Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 4 No. 4 | Winter 1984 (Seattle) /// Issue 2 of 24 /// Master# 50 of 73

PickingI ■I \ Walt Curtis Andpluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden applies of the sun. W.B. Yeats >f you have ever looked closely at jEthe sunburned, weather, beaten, dirt-encrusted face of a middle-aged fruit tramp, his Tom-o-Bedlam eyes roving, as I have, you’d feel dubious about trading places with him. Recently, as a 41-year-old urban Portland poet, I got an education about the Pacific Northwest’s most abundant fruit, when I visited an applepickers’ camp in the great state of Washington. Northward I headed, to visit a friend and try it myself. Everytime I enter Washington state I feel nervous! Why? As an Oregonian, I harbor mixed feelings about the political atmosphere. I confess this is a little hypocritical of me, because Oregon is hardly Ecotopia. Besides, I was born in Olympia! Lived there till the age of 13, when my father lost his , job at the Mt. Rainier Ordinance Depot. So the fear of God that I feel when I cross the state line has more to do with pubescent Freudian angst than anything else. On Oct. 9, I crossed the bridge at Biggs Junction, drove past the marvelous French-chateau-looking museum at Maryhill, heading toward Golden- dale, Yakima, Ellensburg, Wenatchee and beyond. No state trooper would pull me over for driving a car with Oregon plates. My oil-burning ’66 Plymouth station wagon didn’t cause much alarm as it tooled along. Yakima has a hard edge t o '*• 1 s a w . some young men in a van try to steal F a r gas from a sette r service station. They cursed out the attendant and seemed very desperate. Would I see them in the orchard? As I drove northward, I found myself crossing a dry barren landscape. No wonder there’s a huge Yakima firing range. Not much to blow up out here, except jackrabbits . and a rattlesnake or two. Wenatchee, at the tumwater where the. Wenatchee River enters the Columbia, retains its Indian name, which means “water issuing forth.” The Yakimas and other dry-land Indians called the spring salmon fishery “Winatsha.” Yet today, without irrigation water, this area would remain sand and sagebrush until the next ice age. Many dams (Grand Coulee, Chief Joseph, Wells, Rocky Reach, Rock Island, and Priest Rapids) have turned the Columbia into a series of lakes and reservoirs which make the Eastern Washington desert literally bloom. As the local newspaper, The Wenatchee World, claims, I am in the “Apple Capital and Buckle of the Power Belt of the Great Northwest.” While there, I visit the North Central Washington Museum (located on Mission Street). The curator showed me their colorful display of labels from old-fashioned . wood apple crates. BO-PEEP, SNO- FED, FAR FAMED, SWEET SUE, REDMAN, CLIPPER SHIP, JONNIE-O, A-PLUS, and LEGAL TENDER — the labels with their cheesecake and noble Indians reflect another era. In earlier times, he told me, farmers used lead arsenate as a pesticide to kill the destructive coddling moth. “To this day,” he said, “it’s unsafe to grow certain vegetables in that soil.” Little Owl Orchard / t /K y friend Dave Thorsen had told x rim e to look for the painted sign of an owl, some miles past Orondo. (It was 25 miles north of Wenatchee, above the jacked-up waters of Rocky Reach Dam on the Columbia). I found it easily, and its companion orchard Wee Hoot. (Mounted on metal columns, the three or four wind machines among the trees looked like stranded airplane propellers.) Doyle and Thyra Fleming must own the most picturesque orchard in the Orondo Valley. Perched high on a bluff, overlooking the mirror-like surface of Lake Entiat, a windbreak of poplars yellowing beside the road in the dazzling October sunshine, the view was nearly breathtaking. As I parked the car, I saw a spirited volleyball game in progress. Men and women, ages 20 to 30, leaped and yelled, shouting, “You know where the hole is now.” The reply went, “Right in the middle of the net!” I thought, after work they have this much energy? What am I doing here? Dave walked across the green lawn, in front of the trailers, to greet me. I have arrived at the last week of picking varieties of Red Delicious. For half the crew, this was the end, although some would say to finish off the green Granny Smiths. Later that evening, inside the cramped quarters of his small trailer, Dave reassured me, “You don’t have to pick, if you don’t want to. Doyle says it's okay, though.” With that, we joined the gang around the campfire. The pickers were bantering and talking. They were about the friendliest bunch of people I’d ever met. For starters, I was told Golden Delicious paid ten dollars a bin, but they bruised easily. Red Delicious paid nine, and Grannies ten. A bin is four by four feet square, and maybe two-and-a-half foot deep. It weighs about 800 pounds. Good pickers can pick six, seven bins a day. Maybe more. The season lasts three weeks to a month. And you could earn up to a thousand dollars or more. How many apples does a bin contain? 1500? 2000? Well, that would depend upon the size of the apples. The bigger, the better. Good picking is called “gravy,” because the bin fills up faster. When encountered, the delighted picker, imitating comedian Steve Martin, will irrationally yell, “Die, you gravy-sucking pig!” The others in the orchard will take up the cry. After the first week, Dave said he saw apple patterns everywhere, even when he wasn’t picking. L realize you ’re not a picker until you fight those goddamned trees. But you can't harm the apples! You grab soft and make it seem mean. They gotta know who J boss! Camp Life f amp life is the bare bottom of 2- V-/year-old Katahdin (he’s named after the mountain in Maine) watching Carmella, his mother, wring out clothes on the camp washing machine. Camp life is bright yellow aggressive wasps buzzing near your sleeping bag, looking for a place to hibernate. It’s the blue pop of the propane gas flame when you light the stove to cook your dinner of brown rice and refried beans. The condiments are: El Pato (duck) hot sauce and cans of Schmidt beer, mallard (more ducks) on the label. It’s dirty dishes stacked in the cold water sink and dirty socks and T-shirts on the floor of Dave’s trailer, because he’s been so darn busy picking. His trailer, a nifty one from the fifties with wood paneling everywhere, even on the light switch, is a healthy 8 Clinton St. Quarterly

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