Diving for National Records

by Hap Rocketto

The first cold snap of autumn had come, and with it a new television season. As is our practice I stoked up the woodstove, the bride popped a bowl of popcorn, and we cuddled up on the couch to watch the season premier of Crime Scene Investigator, the Las Vegas one-not one of the spin-offs. The series is little more than a prime time soap opera with engaging characters and intertwining story lines that plays a bit fast and loose with the nuts and bolts of forensic criminal investigation. It is our weekly guilty pleasure.

It is easy to suspend belief for, in my case, I am easily distracted by Marg Helgenberger playing Catherine Willows. The methodology of evidence collection and evaluation intrigues me and, even though I know they are not all that accurate, is fun to watch. I must admit I am always on the lookout for firearms stuff and try to beat them to the punch.

On this seemingly quiet night two of the characters, Nick Stokes and Greg Sanders, flipped a coin to see who was going search a rather ripe, rancid, and raunchy dumpster for evidence. I empathized with them for recently I had been a participant, a distant one thank goodness, of a similar incident.

While Dumpster Diving is not an Olympic sport, shooting is. How they became intertwined and played a big part in the National Rifle Association’s 2008 New England Smallbore Rifle Position Regional is a story worth the telling. It all began when a local gadfly filed suit against Blue Trail Range for, in my opinion, alleged and trumped up safety issues. In the aftermath the range shut down for a short period and the summer shooting schedule was knocked into a cocked hat. The state association, caught short, scurried about the state for alternate venues and the matches were rescheduled.

The positional regional ended up at my home club, Quaker Hill, putting me in the position of club representative. Happy to be of assistance since I wasn’t shooting position last summer; I set up and broke down the range, acted as range officer and target boy, and was Chairman of the Jury. It was one of the first of the new one day conventional three position regionals to be held but that fact, and its ramifications, simply slipped my mind during the hectic preparations.

Things went well, except for a fierce thunderstorm that broke during the standing stage. While the shooters were under cover the same could not be said of the Range Officer, the target boy, and the Chairman of the Jury, not to mention the targets which were reduced to the basic ingredient for paper mache. After the challenge period had ended, the awards distributed, and the competitors left, I tossed the soggy targets into the dumpster, locked the gate, and headed home.

I had barely gotten out of my wet clothes when a phone call arrived from Lisette Grunwell. As a competitor she had stayed undercover and remained dry at the match and, not having to change clothing, went directly to her computer and looked up the National Records for the new course of fire. Finding that a number of participants in the match, herself included, had established National Records she felt compelled, for reasons unknown, to call me. I then called the Match Director who, not being a club member and living further away, asked if I would file the paperwork as I was Chairman of the Jury. I was happy to do so. I then remembered that I needed to submit the targets for verification. I called Lisette back, as she lives close to the club, and asked her to retrieve the targets. She agreed but, being no fool, immediately dispatched her fiancé Kent Lacey with instructions to recover the targets at all cost. Kent, being no fool, climbed into his truck, dove into the Dumpster, and returned to spread the targets out on the garage floor to dry.

Eventually the rescued mildewing mass of paper pulp got to me and was sent off to NRA Headquarters with the appropriate forms. Soon after, record certificates began falling all over Connecticut as do the leaves in autumn. But, alas, no good deed goes unpunished. Word quickly got back that I had overlooked one of the records and needed to make things right. I got on the phone to the NRA, informed them of the situation, and asked that they adjust the records accordingly. They would be only happy to do so, all I had to do was send in the targets.

The targets! In a panic I shot down the basement stairs relived to find the buff colored pile of putrefying pulp more or less safe and sound. What started as the official score cards of a rifle match had now turned into an interesting, if unintentional, mycology project. After brushing away an interesting assortment of fungi it only took some scraping to remove a minor coating of mold hiding the competitor and match numbers I sought. Quickly they were folded, stuffed into an envelope, and mailed off to the unsuspecting, and I hoped understanding and allergy free, NRA Competitions Division.

For the next few weeks I nervously scanned the newspaper hoping not to read of some postal facility in the Washington, DC area being evacuated when an envelope with a strange growth escaping from underneath the packaging set off the biological alarm system as it passed through a security screening. Much to my relief, within a week or two, the correct record was posted and the newspaper had remained mute. Once the record was posted online I wasted no time in bagging up the moldering mound of targets and, with fingers crossed, hoping no other record would be found missing, reinterred them in the local landfill’s white paper recycling dumpster.