Early Morning Updates Part Two

Good morning.

I am still caught in the shards of a most disturbing and intense dream. After my now customary 5am wakeup I fell back into a dream that I was in Germany at the unfolding of World War II. Terrible things were starting to happen and I was scared all the time. Then they rounded up a bunch of people from the street, some of my best friends from Goshen included, and made me spray icy jets of water at them. I couldn’t do it and ran away crying. My friends got mad at me, saying I had put myself at risk and that the water wouldn’t have killed them. In the magical manner of dreams I knew things were going to get a lot worse so I decided I should probably go home to America and felt guilty for having an escape when so many others didn’t, but then I couldn’t find my car and my friend (who really is in Germany right now) was being no help at all because she was preoccupied with skateboarding all over the parking lot, and then I opened my eyes and was safe in bed in Minnesota.

I’m having trouble shaking the feeling off, so sorry if I seem a bit distracted.

Back to my nice, calm, atrocity-free life here at the orchard. Blueberries. Blueberries are awesome to pick, because they come off the bush so easily and they are all good—no mushy, moldy berries to pick out. They are also delicious and nutritious. The most memorable picking day was the hottest day of the summer, when we took the afternoon off and reconvened to work in the evening. The humidity must have been something like 80 percent; you could feel the air, dew condensing on your skin just from walking through it. I have never sweat so spectacularly as that day. Jake, who is a major sweater on the coolest days, stood looking at his sweaty hands for a minute then wiped them on his pants, said “well, this is going to be gross” and set to picking. Because my readers are not in our customer radius I will tell you that those half pints of blueberries may have contained 2% or less of Man Sweat.

Since much of my time here consists of boring repetitive jobs, I am always eager to jump at the opportunity of doing anything different. Except the several days I helped Mauro put up apple maggot traps. Apple maggots come from the woods at a certain time of year, looking for something round and dark-colored to lay their eggs on. They would prefer an apple of course, but we fool them with apple-scented red balls covered in a sticky goo that the insects get stuck in. Apart from the peppering of dead bugs, the balls look strangely like Christmas tree ornaments. First, though we had to clean them. We dipped the balls, crusty with the carcasses of last year’s bugs, into gasoline and rubbed them off with rags. Before long everything was covered in gas, sticky residue, and bugs. It was probably the sexiest thing I’ve done all summer. Then we carried them out and hung one in every third tree around all 45 acres of the farm, attached a plastic bottle of apple scent, and painted on the sticky trap. I don’t mind getting dirty but I hate being sticky, especially the kind of sticky that is not water soluble. I had to clean myself off with gasoline at the end of the day. So, that was fun.

Right about here is where my farm journal gets spotty, so I don’t have dates for some things. Apricots came ripe and for the first time in my life I ate them fresh and loved them more than anything I have ever eaten. I ate them all day while they were here, and now I feel bad for not having eaten enough of them. Plums also came, and the last bucket in the cooler I’ve been filching out of has finally gone too soft to eat.

On a non-farm related note, I have been honing my haircutting skills, moving beyond just cutting my own hair and have officially become the farm barber. It’s really quite similar to pruning trees—a little off this side, a little off that side, balance it out, don’t chop the ears off. Easy.

I don’t have a single note about August. No idea if it even happened. It was hot, I vaguely remember that.

Living on top of a ridge is exhilarating. Because you can see the sky so far in every direction you can see weather coming from miles off, huge rolling thunderclouds, a wall of rain, dramatic sunbeams and sunsets, making it feel as if something is imminent all the time. I had the same feeling about the whole orchard in the beginning of September. They kept warning us that apple season was coming, describing the farm as a barge that is slow to start but unstoppable once it gets going. In the weeks leading up to apples we were consumed with weeding projects, with getting things to a stable place so we could ignore them for a while, with cleaning and checking the packing line and cider press.

We started picking apples slowly, just an hour or so, dumping our picking buckets into bushel boxes that we then loaded into the pickup truck. We packed the first, softer apple varieties by hand, polishing them with clothes one at a time. It seems sort of precious now, looking back.

Apple season hit like, well, like a picking bucket full of apples. Which weighs at least thirty pounds, by the way, and hangs from your shoulders by straps that cross your back, putting most of the weight on your neck muscles. It has two metal hoops in the canvas frame, one that is right at the level of that hollow spot right above my kneecap. A few times a full bucket has swung away and come banging back, making me wonder if the dent forming above my left knee will be permanent.

Then there are the picking ladders. Ten foot tall A-shaped wooden ladders, they are a thing of grace once you learn the technique of placing and climbing them, but until you reach that sweet spot they are cumbersome to the point of tears.. Sometimes you will think you’ve placed it securely only to have it slip and drop two feet to the next branch while you are on it, or if you lean too far to one side the ladder will twist, threatening to leave you hanging from the underside. Everyone has a different sound they make when this happens—Jake says “oh boy,” Johanna says “waaaaa!” My own cry is embarrassingly similar to the Pillsbury dough-boy’s “woohoohoohoo!” The nearest I have come to serious danger was a wet day when I was wearing rubber boots and turned one foot sideways on a rung to be more comfortable while I stood to pick, and my foot slipped straight down through the rung of the ladder. Fortunately I had hold of a branch with one hand, so nothing drastic happened. Another time I was on a very skinny tree and the branch I was leaning on, the only branch large enough to support me, began to break while I was at the top. I grabbed the trunk and the ladder, holding them together, and called frantically to Mauro, who came and held my ladder up while I climbed down. There is a part of me that loves that I get to do stupid things high up in trees as a job.

We picked nine to ten hours a day for two weeks. On the fourth night I was exhausted, sitting on my bed, thinking “augh, I have to pick apples tomorrow” when I found, oddly, that I didn’t mind. The switch had been made, and I realized that I like picking apples. I’ve found a rhythm to it. I wouldn’t want to do it for the rest of my life, but there is something enjoyable in it. The weather is gorgeous, the view across the coulees from the top of a picking ladder is breathtaking, and working so hard makes me feel pleasantly badass.

Packing apples is a whole other beast. There is something I like about it, the frantic, factory atmosphere, but I also kind of hate it. I’ve been inside most days this past week, and I feel like I’m missing the best part of the season. I’m ready to be done looking at apples all day, standing on concrete in a dim building with no windows with loud machinery and music I don’t like playing loud enough to be heard over said machinery.

In a fit of fortune, it’s lucky I’m ready to be done looking at apples, because in five days time I am going to be done looking at apples. This farm has never been a great fit for me; for a while I managed to convince myself that it could be, even that it should be, but as time has passed and the group dynamic has shifted it has become even less of a good fit and I have realized that the things that bother me are not inconsequential. In large part my unhappiness here is due to the fact that I am feeling pulled away from producing food that is packaged in massive amounts of plastic and shipped hundreds of miles away to be sold to only those with immunity to sticker shock. Yes, it’s organic, but that is not the be-all and the end-all of food production. So when I was offered the opportunity to leave early I jumped at it. I have learned a lot here, but I’m ready to move on.

What I will be moving on to will be coming later.

Sorry this blog was so delayed—a situation arose which required all my writterly attention and left me not in a frame of mind to be writing peppy updates about the place I’m in. But things have resolved and I had most of this one written, so I polished it up and here you go.

Thanks for reading, peace to all.