Kubotcha Tale

Years ago when we were still snowbirding in Arizona we usually camped together with our friends on the North side of Tom Wells Road which is half way between Quartzsite and Blythe.

Travelling from there to Blythe is a weigh station where trucks will have to stop when it is open. Most of the time it was closed though.

Two of my friends and I would walk across the desert to a service station by the highway. It was a very old one and has since been replaced with a Texaco Station. Using the old but still functioning station we used the pay phones to retrieve our emails with the then popular pocketmail devices.

All three of us had one of those and in the days without access to the internet in the desert, much different from now, we were happy to stay in contact with friends and family that way.

Some days we arrived at the service station parking lot, which was just a gravel area, to find mounds of fruit or vegetable in a back corner of the lot.

The truckers who hauled those goods along the highway knew that most of the time the weigh station was closed so quite often they would be overloaded. Since they all have CBs and alert each other to obstructions etc. they knew when the station was open for a change and stop at the old service station to drop off the surplus goods in a back corner.

When we passed the lot and saw there was new goodies we usually got our mail, went back to the campsite and returned to the parking lot with our containers to fill up on the free bounty.

One day we found a big hill of kubotcha squashes! Bonus! We picked up as many as we could carry and from then on we were eating squash for days and later on took a few home with us when out time in the South as up.

That spring we planted some of the seeds of the kabotcha and we have had squash ever since, which is about 12 years now. At first the results were all kinds of different squashes and there was even a pumpkin and spaghetti squash amongst them but by now they all come up as honey nut squashes.

I got reminded of this when we were having a good squash meal at dinner time.