Alternative uses for watermelon and Partridge Family tunes...gotta be Monday!

Good Monday morning everybody! Hope you had a great weekend. Cousin Fred and I headed south to Rush Springs for the 72nd annual Watermelon Festival. I heard one estimate that put the amount of watermelon consumed there at more than 50,000 pounds. Assuming the average watermelon is 20 pounds, that’s something on the order of 2,500 watermelons.

The Rush Springs event is all very family-oriented with games for the kids. An arts and crafts fair. Stuff like that. Oh, and of course, all the watermelon you can stuff down your throat. Wonder what they do with all the leftover rinds? We didn’t stick around to find out.

In fact, Cousin Fred was more interested in the alternative festivals that surround Rush Springs going on at the same time. Our first stop on the alternative tour was about 5 miles west of Rush Springs at Hurling Acres Farm owned by a Scot named Fergel Clawbaw who immigrated here 15 years ago to…well…raise melons.

For all intents and purposes, Clawbaw is the King of Watermelon in that region. He has nearly 1,000 acres of watermelon planted on his place, of which he holds back nearly a ton for the annual hurling. The hurlers come from all over Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas, which is where Cousin Fred first heard about it.

Hurlers show up with their homemade contraptions for hurling watermelons. This can be everything from cannon to catapult. The only catch is, the hurlers have to dress in traditional Scottish highland garb, meaning a kilt and all the accessories that go with it. Even the women hurlers are wearing the kilts. On a typically windy Oklahoma day, it makes for interesting viewing for everyone concerned as the day wears on.

At the start of the hurling, Clawbaw steps in front of the competitors and produces a huge sword from a scabbard at his side. He raises it and screams in as loud and shrill a voice as he can produce, “Shoot straight, ye bastards!”

He immediately ducks back behind the firing line as the hurling from one end to the other commences. The judges, all hired hands working on the farm, are down range to mark the furthest hurl, though truthfully, they’re really just trying to stay alive down there ducking and diving to avoid incoming rounds of melons.

In the end, when it’s all over, Clawbaw steps back out in front of the contraptions, raises his sword over his head and announces, “Let’s eat, ye bastards!” With that, the hurlers let out a “whoop whoop” in unison and then run down range and pick up pieces of split watermelon to eat.

Cousin Fred, who had witnessed the spectacle in previous years had stripped off everything below the waist, wrapped a towel around himself and with a war cry of “whoop whoop” charged off pell-mell with the others.

A few more miles to the south of the Hurling Acres Farm is the farm of Elmer Schlampe. Elmer is known for cutting out holes in watermelons, filling them with tequila, sealing the hole back up and putting them down in his root cellar overnight. By the next afternoon, the fruit of the melon is absolutely saturated with tequila. He gives away hundreds of melons to people who show up. He has a band playing and generally everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

By early evening at the Schlampe farm, there were a lot of drunken watermelon eaters scattered around the grounds of the farm. Cousin Fred attended the event last year and kept telling me the best was yet to come. I was too interested in consuming tequila-soaked watermelon at the time to be concerned or even care.

I had noticed a huge stack of dead trees piled up in a field just to the east of the Schlampe’s farmhouse. As dusk drew near, a small number of people pulling little wagons loaded with boxes began moving through the crowd. They were handing out ice-cold bottles of Smirnoff Watermelon-infused Vodka and encouraging us to move out into the field for the bonfire.

At 9PM on the dot, Schlampe lit the huge stack of dead wood and a veritable raging inferno ensued. Clothes soon came off and people began dancing naked around the fire while holding their bottle of vodka. I’m pretty certain I even saw Clawbaw participating.

I woke up the next morning naked in a bar ditch on the edge of Schlampe’s property humming an old Partridge Family tune. I was still drunk. I found Cousin Fred in a tinhorn about 40 meters away. He was in a similar condition.

Is this a great state, or what?

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