DANBY, N.Y. — Reaching the 2017 Finger Lakes Fling, held on the last weekend in August, required entering Paul Maccarone and Chris O’Brien’s driveway. Still in your car, you eased left onto their vast, flat front lawn, careful not to clip the three skinny maples. You minded the garden fence, guarded by pink flamingoes and watering cans.

You parked among the compact cars, campers and minivans from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and Ontario. Then you followed the reverberating thunk to the couple’s three-acre backyard. There, 23 men and women — divided by and ability — tossed knives and tomahawks for two days into increasingly splintered wooden targets. Sometimes the blades split playing cards or whizzed by a mannequin’s ear.

The event was sanctioned by the International Knife Throwers Hall of Fame (or Ikthof, if you prefer), a 500-plus member organization. It was less about competition than about sharing a single love that had various origins: among them, a knife that was a gift from a father to his child; one that came from a renaissance fair; or ones that were swiped from grandma’s kitchen, just to see what they could do.

“Most people think I’m nuts,” said Jeff Perreault of Oswego, N.Y., as he took his first throw.

The stigma of misunderstanding dissolves with each thunk. “We all want to hear that sound over and over and over,” said Jack Dagger (yes, that’s his real name), the United States director of the International Knife Throwers Hall of Fame, which is based in Austin, Tex. “We’re chasing just the sound of success. Every time we do it, it’s a reward and it dumps endorphins in our brain and it gives us immediate confirmation of a job well done — right there, right then.”