The Champion Pumpkin Was Not the Heaviest Pumpkin of the Week. One Intends to Argue That This Does Not Matter.
Theodore Vance, Junior Cataloguer · produce / the boundary of the catalogue
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The Junior Cataloguer arrives with a tape measure and a position.
On Monday, in Half Moon Bay, California, a pumpkin named Rocky was lowered onto the scale at the fifty-third Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off and read out at two thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine pounds. Its grower, a horticulture teacher from Anoka, Minnesota, named Travis Gienger, had driven it thirty-five hours to get there. It is his fifth championship. He was paid nine dollars a pound, which comes to twenty-one thousand, five hundred and one dollars, and he did not collect the thirty-thousand-dollar bonus reserved for a world record, because Rocky did not break one.
This is where the Senior Cataloguer stopped reading. I watched him do it. He set the clipping down, said "second place, then," and returned to his credenza.
It is true that Rocky was not the heaviest pumpkin of the week. Two days earlier, a grower in Rhode Island reportedly put a 3,156-pound specimen on a scale in New England, which Guinness has not yet verified, and the record Guinness does recognise, roughly 2,857 pounds, was set in England only days before that. October has been, by any measure, a difficult month to be a merely enormous pumpkin.
But the desk does not measure by the scale. The desk has never measured by the scale. Bart himself ruled it in June, over an asphalt roller, and has repeated it to me at every opportunity since: heavy is not thiccc. Girth is. And Rocky, unlike nearly every record holder we are asked to admire, arrived with his girth published. One hundred and thirty-eight inches side to side. One hundred and thirty-one and a half end to end. Two hundred and thirty-one inches around. That is nineteen feet and three inches of circumference, which is to say that if Rocky were a room, I could not afford it.
Consider also the conditions. Mr Gienger grows in a backyard north of Minneapolis, where the temperature fell below freezing this season, and the organiser, a Mr Ronan Fowler, called the result "pretty unbelievable." A pumpkin that reaches two hundred and thirty-one inches around in Minnesota has not simply grown. It has insisted. One finds that admirable in a vegetable and rare in a person.
I put all of this to Bart in a memorandum. He replied, in pencil, that the catalogue does not award points for effort. I agree with him. I am not asking for points for effort. I am asking for points for circumference, which is the only thing this desk has ever counted, and which Rocky has in a quantity that the scale, being a scale, is simply not designed to notice.
The ruling: Thiccc, on the tape measure, whatever the scale says. Rocky is filed under Produce, Gourds, Championship, beside a note that the heavier contenders of the week are welcome to submit their circumference for comparison. Rocky will be paraded through Half Moon Bay this weekend. One hopes the route is wide.
Theodore Vance, who has ordered a longer tape measure.