Beer can make a guy do strange things. Whether it’s caused by drinking suds or the prospects of getting free beer, the brewskis have influenced a lot of odd behavior. I’m certainly no exception. Much of my youth could be summed up with the words, “Hold my beer and watch this!” I could tell you some stories – but that’s a topic for another time.
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Today, though, we see that in Maine, the annual North American Wife-Carrying Championships are underway, and yes, there is beer involved.
An annual event involving dirt, beer and cash once again drew dozens of eager competitors to a ski resort in Maine on Saturday.
More than 30 couples competed in the North American Wife Carrying Championship, a 278-yard (254-meter) race during which contestants splash through water, leap over logs and trudge through mud — all while carrying their partner like a sack of potatoes.
The sport’s origin story isn’t exactly politically correct. It’s based on a 19th century Finnish legend involving a man known as “Ronkainen the Robber,” whose gang was known to pillage villages and carry away the women, according to one of the explanations included on the website wife-carrying.org.
Traditionally, the Finnish event featured male competitors carrying a woman. On Saturday, competing couples didn’t have to be married, nor did they have to be a man and a woman.
That’s unbeerlievable – until you read what the prizes for the first-place finishers are. Granted the competition is fierce, and the winners must truly be lager than life characters.
The champion leaves with the weight of the “wife” in beer and five times the “wife’s” weight in cash. To estimate the amount they win, the winning “wife” is put on one side of a see-saw-like scale that organizers balance out on the other side with cases of beer.
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Imagine winning a competition where you’re awarded your wife’s weight in beer; granted my wife is pretty tiny, but that’s still a fair amount of beer. And five times her weight in cash would buy a lot more beer. It would be, I admit, a brew-tiful thing.
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This may have been something I would have tried, maybe, when I was younger. I doubt that these days my wife would appreciate being carried through a mud pit, even by me, with just my beer hands. And I’m a pretty stout guy, but I’m not as tough as I was forty years ago. No, at our age, I don’t think there’s any amount of beer pressure that could convince us to participate.
Besides, this is an odd pastime. Here in Alaska we just launch cars off cliffs. And people think that is weird.
As my grandfather was fond of saying, “Every cat its own rat,” and, we suppose, every locality its own odd traditions, customs, and practices. These are great traditions, and I’m hoptimistic that they will continue. What’s an American community without its own unique traditions?
After all: Some people juggle geese.
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