FLYING WATERMELONS

As is true with all successful attempts at banditry, stealing watermelons requires careful planning. A moonless night is essential, as is thorough attention to the details of the designated attack area. The height of the fence surrounding the field, any significant topographical indentations that might provide cover, and -- most importantly -- the location and sleep habits of the guard, all have to be taken into account.

The adventurers must never park their vehicle on a paved road near the object field. However slight the chance of raising the suspicion of a passing motorist in the hours shortly after midnight, too many raids have been thwarted by such a careless error, often with the consequence of a load of buckshot in a boy’s butt.

The choice of raiding vehicle is also crucial. It must be able to maneuver on rough and unpaved roads and quite possibly across open fields. If a four wheel drive conveyance is not available, at the least one with reinforced springs and a chassis with a high road clearance is a requisite. My father owned a pickup truck that met the latter specifications.

Bill, Billy, and I scouted the field on a quiet Sunday afternoon. We found a dirt track -- probably an old logging road -- leading into a forest of pine and live oak about two hundred yards beyond our target, followed it in a rough line paralleling the field’s western fence line, and were eventually able to maneuver the truck to find the northern boundary and bump our way along it to a point of some seclusion beneath a large oak tree. We were pleased to note that we had settled on a spot about as distant from the rough-built guard tower as we could get.

To enable us to return to our point of attack in the dark of the coming night, we blazed a trail on our way out, using a hatchet to make wide slashes in a number of trees. These were not amateurs at work.

There was a tacit understanding between the growers and teenage bandits that the poaching of watermelons was generally regarded as something of a game, a test of youthful bravado against experienced cunning. As long as there was no wanton destruction of the fruit, and if we attempted to carry off only that needed to sate our immediate appetites, even if we were caught, there was no danger of any punishment, other than notification to our parents. The one exception was what might be administered on the spot by the guard and his twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot. They were always in play.

Sometime after midnight, under a dark sky made more opaque by massive rain clouds, Bill, Billy and I weighted down the top strands of the barbed wire fence with a pair of heavy tree limbs. We could then easily jump over the simple barrier and be on our way.

I was never able to explain this, nor can I today, but something always drew us to the center of the field on these adventures. This was a crop of the Royal Sweet type of melons, described in my grandfather’s seed catalog as “....oblong, blocky shaped hybrids with medium dark, fairly wide, green stripes on a light green background, with thick rind and crisp red flesh.” I can only assume we believed those with the crispest red flesh were to be found at the innermost part of the patch. Whatever the attraction, that’s where we headed, obviously not very concerned that every advance took us closer to the guard.

We moved slowly on hands and knees from melon to melon, thumping each to listen for the deep hollow echo that would reveal the ripe fruit. Bill and I each had cut from its vine one of our self-imposed limit of two, and Billy already had a pair, when the searchlight flared on and the shotgun boomed. The buckshot sailed harmlessly over our heads, undoubtedly because that’s where the guard had aimed. Bill and I crawled together as fast as we could, using what terrain cover was available, until we escaped the light. Then we bounced to our feet and ran pell mell for the fence.

I looked back once to see an incredible sight. Billy had obviously dropped to the ground like Bill and I when we first heard the shotgun, but he was now back on his feet scrambling to pick up his two watermelons. Bill and I kept going at full speed. We safely cleared the fence, but in doing so, one of us accidentally freed one of the tree limbs, and when it fell, it released enough spring in the barbed wire to fling the second one to the ground as well. The entire fence was then back at its original height.

As Bill and I scrambled into the truck, we looked back to see Billy caught clearly in the bright searchlight. He was running as fast as he could with a watermelon cradled on each shoulder. I swear I heard the guard laugh out loud as he fired the next round of buckshot, a substantial amount of which caught Billy square in the butt. He let out a yelp, performed a kind of skipping leap, hit the ground back at full gallop, and kept on coming, his watermelons still safely nestled on his shoulders.

Billy never hesitated as he approached the fence. Without breaking stride, he soared over it in a single bound, the watermelons flying right along with him. He gently laid the melons in the back of the truck on the old packing material we had brought along for that purpose and less gently plopped himself in right behind them. And we were off.

Billy later said he didn’t mind that we had run without him, but to flee without the melons we had already cut from the vine was inexcusable. It was tantamount to leaving a wounded comrade on the field of battle.