Blood and Guts

A warning for those who left the straight-and-narrow.

Halloween came to the park – with a bang. Honeymoon Island pulls the stops out every year with a huge Halloween spectacular. Our assignment was to cook hamburgers and hotdogs for the 300 volunteers involved in producing this extravaganza.

It also involved working during the week on the setup of the horror walk where we installed an outhouse, a funeral parlor, a Donner Pass stopover with appropriate cannibalism props (legs hanging out of the cook pot) and a saloon with a headless piano player.

All of this took massive planning by the rangers. It’s a major revenue producer for the park and all hands were on deck. Karen, our supervising ranger, was in charge of the volunteers. Karen reminds me of the ringmaster of a circus… or maybe one of those plate-spinners who keeps ever-increasing numbers of plates aloft. She pulled this one off with her usual good nature.

In addition to the horror trail we helped set up, there also was a haunted house, make from the picnic pavilion. Youngsters from the local high school appeared at 6 on Friday and Saturday nights with their ghoulish makeup, along with orange and yellow contact lenses, bloody clothing and nasty scars and gouges.

Jo and I cooked our burgers for the volunteers just outside the haunted house and we were subjected to the endless screams of the visitors as they made their way through the black corridors with the waiting un-dead.

Elsewhere in the picnic area, there were booths for face painting, fortune-telling, dunking, as well as other games. Thousands came each night to the park as the sun set and a waxing moon rose over the palm trees.