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The Sherlockian picnic . . .

We had the annual picnic of our local Sherlock Holmes society in Peoria this week.

Sherlockians and picnics is a combination I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand. We’re book people for the most part. We’re not strapping outdoorsmen. There is at least one notable Sherlockian who climbs mountains, as well as a skier or two, in our midst, but they are the exceptions, not the rule. Once I attended a Sherlockian symposium at a Florida beach resort, and the visual difference between the other tourists and the Sherlockians was so severe that you almost thought the mothership had dropped our pale, muscle-free physiques there. Sherlockians like to attend their Silver Blaze races in that air-conditioned part of the track that’s sealed off from the flies vexing the tail-whipping racehorses, and they’re also at their happiest in the dim, hidden corners of the urban bookstore. So why the picnic?

The picnic is not really a true Sherlock Holmes related function. The only mention of the word "picnic" in the sixty tales of Holmes is in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where old Frankland the crank has sued to keep the Fernworthy townsfolk from their favorite picnic place. If anything, one would think we’d be anti-picnic.

Since we seem to have this mysterious desire to have picnics, we have to come up with something to do at them. Croquet is a popular choice. It was Victorian. But could you ever picture Sherlock Holmes picking up a croquet mallet if it wasn’t lying next to a dead person? Shooting is a more Canonical choice for a picnic, but it’s not something you can casually do in a public park, an urban backyard, or many of the places we wind up having our picnics. And like I said before, we’re book people. We usually like reading about guns a lot more than actually firing the damned things. (But again, there are definitely exceptions.)

As you can see, I’m not really a picnic person. But tradition is what it is, and the tradition of the Hansoms of John Clayton is to have a picnic on the third Saturday afternoon in July, a very hot and humid time in central Illinois. In previous years, we’ve held the picnic in some rather scenic backyards, the sort that border on woodlands or a lake, with a sliding glass door we can hide behind if the actual outdoors is a bit too steamy. This year, a last minute site change meant we had to do without the sliding door . . . or the air-conditioned house behind it.

Ninety-three degrees. Sixty percent humidity. High noon for the Hansoms.

Twenty-four years earlier, the Hansoms had held a picnic in Jubilee State Park, a few miles west of Peoria. We don’t know how many attended from the newsletter report, but we do know that some Double-Barrelled Tiger Cubs came up from Champaign-Urbana (and none of the Naval Treaty folks from St. Louis showed up). There was a quiz covering the entire Canon, and an event that had been previously advertised thusly: "In VALL we find Holmes exterminating four eggs for breakfast. I can guarantee you that we’ll exterminate considerably more than four during what may be the most hilarious event of the day."

Well, the Tiger Cubs don’t show up any more. We don’t really have a quiz any more. But the "exterminating of the eggs"? The Hansoms have never had a picnic without it in the last twenty-four years.

Attendance was down at this year’s Hansom picnic, as it’s been for most of the scion’s activities of late. In fact, for a moment or two, we were actually wondering if the postal service delivered the meeting notices. But the Hansoms have enough diehard members than two or three of them will show up to any given event. The balance of food hit all the required food groups, including some nice home-made lemon sherbet – a real accomplishment in the heat. The wasps and flies stayed clear, and aside from a few bites from a mystery bug, nature let us be.

But in the end, a Hansom picnic always comes down to the eggs. And eventually we popped open the "organ donor" ice chest that held the eggs, took off any rings we were wearing, softened up those palms, and prepared to play catch with raw eggs.

Yes, the one picnic tradition the Hansoms of John Clayton hold to is playing catch with raw eggs. Like I said earlier, Sherlockians have a hard time coming up with things to do at their picnics . . . .

But you just haven’t lived until you’ve had an egg whipping at you across a forty foot trajectory and actually managed to safely bring it to rest in your hands, shell intact. Talk about your extreme sports!

The competition was held; the victors, Mike Cook and Carolann Purcell, demonstrated a masterful skill at the throwing and catching of the eggs; and none of us got egg yolk on us this year. All in all, you’d have to call it a success.

But I still don’t understand the Sherlockian/picnic thing. And with eggs whipping at my head, perhaps I never will.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver