No AI involved in 2025 Halloween Pumpkin Drop

Story by Katie Banning and Mike Weland
Photos by Piper Banning

At 4 p.m. Halloween day, Boundary Tractor owner Cal Russell did an amazing thing for the community, staging a free and awesome but all-too-brief smashing pumpkins concert. For those in attendance, it may have been just one hit, but it was a wonder not to be forgotten.

Rewind close to 20 years ago when Rick Maggi gave him a 1,000-plus pound pumpkin.

“What could I do with a 1000-pound pumpkin?” Cal thought. “Make 1,000 pumpkin pies? No! I’ll drop it from 60 feet in the air and watch the wake of pumpkin guts spew as hundreds cheer!”

It was an idea whose time had come.

The 2025 Boundary Tractor Halloween Pumpkin Drop didn’t play on any political or social issues of the day.

And he did it with absolutely no artificial intelligence, no computer-generated imagery, just hard work, physics, sweat and guts. Lots and lots of guts.

It was just pumpkins. The biggest, a pale orange, almost pink behemoth weighing in the neighborhood of 1,200 pounds, too fragile to hoist, stayed on the ground, showing little emotion, just staying cool and nonchalant as a large, admiring crowd built up around, many of them young-trick-or-treaters in full costume who got their first tricks of the night from a witch toiling mightily over a smoking caldron, letting out the occasional shriek and cackle as her bubbling brew of rats, bat lips, spiders, eye of newt and fat frogs simmered to perfection.

Meanwhile Cal, happy as a kid in a toy store, orchestrated the hoisting of the smaller orange one, about 800 pounds with his crew. Strapped into a custom harness, a plumb bob attached at its base for precise aiming. Soon it was on its way up, and up, a physics lesson in action.

The big, pinkish pumpkin lolling lazily on the ground rested with an inertia of about 37.27 slugs (probably stolen from the boiling cauldron while the witch was tending to the plump and tender little children) while orange one had an inertia of about 24.84 slugs.

Using Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence principle, the big fella has a rest energy of 4.08 × 10¹⁹ Joules, the little boy of 3.26 x 10¹⁹ Joules.

When the little pumpkin was hoisted, it gained potential energy of about 64,345 joules at 60 feet.

After the countdown, the orange one was released, and potential energy became 64,327 joules, about the same energy needed to light a 1,000 watt light bulb for 0.64 seconds or to throw a regulation-size baseball 45 miles-per-hour.

It reached a final velocity of 29.1 feet per second, hitting Mr. Nonchalant at a speed of about 19.8 miles per hour.

I can’t vouch for my science, having never taken a physics class, but the ensuing concert, though brief, was spectacular.

As the pumpkins smashed, inert vocalist Mr. Nonchalant let out a deep, loud and somehow satisfying bass “ooof!” and the rest of the concert was syncopated percussion as various sizes of rind, a multitude of seeds and gallons of viscous pumpkin guts rose and fell to earth in an amazingly large circumference, a glissando.

And it was over. With 2,000 pounds of pumpkin puree now spread across the blacktop of the Boundary Tractor, the masses rushed into to get their piece of the pie.

Within minutes the pumpkin guts had been scraped off the parking lot. What didn’t go for holiday pies for people were packed up for livestock around the county, not even the pumpkin bones or sinew went to waste.

Encore, Maestro Cal, encore!