Square watermelons? That’s not how we roll

Of all the changes I have seen in horticulture over the past 35 years, none is as severe as what we have done to the watermelon. You would not recognize the sweet summer fruit of my youth in varieties offered up today. I speak with bias, as my life was saved by a watermelon, or so it seemed at the time.

One of several volunteers on a sea-turtle rescue mission, I had been deposited alone on one end of an isolated South Carolina beach at sunrise. Scooting over the wet sand in a dune buggy, we had crossed several tracks made by female turtles during the pre-dawn hours as they crawled slowly out of the surf to the high-tide line, intent on laying their eggs. My job was to remove the buried eggs from each nest and move them to an impoundment protected from raccoons and other predators by wire fencing. I had to make new nests, digging each hole in the sand to the depth of my arm in the shape of an inverted light bulb, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. Each nest took an hour to dig.

After my driver left me with a promise to return by noon, I quickly inventoried the supplies piled on the sand and found everything necessary for the task at hand. The buggy was a speck on the horizon when I realized my water jug was still on the back seat.

I labored for six hot, full-sun hours without water, each nest taking longer to dig than the last as I dehydrated. My headache grew more intense with each trip across the sand carrying buckets heavy with eggs.

The driver returned as promised, but without water. Facing another parched hour back to the old house where we bunked, I wasn’t sure I would make it without passing out.

The road away from the beach passed through a salt marsh into live oaks festooned with Spanish moss. Among the trees was an old shack with a sagging roof, a group of black children gathered around a wagon under a tree in the dusty yard. They waved and shouted at us, beckoned us to join them. In their midst I saw the washtub on the ground, the watermelons packed in ice.

The melons were round and dark green, as big as basketballs, and when sliced open the bright red flesh was studded with large black seeds. Nothing ever tasted wetter or colder or sweeter. We ate the cold watermelon in the shade, spitting seeds into the dust, making a game of who could spit their seeds the farthest.

I have no use for the seedless and tasteless melons offered these days. Seed spitting is integral to eating a watermelon. Eating a modern watermelon is like shaking hands with a pretty girl at her door.

I read that the next improvement in watermelons will be a change in shape, that Japan is leading the way in marketing square watermelons. It seems the fruits will take the shape of the container that surrounds them, so let’s make it easier to stack them on trucks and in the refrigerator. And square watermelons will not roll off the kitchen counter.

I suppose that you can’t miss what you have never experienced, but I know that watermelons were never meant for refrigerators or kitchen counters. They were meant for washtubs filled with ice, for slicing on the boards of an old wagon bed, for eating in the shade on a hot summer afternoon while seeing who can spit the seeds the farthest.

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