If the pumpkins are rubber, why are we even here?

In this newsletter: Don’t ask about the pumpkins, what the Vermont surge tells us about the winter to come, and some words of advice.

Part I: Folks, The Pumpkins Were Rubber

I try not to be a party pooper, so I sat on this take until the Santa float had pulled up in front of Macy’s and the apple picking/fleece-and-a-flannel season was fully over, and here we are, and so here you go.

They have these things now called “pumpkin blazes,” which are these shows that set up in big field in some distant suburb, and you go there at night in the fall with your kids and walk around and look at illuminated jack-o'-lanterns. I’m not sure how widespread this is, and in fact there may be only two of them, but it’s definitely a thing.

Calling it a “blaze” is a bit misleading; nothing is set on fire. But that’s a minor discrepancy compared to the one I uncovered when we went to one of these blazes earlier this fall.

I first heard about this a couple of years ago from some flack, who mentioned it in passing. My instinct at the time was that it was the most goyishe¹ thing I had ever heard of in my life? Which is fine and good! I love goyishe things! Apple pie! John le Carré! Dinghy sailing! Oreo cookies! Carroll Gardens! Bertram Wooster! Old Town Canoes? I don’t know, air conditioning? Frozen bagels, when necessary? Sperry Top-Siders! I could go on!

Anyhow, we went this year, and I’ll say up top that the kids loved it, and that all went home happy and kept talking about how amazing it was for weeks, and still bring it up sometimes, and we’ll obviously go back next year. No complaints.

Well, except one.

We walk in, and there are all these sculptures made out of carved pumpkins, dramatically lit. (That’s the blaze aspect, the dramatic lighting.) There’s a pumpkin windmill, a pumpkin bridge, a dragon made out of pumpkins, a pumpkin Statue of Liberty (“I lift my pumpkin beside your blazing pumpkins,” obviously), pumpkin jellyfish, a pumpkin tyrannosaurus rex.

I will admit to you that I was kind of impressed, and found myself wandering around, repeating over and over again something like: “Holy cow, look at all the pumpkins!” I mean, there were all these sculptures there, made out of pumpkins? So many pumpkins. Such a massive agglomeration of pumpkins. Who had ever seen so many pumpkins in one place? Maybe there are industrial pumpkin fields out wherever pumpkins are grown where you see this number of pumpkins, but I’ve never been in one of those, and this was a lot of pumpkin for me. Where did they even get all of their pumpkins? Was there a pumpkin farm somewhere nearby, just acres and acres of fields, churning out pumpkins exclusively for this? A whole pumpkin supply chain, pumpkins trucks and pumpkin warehouses, dedicated entirely to creating pumpkins to be blazed in this particular field, in this particular distant suburb?

And while obviously there were structural elements supporting the pumpkins, the engineering involved in stacking all these pumpkins and attaching them to the arms of a windmill that actually rotated seemed kind of impressive! Pumpkins are heavy and easy to smash! It was all kind of amazing!

The weird thing was that the pumpkins had no smell. There’s this pumpkin odor you get when you spread the New York Times Real Estate section on the floor and sit down there and carve out a jack-'o-lantern, and it’s rather powerful, and I didn’t get a whiff of it from the pumpkin dragon, or the pumpkin bridge, or even this pumpkin tunnel where everyone was stopping to take pictures for their Instagram surrounded by hundreds of carved pumpkins.

It’s obviously dumb, in retrospect, that it did not occur to me that these pumpkins were not real pumpkins. I have no excuse, except that I’m apparently a sucker and susceptible to the power of suggestion, such that if you call a thing a “pumpkin blaze” I’m going to believe that it involves pumpkins? (OK now I’m looking it up and I see that it’s called a “jack-'o-lantern blaze,” and not a “pumpkin blaze,” which smells vaguely of lawyering.)

Anyway, we walk through the whole thing and I convince myself that they’ve come up with some special technique to preserve the pumpkins so that they don’t rot, and that this technique strips them of their pumpkin smell. I’m not sure what I was imagining. Some kind of chemical bath? Something like what they do at the dry cleaner’s; something spooky and alchemic that it’s best not to consider too deeply?

We get to the end, and I’m still going on about how many pumpkins there are like some kind of a dope, and as I look at the very last pumpkins I see a lady standing nearby who works there, and, being a dope, I ask her how they preserve the pumpkins.

And of course she tells me that the pumpkins are made of silicon, or latex, or whatever; I don’t recall, I was too stunned to fully process the information. Obviously the pumpkins are not real. Obviously they are not re-carving thousands of pumpkins every day. Obviously the place would be entirely overrun with rats and squirrels and raccoons if there were actually thousands of carved pumpkins just sitting there all the time. Obviously.

This is not some great secret. This was disclosed in the New York Times nearly a decade ago, in an article that mentioned this place. That article says that half of the pumpkins actually are real, which is perhaps still the case, I do not know. I will say that the woman who lifted the scales from my eyes told me where to look on the way out to see some some actual pumpkins, and when I saw those pumpkins it was abundantly clear that they were real and that some very large portion of the rest of the pumpkins at the blaze were not real, because it turns out that real pumpkins, when they sit outside for a little while, generally look like rotting gourds, which they are, and which fake pumpkins are not.

And yet. The revelation that some substantial segment of the pumpkins were rubber or foam or whatever seemed to me to pose a problem. Because if we were not there to look at pumpkins, what were we doing? The awe of the thing was in the whole “Holy cow, look at all the pumpkins!” aspect of it, the sheer volume of carved pumpkins gathered in one place, but if I wasn’t actually looking at any pumpkins, what was I looking at? Sculptures decorated with orange silicone? I’d been grading the spectacle on a “made with pumpkins” curve. A sculpted dragon doesn’t have to be too impressive in its artistic and structural aspects if it’s made out of pumpkins; it’s impressive enough that they made it out of pumpkins. When the Cake Boss makes a mermaid or whatever, it’s not like the mermaid is such a stunning mermaid; it’s that the mermaid is made out of cake. A pumpkin windmill is much the same: It’s in the shape of a windmill and I guess the lights are nice? But if those pumpkins are not actual pumpkins, then how’s it any different from the windmill on a mini golf course? Would I have been impressed by the pumpkin dragon if I had understood, when coming upon it in the dark, that it was not actually made out of pumpkins? I am not sure, because when I first saw the pumpkin dragon I thought it was a pumpkin dragon, and I can’t go back and see the pumpkin dragon for the first time again knowing that it’s actually not a pumpkin dragon, but rather an orange rubber dragon.

It’s a problem. So here’s what I’m thinking. If you do go to see the pumpkins get blazed next year, just don’t ask the lady how they preserve the pumpkins. No one asks the guy in the Mickey Mouse suit how they keep the tigers at the Jungle Cruise from eating the Dumbos in the Dumbo ride. Forget you read this (sorry), enjoy the “pumpkins,” and don’t be such a journalist all the time.

I will say one thing: Extraordinarily clean port-o-potties at the blaze. Really nice.

Part II: The Vermont Problem

Why are Covid-19 rates rising in highly-vaccinated northeastern states, and does it mean we’re in for another dark pandemic winter? I looked into it for a Barron’s feature published on Thanksgiving, hours before the world learned about the variant now known as Omicron. You can read it here, and I still think it’s worth reading, though with the caveat that Omicron introduces a new variable.

Part III: Words of Advice

• Six Thanksgivings ago - that’s six years ago on Thanksgiving - I tweeted the story of the Thanksgiving meat riot of 1906, when the kosher butchers of the Lower East Side all raised their beef prices from 14 cents per pound to 16 cents per pound on Thanksgiving day (I guess you bought your meat on Thanksgiving day in 1902 because you didn’t have a fridge?), and the women of the neighborhood responded with rotten eggs and old apples. (This is a different Lower East Side meat riot than the 1902 Lower East Side meat riot that I made a podcast episode about, which you can still listen to here or, if you prefer, here, and read about here.)

• Five Thanksgivings ago - and I promise I’m not going through everything I’ve ever written or tweeted about Thanksgiving in each of the past six years, but bear with me - I tweeted about why, on Thanksgiving on 1922, congregants at one of New York City's leading synagogues heard a sermon on not attacking the Ku Klux Klan.

• Four Thanksgivings ago… Just kidding. I think these guys played the big spring concert senior year of college? I think they opened for Ghostface? And maybe Andrew W.K. was there? This sounds like a dream. (I have Googled this and none of it happened.) Anyway, if they did play at my college, in my dream or in something closer to reality, they definitely did not play this song, which is a great song, and which they perform nicely in the above-linked clip. This song is, among other things, used as the title music to “Peep Show,” a program I first watched to distract me from a truly unpleasant day of hamburger-induced food poisoning, and which I have re-watched more times than I think I should admit. The advice here it watch “Peep Show,” not the linked cover of “Flagpole Sitta,” though I suspect most of you in the vague target demographic have already watched “Peep Show,” so just watch the linked cover, I guess.

• The Casey Jones Variations: Casey Jones. Casey Jones. Casey Jones. Casey Jones. (A pitch: A band called Casey Jones where everyone dresses like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles character Casey Jones and only plays covers of songs called Casey Jones. Eventually they get sick of singing about Casey Jones and start writing their own songs, but to maintain the shtick they name all their new songs “Casey Jones,” and their first album, the eponymous “Casey Jones,” has twelve tracks, each of them titled “Casey Jones,” though none of them mention the railroad engineer. The third track, “Casey Jones,” gets a ton of radio play, but listeners on Spotify can’t find it because there are eleven other tracks called “Casey Jones” by the band Casey Jones on the album “Casey Jones,” and their shows are kind of a nightmare, too, because the band is always like, “This next tune is called ‘Casey Jones,’” and the crowd gets excited that it’s going to be the radio hit “Casey Jones,” and sometimes it is, but usually it isn’t, and so pretty soon the band tries to break up but gets caught up in all kinds of lawsuits, including, improbably, one brought by whoever owns the rights to the Joe Hill catalogue, and eventually a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee retroactively changes the names of the songs on the album “Casey Jones” to “Casey Jones #1,” “Casey Jones #2, “Casey Jones #3,” etc., which actually has a huge impact on the streaming revenue, because now everyone who wants to hear the hit song “Casey Jones” can find it because it’s listed as “Casey Jones #3” on Spotify, and when the lead singer and the drummer eventually win the rights to continue performing as Casey Jones in a settlement they find that the stage shows go better, too, now that they can refer to the songs by the numbered names chosen by the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, and anyways that’s the pitch. Also the reconstituted band’s second album is called “The Ocean Whispers Like A Dying Sun” or something, and there’s a lot of synth and a drum machine, and the words “Casey” and “Jones” appear in neither the title nor the lyrics of any of the songs, though they keep the band name, more as a reminder of everything they had suffered through than anything else. And meanwhile the original bassist, who got bought out as part of the settlement, becomes an accountant and does alright for a decade or so, working for one of the big firms, auditing chains of car dealerships and that sort of thing, but then in his early 40s he has this health scare and it’s fine, just a little bit of cancer that gets scraped out, really no big deal, but afterwards he realizes he actually wishes he hadn’t left the band, and regrets all the fighting and the lawyers and how it all ended, and he calls up the other guys and they go out to dinner at a nice Italian place in Santa Monica and it goes great, and they remember why they wanted to make a band together in the first place all those years ago, and right there over big plates of pasta and fat glasses of Bordeaux they all decide that the bassist is back in the band and they’re going on tour again, and so they do, they book some venues and get a bus and they’re out there on the road and everyone is having fun, and they’re older, sure, but they can still make “Casey Jones #3” really crank most nights, and the crowds know all the words and it’s pretty fun. And then late one night their bus breaks down on the side of the highway between somewhere and nowhere and there’s no cell service, so they realize they have to get out and walk to that gas station a little ways back for help, so they leave the driver behind and they walk along the shoulder of this empty highway until they come to railroad crossing, and as they approach the crossing the bells start to ring and the guardrail comes down and all of a sudden screaming out of the night comes a locomotive, whistling and grinding and doing all the things the big engines do, and as it passes by in a rush of kinetic fury they look up and there is the engineer, smiling down from the bright cab, and his eyes meet each of theirs, and it’s Casey Jones himself, and each of them knows in that instant that Casey Jones thinks they’ve done well, Casey Jones thinks they’re doing well, Casey Jones thinks they’ll do well, and then Casey Jones gone, and then the train cars rumble past for what feels like forever, and there’s silence. And then Casey Jones from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jumps out from behind a bush and beats all three of them to death with a hockey stick.)

That’s all I’ve got!

1. Haha, no, I am not actually going to define “goyishe” here.