Source: Boston Globe
Author: Judith Gaines, Globe Staff
PLAINFIELD, MA – Time was when a scarecrow did what it was supposed to do: It guarded the season’s crops from marauding birds and other hungry pests. But in what may be a sign of the times, many of these traditional harvest harbingers are turning their attention to other tasks, such as luring tourists, directing traffic, offering social commentary, even engaging in public feuds.
The change is plain in several rural New England communities just now and particularly in and around Plainfield — a western Massachusetts’ hill town where the crop of scarecrows, not vegetables, is so fulsome this fall that it could be called Scarecrow Central.
A visitor can see the shift at the Dillers’ home on North Union Street, for instance, where their scarecrow looks unlikely to ward off anything except perhaps a terribly cold winter. Clad in a ski cap and a brightly striped woolen neckscarf, it sits by the roadside, thumbs in jeans pockets, looking sad. A sign nearby reveals the reason: “The Summer That Never Was,” it says.
“It was so cold this summer that we only got to go swimming in the pond five times,” complained Jon Diller, 9, who made the scarecrow with help from his mother and brothers David, 4, Greg, 5, and Jake, 8.
Across from the Plainfield Town Hall, a civic-minded scarecrow holds a placard urging motorists to “Slow Down” because of all the children and pets in the area.
Down shady South Street, where the woods already are starting to turn their autumn hues, the scarecrows stand like beacons to artistry and inventiveness.
Resident Michael Melle, 42, delivers mail for the local post office, but neighbors like Jody Kerssenbrock say he should be called the region’s “Master Scarecrow-Maker Emeritus” because his carefully-crafted scarecrows are in a category all their own.
By his vegetable garden, a muscular Indian wields a bow and arrow at a big buck rearing up on its hind legs. But the arrowhead is an apple leaf “that isn’t going to do the job” of doing in the deer, he said.
Local deer, perhaps encouraged by this sight, “have been nibbling on the collard greens,” Melle observed, adding that he doesn’t really mind this.
Next door, Kerssenbrock, who has sung with Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society, the Robert Shaw Chorale and the New York City Opera, among others, has created a kind of scarecrow memorial to the musical “Phantom of the Opera.”
“There’s the phantom,” she said, pointing to a white-sheeted, ghost-like scarecrow swooping down from a tree. “And there’s the opera.”
An aged scarecrow, wearing an elegant long orange-and-yellow dress and carrying a basket of marigolds, looks shyly out from a flower patch in front of the bed-and-breakfast inn Kerssenbrock now runs.
Kerssenbrock admitted to having triggered much of the local scarecrow fever with a contest she created in 1991 and continued this year to help stimulate the local economy and give tourists something more to look at than autumn leaves.
The contest, open to anybody in the 10 hill towns of Hampshire County, offered prizes to creators of scarecrows in a range of categories, such as the prettiest, the funnest, the spiciest, the most contemporary, and so on. Winners will be announced next month.
There were so many entrants this year that Kerssenbrock has created a map, available at any local bed-and-breakfast, to help tourists find all 29 competing scarecrows.
But she never could have envisioned the feud that developed among the local fire departments.
The commotion started when some members of the Chesterfield fire department entered the Goshen firefighters in last year’s contest by making a cocky- looking crow that appeared one morning atop the Goshen fire station. Goshen responded by transporting the crow to the front steps of the home of Chesterfield’s fire chief.
This year the same arrogant crow was found sitting jauntily atop the maintenance shed of the Cummington highway crew, “with its legs crossed, tongue hanging out, kind of mocking the whole town,” observed Vinnie Rydel, 72, Cummington’s assistant tax collector.
So Cummington residents, led by Delbert Robbins, retaliated by building an enormous scarecrow on the Cummington town common, which offers its own commentary on the Chesterfield fire squad.
This huge black crow, with a 24-foot wing span and eyes that light up at night, “is gobbling up the Chesterfield fire department, one by one,” Rydel explained. The “graves” of four firefighters sit in front of the crow, as it gnaws on a fifth victim.
“We know they’re going to get us,” said Robbins, Cummington’s highway superintendent and a fire lieutenant. “But whatever they come up with, we’ll get back at them bigger and badder.”
It’s all in fun, he added, noting that the volunteer squads all work together when there’s a big fire in the area “and need to get to know each other better.”
In light of the success of this year’s scarecrow competition, Kerssenbrock says she is thinking about expanding the contest next year by including a scarecrow-making workshop and by extending the contest’s boundaries to include all of western Massachusetts.
“I’ve decided I can’t do much about the bad things that happen in this world,” she said. “But I think I can add a little good fun.”