining the sidewalks are sculpted or painted giants, sixty-five in total. We stop to watch an artist incise an elaborate bas-relief of a coastal marsh scene into the surface of his four-hundred-pounder. The 1,375-pound champion of the local weigh-off, which was held last weekend at the start of the festival, is enthroned in a hay wagon cushioned by straw and surrounded by purple mums. Grown by Elroy Morgan, it is a beauty, waxed to high sheen and exuberantly orange, the very essence of pumpkin.

  We have already missed the all-you-can-eat pumpkin pancake breakfast, the pumpkin parade, the pumpkin derby, and the pumpkin pie eating contest, so we’re glad to see that we’re still in time for the pumpkin catapult and pumpkin hurling. These events take place a few miles out of town, in a grassy field that slopes down to Salt Bay, which lies as smooth and shiny as a pool of mercury. We park our car along Mill Street and join the amiable flow of couples and families, many with picnic baskets and blankets, dogs on leashes, or children in strollers. It’s postcard New England, and we arrive just in time for a catapult launch.

  The catapult is a two-story triangular contraption, featuring an impressive array of heavy-duty springs. The springs are stretched taut by cranking back the launching arm, and when the arm is released with a reverberating bang, a pumpkin soars thousands of feet overhead and lands in the bay with a splash you might reasonably expect from a breaching whale. The crowd responds with whoops and applause. I ask a man standing beside me, evidently enjoying the event, if he’s ever seen anything like this before. Oh, no, he says, this is his first time; he’s only seen it done with bowling balls. Clearly, I’ve got to get out more often.

  Even better is the pumpkin hurling, which involves a makeshift cannon. The barrel of the cannon is about thirty feet long and is paired to what look like two jumbo-sized household water heaters stacked on their sides. These tanks are connected to a well-drilling machine, a sixty-thousand-pound piece of equipment with a roaring air pump that normally would drive a drill bit. Instead, the pump channels air to the tanks. The barrel, breech-loaded with an ordinary field pumpkin, is aimed at a decrepit gray Toyota pickup truck at the lower end of the field overlooking the water. After the pressure has built up in the tanks and they start groaning, a bearded man wearing neon-orange ear protectors, a yellow hard hat, and a T-shirt that reads “Punkin’ Chunkin’ World Champion” fires the cannon. It goes off with a terrific boom. Instantly, automotive parts go flying. I witness the passenger door take flight, the hood somersault away, and a spray of metal innards explode from the engine compartment. At the bearded man’s signal, the children charge down the field to inspect the damage, followed by adults who saunter down the greensward after them. The event is so harmless and so silly, the day so glowing, and the spirit so Rockwellian, I wonder what it would be like if we moved to Damariscotta. If we did, we would increase the town’s population to 1,912. Which raises the question, how did such a small town, and one noted for its maritime heritage, come to have a pumpkin festival that draws some twenty thousand visitors to its quaint streets?

  The answer, I am told, is Buzz Pinkham and Bill Clark. Buzz is the earnest, clean-cut, blue-eyed owner of Pinkham’s Plantation, the local garden center, and Bill is a laconic, dark-haired, and bearded naval engineer employed at the Bath Iron Works. I caught up with them and a few of their pumpkin-boat-building buddies in the late afternoon at the back of Pinkham’s. The gist of the story, told by Buzz in an accent that makes only a passing reference to his r’s, is that about eight years ago, Bill bought a handful of giant pumpkin seeds and planted several in his backyard. They grew pretty well, and one day he was down at Buzz’s picking up some fertilizer when the two of them started talking pumpkins. Bill said it wasn’t hard to get little plants going, and it dawned on Buzz that giving away giant pumpkin seedlings might be a good promotion for the garden center.

  The first year, he gave away a hundred seedlings. The next year, he prepared two hundred seedlings, which were gone before nine in the morning. Pretty soon, he was giving away many hundreds of seedlings. Busloads of schoolchildren would come in to the store in spring to learn how to care for pumpkin plants, and he was tickled with the opportunity to teach them about the way plants work. He also sold a fair number of Langevin’s book on growing giant pumpkins. One day, he and Bill were looking through the book and saw a photo of a pumpkin boat. That tickled the naval engineer, who said he’d make a boat for Buzz, if Buzz would row it. Buzz, who I imagine has never turned down a chance to try something new and potentially fun, was game. (Buzz, it turns out, was the jokester lashing the bat-wing motorboat.) People heard about it and came down to the harbor to watch, and the Damariscotta regatta was born.

  Buzz and Bill and a few others got the idea of growing pumpkins for charity. Now, in the spring, kids sign up relatives, neighbors, and businesses to pledge a sum per pound of full-grown pumpkin. Half the take goes to a charity of the grower’s choice; the other half goes to the Pumpkinfest committee activities, including the weigh-off prize money. (The winners go home with a portion of a ten-thousand-dollar pot.) Every year, the number of visitors has grown.

  “The thing just sorta caught on,” Buzz sai
d. “Take Dan here,” and he nodded at a gawky man standing near us. “He just got fourth place in the weigh-off. Now, he used to be a stock car driver. His whole family was into stock cars, and their wives were stock car widows. Every year, the wives’d go over the budget, saying”—Buzz exaggerated his accent—“How much d’ja spend on that stahk cah this year? How much d’ja win? You’re not gonna do it again this yeah, are ya?’ ”

  Buzz continued, “And then Dan and a lot of others, they discovered pumpkin growing. The wives thought that was really good. They’d say, ‘What? The pumpkin seed’s only sixty bucks? Oh, great, why don’t you get two or three? You need a load of manure for the gahden? How much is that? Only a hundred bucks? Go right ahead.’ This was nothing compared to a new transmission or a new set of tires.

  “Of course,” he added, “it can get a little out of hand. I mean there’s the unfortunate wife who hadn’t been subjected before to any of her husband’s hobbies. Then pumpkin growing comes along, and she thinks it’s the worst thing that’s happened in the world. Why? Because all of a sudden her husband’s in the pumpkin patch all the time, and he’s watering and putting out manure and he’s on the Internet and he’s in the pumpkin chat room and he’s getting the soil tested. The house could be falling down around their ears, but that pumpkin patch sure looks good.” Everyone laughs knowingly.

  When it comes to pumpkins, Buzz says, everyone is always talking about how to get an edge. Two years ago, he began inoculating his soil with mycorrhizae and promptly grew his best pumpkin, a 1,266-pounder. (Sadly, at 1,099 pounds the pumpkin developed a split in its side. Although he fixed it with the wax ring from a toilet installation kit, a patched-up pumpkin was ineligible for a prize.) Still, while a competitive spirit spurs on many people—Mainers will compete on almost anything, including table-saw and belt-sander races—it’s a small component of the pumpkin mania in Damariscotta.

  “The interesting thing is,” Buzz said, “it’s a real community builder. Some neighbors can live near each other for years and never talk, but this gives them something to chat about. People who pledge a pumpkin want to see how it’s doing through the summer, and the pumpkin sort of develops a fan base. Then everyone turns out at the festival to see how ‘their’ pumpkin’s been decorated.”

  Giant pumpkin growing involves nearly everyone in Damariscotta. Kids and adults grow them, local artists craft them, businesses support them, boat owners lend their engines for the race, charities arrange pumpkin transport, the Shriners parade, and a volunteer committee of dozens works through the year to organize the festival. Even the local curmudgeons get involved, writing cranky letters to the Lincoln County News about the traffic jams during the festival. It’s as if the pumpkins’ giant root systems twine from yard to yard and stretch from the harbor throughout the town and out to Salt Bay, pulling townspeople and tourists into one productive, if rather goofy, enterprise.

  PART III

  Leaves

  fourteen

  New Beginnings

  After college, I did not become a poet; I never tried. The thought of starving in a garret, as my father warned me I would, scared me, and there was no way I was returning to Baltimore to scribble in my childhood bedroom. Like many a recent college graduate, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career. I only knew what I couldn’t or didn’t want to do. Law was a nonstarter, thanks to an aversion to conflict and a well-demonstrated inability to pay attention to detail. Medicine was impossible: I have always been profoundly grateful that our internal anatomy is neatly packaged out of view inside our skin. Even the sight of my own meandering blue veins makes me slightly queasy. Science was out (see “dexterity, lack of”). Business held no attraction: My father was already counting the days to his retirement. As for journalism, I grew up in the era of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein, and investigative reporting, and knew I didn’t have that kind of bold nature. At five feet, one inch, and weighing ninety-five pounds, I was congenitally unfit for any job involving heavy lifting. The only thing I could competently do was read and write.

  One day in my senior year, I was in the career office, morosely flipping through binders of jobs I wasn’t qualified for, when I saw an announcement for an internship at a foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. As an American studies major (with a heavy emphasis on American literature), I knew it was a long shot on the face of it. Naturally, the application called for relevant writing samples. I had taken one course in international politics, so I had one term paper to submit. I should have added another from an American history class, but for some reason I saw fit to enclose a book review I’d written for a campus literary magazine. The book in question was Nora Ephron’s collection of essays Crazy Salad, and I had highlighted the chapter on her interview with Linda Lovelace, star of the hard-core porn film Deep Throat. I still have the book, and remember quoting the following exchange: Ephron: “Why do you shave off your pubic hair in the film?” Lovelace: “Well, it’s kinda hot in Texas.” It seems clear in retrospect that this was not the ideal writing sample, but whoever at the think tank had the task of reading scores of college term papers must have appreciated a dash of comic relief. I always tell people that Nora Ephron got me my first job.

  The internship was perfect for me; I did research for a book on the CIA’s dealings with the Kurds in Iraq. That job led to other jobs, including ones at a congressional committee on foreign relations and a foreign aid agency, then to a master’s degree in international relations, and finally, for fifteen years, a position with a government corporation that facilitates investment in developing countries. I traveled in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia, learned how to read a balance sheet, write contracts, focus on details, give speeches, ask uncomfortable questions and listen critically to answers, critique and take criticism, manage a team of employees and contractors, and enjoy the camaraderie of smart and committed colleagues engaged in a meaningful endeavor.

  Yet somehow, at forty, slowly and without even a telltale hiss, the air seeped out of the enterprise for me. The script was great, my role was a plum, the pay was good, but my heart was no longer in it. I had to reconsider. I’d already given up travel because I hated to be away from our three daughters even overnight. Now that all the girls were out of their baby years and more engaging by the minute, I wanted to spend more time with them. I also realized that my greatest pleasure at work increasingly came from writing. Whether it was crafting an internal memo or detailing an employee’s accomplishments or making the case for board support for backing a business in Sri Lanka, the writing itself had come to matter as much to me as the substance. With Ted’s support, I decided to try a freelance writing career.

  I was glad to write on any subject for anyone who would pay anything. I wrote articles for newspapers and magazines about the trucking industry, swim instruction, my mother’s cooking, the “Help me, I’ve fallen” devices, portraiture, cochineal dye, and a glass capsule of “liquid skunk” that I bought as a personal safety measure (break it and your assailant flees in disgust) but then lost somewhere in our house. I wrote school newsletters, corporate annual reports, and papers for a congressional watchdog agency. One of the latter I converted into a book for school libraries on the history of the U.S. census, just in time for our decennial enumeration. I was pleased; I was writing. But I began to wonder: Was the process the only goal? What was it I really wanted to write about?

  Epiphany came via our daughter Anna and the local elementary school. Every year, the fourth and sixth graders participated in either a science fair or an “Invention Convention.” When Anna was in fourth grade, it was the year for the latter, for which every student had a few weeks to invent something. If there were any more explicit instructions or guidance, she never told me and I never found them in her backpack. In any case, Anna was sure about what she wanted to create: a device that would allow kids to read in bed with a flashlight without getting in trouble with their parents. This involved attaching a long string to the handle of
the bedroom door, routing it through pulleys on the ceiling, including one over the nightstand, and tying it to the back end of a flashlight. When a parent pushed open the door to check on the child who should be sleeping, the flashlight, which had been hanging above the nightstand to illuminate the book, would dip into a large mug, effectively extinguishing it. Anna needed a scale-model of a bedroom with the device to take to school, so the project required Ted’s involvement as he was the only one in the house who could be trusted with a saw.

  Daughter and father had a great time together, but I wondered what the point was. There was no connection to her science class or to understanding the process of invention. Why, for example, was using pulleys (which I suspect was a suggestion from her dad) instead of hooks a good idea? The night of the convention, it was clear that not every child had a workable idea or a dexterous enough adult to make a presentable project. Six years later, our youngest daughter, Alice, participated, and for her the convention was meaningless. A decade later, she can’t even remember what she made. But surely, whether a child has a good idea or a good helper, something might be learned?

  The question caught me like a fish on a long troll line, and I read through the theory, practice, and history of inventions. If I’d been an educator, I might have designed a course. As it was, I wrote two books, Reinvent the Wheel and Build a Better Mousetrap, that help kids reinvent classic inventions from Neolithic paint to a simple motor, using materials they can find around the house. (Ironic, isn’t it, me and “hands-on” science books? But I knew if I could build it, anyone could.) Each invention project was preceded by the story of a problem the inventor faced and what inspired his or her solution, and was followed by an explanation of the science behind the device.* After dreaming up fifty reinventions, I exhausted my hands-on imagination, as well as the patience of my three resident testers, but not my curiosity about how we have come to understand and manipulate the natural world. The historical moments when the explanation for a familiar phenomenon shifted from myth to fact, or when scientific truth was converted into a practical process or product, continued to fascinate me. I relish a good plot twist, and these discoveries or inventions often changed the trajectory of civilization. I went on to write books about the history and science of iron, gold, glass, ceramics, dyes, and greenhouse conservatories. But I encountered nothing more interesting than the series of discoveries that revealed the elegant workings of photosynthesis, the engine of nearly all terrestrial life. And, by the way, the invention of club soda.