Oct 25 2009
Let it fly
Pre-Ramble: So, four things happen pretty much every year around the end of October that signal that the fall season has officially arrived:
- tons of acorns fall into the backyard until you feel like you’re walking around on marbles;
- the local bakery rolls out its seasonal frosted pumpkin cookies (unbelievably yummy);
- the classic animation, “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown“ is on at 7:00 on a school night;
- the closing story on the local news is some rural yahoo hurling pumpkins 500 feet through the air with one of those medieval homemade catapults as cheering bystanders watch them smash into tiny bits in an adjacent corn field.
Yep, it’s officially fall in the upper Midwest.
It’s that fourth indicator that I’d like to discuss — the catapult, or trebuchet (pronounced treb-yoo-shet). According to our experts at Wikipedia, a trebuchet works by “using the mechanical advantage principle of leverage, releasing a sling and arm mechanism to propel a stone or other projectile towards a target with great force.” The trebuchet was used in the Middle Ages (and in the Broadway play “Spamalot“) to smash into masonry walls or to throw projectiles over them. Recorded flings could apparently send “350 lb+ projectiles at high speeds into enemy fortifications.” (Caution: skip this next part if you’re squeamish or eating breakfast.) “On occasion, disease-infected corpses were flung into cities in an attempt to infect or terrorize the people under siege – a medieval form of biological warfare.” (Eeeeeoww!)
Over the past decade, the sport of “pumpkin chucking” has become somewhat popular, with the annual World Championship Punkin’ Chuckin’ Contest held in Sussex County Delaware bringing a variety of launching machines, including the trebuchet, to the fore. The record-holding toss in the competitive 8 pound pumpkin event is the Yankee Siege, a 51 foot tall, 55,000 pound apparatus developed by former dentist Steve Seigars. Owing to the miracle that is constantly updated, open-sourced information, “as of October 2009 (which would basically be now), the trebuchet has unofficially broken the 2,000 foot mark, with a possible throw of up to 2,300 feet.”
Boys will be boys - Well, so, there are these four guys in Minnesota who have designed and constructed a trebuchet in one of the guys mother’s backyard. We’re not talking about Beaver Cleaver and a group of Cub Scouts messing around with sticks and rubberbands (“Wash up for dinner, boys!” … ), these guys are in their mid-thirties and presumably have day jobs.
In the spring of 2008 they began construction on their machine using reclaimed materials like construction lumber, landscape timbers, slabs of aluminum, old garage-door parts (“stuff you can get at any Menards … “), and a 265-gallon fuel tank that they found on Craigslist. The initial goal was to launch old bowling balls into the nearby field, but after a few ”successful” attempts, they began to branch out. “The trebuchet team is now testing the flight and crash-landing characteristics of obsolete consumer electronics” including old televisions, computers and clothes dryers. This could be ”David Letterman, the Rural Edition.”
William Gurstelle, author of “Backyard Ballistics,” suggests that,
Most people who build stuff like giant catapults are doing what they’re doing because they’re seeking a challenge — the challenge of creating something big and wonderful in a physical, tangible way.”
The Take-Away: Great! Never mind the trauma that would be visited upon Linus and the gang should they have cause to witness their much beloved pumpkins subjected to the vaulting/smashing exercise, the homemade trebuchet is appealing for a number of reasons. It is inventive, over-sized and somewhat whimsical; it uses recycled materials; incorporates movement; invites anticipation; and ultimately, it provides an oddly simple, down-to-earth form of entertainment. While I’m not generally a fan of wrecking stuff, anything that facilitates and celebrates the creation of “something big and wonderful” is a potential personal growth opportunity and worth a second look.
Post-Note: I wonder how far a fully-loaded golf bag would go?
Do you think I could use a trebuchet in a road rage setting ?
I know exactly what doing something big and spectacular for the sake of it looks like except I call it the Great Model Train Project. Everyone has to have a “thing” because you only go around once! But if you are not “on board”, to use the train parlance, it might look like nothing more than madness.