“Is the owner of this pumpkin in the building?” the tall man asked, using a microphone.

  I raised my hands and waved.

  “Good, good. Can you come here? We’d like to get your picture with the pumpkin.”

  Dad and I walked over. The crowd was now looking at us. I hated having the spotlight on me. That was definitely not my style. I preferred to stay away from that sort of thing. Here, though, I had a quest to fulfill, so there was no way around it.

  “Dad, why don’t you stand on one side?” the tall man said. “And you can stand on the other.”

  We did as he said. He and the other workers—and what looked like some more organizers—stood nearby. A woman from the local news took a handful of pictures.

  “Great job,” the tall man said afterwards. “Are you going to the event on the river tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Looking forward to that.”

  “I’ll see you there,” he said. “And again, congrats on winning. I’ll mail you the prize, so expect it.”

  He offered his hand, and I shook it. That was when I looked at the results of the quest.

  I was elated by the amount of experience. It was so much more than most of the quests I had done in the past! Then I remembered how much I had spent in order to win. The smile fell from my face. I had lost a fair chunk of experience. I’d learned valuable things—like the bit about the pesticides, which were giving me notifications now and then when something died—but, at the same time, I’d spent so much to get that.

  I wasn’t sure it had been worthwhile. I mentally shook my head. What was done was done. There wasn’t anything I could do except take the lessons learned to heart and not repeat the same mistakes in the future.

  Dad and I wandered through the fair for a few hours while it wound down. Since the pumpkins had been weighed and prizes handed out—or put in the mail, in my case—we didn’t have to wait too long before loading the pumpkin into the truck and driving it the few miles to where the event would be.

  “What do we need to do?” Dad asked when we parked the truck where the event would be.

  “Besides unload it?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I’ve got to cut the top off and get a paddle to use for the race.”

  “I think that’s doable. We’ll figure out the logistics of getting it out later. For now, let’s get what you’ll need.”

  “Sure.”

  We got back in the truck and went to the closest outdoorsy store. There, we bought a kayak paddle, a hatchet, and a stack of metal buckets—both for the scraping and to hold everything that was removed from the pumpkin. Then we retired for the night at a local hotel.

  The next morning—after breakfast—Dad and I went back to the river where the event would be. There were other people there when we arrived. Thankfully, someone—the organizers, perhaps—had thought to bring a small crane to move the pumpkins with.

  As I cast my eyes around, I saw I wasn’t the only one who had yet to carve the pumpkin into a boat. In fact, that was true for most of the participants. The pumpkins were in various stages of being worked on. Some just starting while others were nearing completion.

  “Can you help me get my pumpkin out of the truck?” I asked the closest person to the crane.

  “Oh, hey,” he said. “I’m not the owner of the crane. I think you’ll want to ask the lady behind the table over there.”

  He pointed to a foldable plastic and metal table in the middle of the event. There were two people behind it—one woman and one man.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And good luck later.”

  “You too.”

  I walked over to the table. There was a small line that cleared quickly. When it was my turn, the woman looked at me.

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  “How can I help?” she asked.

  “I need help getting my pumpkin off Dad’s truck,” I said.

  “Alright. One moment.”

  She turned to the side and cupped her hands around her mouth to make a megaphone.

  “Eric!” she yelled. “The boy needs his pumpkin off a truck!”

  The person she was yelling for turned and walked towards me.

  “You the kid who needs the pumpkin moved?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lead the way.”

  He followed me back to Dad’s truck.

  “That’s a huge one,” he commented when he saw it.

  “Just got it back from the fair.”

  “Oh, did you, now? And how’d you do?”

  “I won!” I exclaimed with a huge grin.

  “Wow! Now let’s see if we can get that thing off the truck. I’ll go get the crane.”

  The man left and came back with the promised crane. It took some doing on our part to get the straps around the pumpkin, but eventually he could lift it and place it a few feet into the river—not enough that it would float, but enough that I wouldn’t need the crane again to launch it into the water for the race.

  “Thanks,” I said when we got the straps off of it.

  “No problem.”

  Dad wandered over with the tools as soon as Eric left.

  “So how do you want to do this?” he asked.

  “I think I’ll start with the hatchet.”

  He handed it to me.

  “Do you need me?”

  “Not yet.” I shook my head. “When I’m done getting the top off, I might need help scraping the inside.”

  “Alright. I’ll watch you. Yell if you need me.”

  I took the hatchet and began by marking out where I was going to cut. Then, with short hacks, I dug the hatched in along the marks. I had to do three passes before I could force the top from the rest. I say top, but it was really a part of the side as the pumpkin had grown in such a way that the stem was effectively the front of the soon-to-be boat.

  The part I had cut away was heavy. Even for me—with all of my extra strength. It took both arms working overtime to push it off the giant pumpkin and onto the nearby shore.

  I looked inside. The pumpkin strings and seeds were a tangled mess inside. I hopped off the pumpkin to put the hatchet away for the moment. When I did, I pulled the cut section fully onto the shore. Pulling it out of the water was far easier than getting it out of the pumpkin had been.

  “Ned help?” Dad asked when he saw me struggling with it.

  “I’ve got it,” I said.

  With one final heave, it was fully on the shore. I was breathing hard from the exertion.

  “I could use some help with cleaning the inside now that I’ve got the top off.”

  “Sure. What do you need me to do?”

  “Can you pass me buckets? I’ll give you the full ones to empty wherever they have a place for that.”

  “One bucket coming right up!”

  Dad went back to the truck and came back with the stack of buckets. He handed me one.

  “I’ll be right back. I’ll see where the trash goes, so fill that up while I’m gone.”

  I waved before climbing up onto the pumpkin. With the bucket in hand, I cleaned from the top down. There was no way the process was going to be anything by a mess. At some point, I was going to have to jump down into that slippery mess to get the stuff at the bottom. For now, though, I used my hands and the bucket to scrape away the strings and attached seeds I could easily reach. I was being purposefully slow as I was awaiting Dad’s return before diving into the mess.

  Dad came back around the same time I finished with the first bucket.

  “Can you get me another bucket?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, picking one up. “They’ve got a dumpster on the other side. I’ll empty out the buckets when we start to run out.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I accepted the bucket and went back to cleaning the inside of the pumpkin. With only one bucket, I hadn’t gotten very far into the mess. A second barely made another dent. That’s when I called Dad over to help.

  Now that there were two people with buckets working, the process was faster. Starting from the top, we cleared out everything we could reach. I brought out the hatchet to clean up the cutout at the top. It was helpful to also thin out the walls of the pumpkin to save on weight. The pumpkin was going to be difficult to paddle around, even without the extra weight. Keeping it on? Unconscionable!

  For the next two hours, we got as much of the goop, seeds, and excess pumpkin out as we could. In the end, the pumpkin was large enough for me to stand in and paddle. It could probably fit Dad, but the two of us might be too much weight for the pumpkin to remain buoyant.

  “You might want to toss a few rocks into the pumpkin,” Dad told me.

  “Why?” I wondered.

  “Ballast. It’ll make the thing more stable. Looking at it, it’s round and you’ll be standing up. That’s a bad combination for staying upright. Throwing maybe a hundred pounds at the bottom will ensure you don’t go swimming when you don’t want to.”

  “But won’t it sink?”

  “Nah. That thing’s huge. Tipping over’s the main issue.”

  “Alright, so where does the rock come from?”

  “Look down?”

  I did and then wanted to smack my forehead. The riverbank was full of smooth rocks!

  “Well, would you look at that,” I said.

  Dad chuckled.

  After dumping the rest of the pumpkin guts into the dumpster, Dad helped me load the bottom of the pumpkin with river rock. From the inside of the pumpkin, this made the base I stood on flatter and less slick. It was like walking in sand, though, so while the catastrophic slip risk was gone, there was still substantial danger to slide around if I wasn’t careful about it.

  “What do you want to do before it starts?” Dad asked.

  “How long do we have?”

  “It starts in about two hours.”

  “Grab some lunch, get the pumpkin to the other side, and see if I can win?”

  “Sounds good,” he laughed.

  We returned an hour later after eating at a local cafe. The pumpkin was where I left it. I went to get in it but was stopped by one of the organizers.

  “You’ll need a life jacket,” he said.

  “Do you have any extras? I didn’t think about that.”

  “Thankfully, we do. I’ll get one for you. Might be a bit big.”

  I shrugged and thanked the man. He dutifully returned a few minutes later. I tossed it over my clothes and climbed into the S.S. Gourdiana—yes; I named the pumpkin, even going as far as to cut the skin off in such a way as to spell its name. Dad handed me the paddle and helped push me into the river.

  “I’ll see you on the other side,” he told me. “Paddle safe.”

  I rolled my eyes and got to paddling. The pumpkin was… well, it was anything but controllable. Every paddle turned the pumpkin a lot. It was heavy, but I was strong. I went forward, yes, but it was in a very serpentine path. One stroke turned me one way, and the next turned me back. I practiced turning around by paddling on one side more than the other. When I felt I had the hang of it, I completed my crossing of the river.

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