My neighbors down at the dead end of the street invited me to one and it was yesterday and man, that was just wild. We drove about three hours into the middle of nowhere to this old farmhouse by a lake with big open fields as well as some wooded areas. There were maybe 25 or 30 people there that had driven in from all over the place. Apparently they do this twice a year, once in winter and once in summer.
Upon arrival and after exchanging hellos we all sat down around this big wooden picnic table for a lunch of beans on toast. The only thing to drink was grain alcohol mixed with pure rainwater. There was a fiddle band playing on a Bluetooth speaker and when they weren’t eating people were dancing around slapping their knees and hooting. They would also lean their heads back and let out wolf howls too. Eventually someone brought out a box with a bunch of colored bandanas, red yellow and green. You took a bandana and tied it around your arm, that was how we got separated into three roughly equal-sized teams.
Then the actual skunk-holler portion began. We learned that six skunks had been released on the property and it was up to us to catch them using nothing but our hands and our “skunk-hollerin’ technique” which is similar to the wolf howl but lower in pitch. The skunks had been trained to respond to this sound by spraying their skunk juice all over the place so it stunk to high heaven. When you eventually caught a skunk you made sure that it sprayed you directly in the face before you brought it back to the picnic area and dropped it into the holding pen. Whichever team brought in the most skunks won, and the prize was that you got to spend an hour in the pen with the agitated spraying skunks.
Even though I was a newbie I was actually pretty good at skunk-hollerin’ and I caught two of them on my own, and another member of our team caught two more. We won easily and each got to spend time in the pen with the agitated skunks. I got bitten several times and the skunk also sprayed into my open wounds. I made sure to hold my eyes and mouth wide open as much as I could in order to get the full experience. Man what a day!