mess: a guitar, black iron skillet, wheat germ, miso paste, boxes of apples bought to take home. (Fresh apples exude an alluring fragrance. Elan vitale breathes from their pores.) Fruit flies buzzing above them. To live in a little home like this with gas stove, running water, cupboards, curtains and a table is a joy. Dave loves the camping-out feeling of it. He’d be a hobo forever, if he had his way. Camp life is laughter over raunchy jokes and complaints about the lack of eligible single women pickers coming from “The Blind Pig,” the bachelors’ trailer, late at night. It’s an affectionate brown and tan female mutt named “Gumpy.” If you don’t believe in “the buddy system” and that Little Owl Orchard is a temporary but loving and supportive community, you shouldn’t come back next year. (Most pickers do! OUTSIDERS, NEED NOT APPLY.) Doyle’s wife, Thyra, dispenses sun- ripened tomatoes and solicitously asks each picker if he or she needs anything. She can also crack tough- minded comments about each individual’s agricultural skills, when she hands out the bin tickets. (I, early on, dubbed myself “One-Bin Walt.”) There are the pickers: Dave and his sister Jackie (who is to be married in Spokane on Halloween). Mike and Cathy, artists from Portland. Will and Bessie, who make the best morning coffee. Jim Cook, Carmella, and their two children. (They homestead up near the Canadian border.) Three nurserymen: tall Jim the vegetarian, Danny Rosato (he wants it known he can leap over a full bin of apples), and Bafe-bottomed Katahdin and friend another “Will.” (PACIFIC PROPAGATORS, Expert Grafting & Propagating, Sheridan, OR.) “Bellingham Bob” writes children’s stories. Tuck is a tow-headed labor organizer. Have I left anyone out? Tim the woodcarver from Seattle and his partner the “Reverend” Jack Rogers. (Red-whiskered, bespectacled Jack has come up “for the cure” and twisted his knee.) Brian, who’s been working at Grady Auvil’s nearby, hangs around because he knows everyone from last year — and he can get a hot shower. Milk Them Suckers! On Wednesday afternoon I get up guts enough to pick. (I am ashamed to admit it: I’m a little bit of an elitist! Aren’t the pickers the proletariat? the journalist the bourgeoisie? the growers the bosses? When I joke about it with Dave, he says, “You always did feel superior to everyone else.”) I am handicapped'. Missing the middle finger on my left hand, I am capable of dropping my toothbrush. Tuck and Dave are encouraging. They help me strap on the canvas bag. Show me ladder sets. How to pluck the fruit between thumb and forefinger. It’ll get callused. (Some pickers tape their fingers.) When you get it down, it’s two apples in each hand, which you lay carefully in the picking bag. You can’t bruise the fruit, and all of the stem is supposed to remain on. Dave and I work on the same tree. “We gobbled that tree like a termite,” he says. He shows me how to carefully release the canvas bag and gently spread the fruit. “There can’t be any thunder and lightning in the bin,” he warns. (I note a row of Goldens planted next to Reds in a row. Golden Delicious pollinate the Reds. Sometimes the grower grafts a limb of Goldens on a tree of Reds.) I’m pinching my fingers and scarring my arms, but I’m getting the feeling of it. I 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’s boss! The primary thing in apple-picking is “reach” and the ability to keep your hands moving at all times. The secret of picking: Get the bag to the bin. A picker shouts enthusiastically, “Milk them suckers! Grab the big clusters.” Another goes, “Cockledoodledoo!” Dave caws like a crow. (On the last day, he will goodnatured- ly juggle Reds.) We will climb to the top of a wind machine and survey the orchard. (These machines cost I am ashamed to admit it: Tm a little bit of an elitist! Aren 7 the pickers the proletariat? the journalist the bourgeoisie? the growers the bosses? David says, “You always didfeel superior to everyone else. $10,000 each and have replaced smudge pots. They blow the warm upper air toward the freezing ground.) Young Dave moves confidently in his third year. (“Like greased owl shit,” he comments.) He picks two or three trees to my struggling one. His long lean elastic body flows with the limbs. Leaves fall in a storm. I watch him in admiration. (Although he doesn’t look like Sunny Jim on the apple butter jar, Dave, despite his black curly Norwegian hair and intense brown eyes, truly is a dyed-in-the- wool apple-picking Washingtonian. Born in Arlington, he digs farm work.) It wasn’t always this easy for him. He confided, “One time when Doyle and Thyra were near me, I fell over backwards on the ladder, was hung up with my legs through it, and they had to help me out!” You’re not a real apple picker until you’ve fallen off your ladder a number of times. At lunch time, everyone winces when someone says, “I’m not ‘picky.’” Time to go back to work, Tim yells out, “All right, maggots! Get out there and pick those apples.” The Blind Pig ■ he Blind Pig.” What is it? JL It’s a trailer where pickers gather at night after work. A transistor plays tapes, the only “sounds” up here. Uncle Meat, Frank Zappa’s album and Dave’s favorite. Acoustic music and Chicago blues. In a prominent place is displayed the motto: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE SHIT TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AS WE SEE FIT. On cardboard a crudely Menu, The Blind Pig drawn pig with dark sunglasses and lettering explains: “A Division of Albert’s Funky Bar & Grill.” The Blind Pig is a clubhouse, an institution of the camp. Pickers crowd in there, listening to music, laughing, talking. Slumgullion is shared by all. You might see Tim, with his jackknife, deftly carving a figurine out of walnut. (He’s been working on an image of Jackie with ladder and her bag. A masterpiece he’ll sell to Doyle and Thyra at the payoff party.) Dave might be scarfing food, and with Jack’s advice and tutelage adding to the facetious “menu” of The Blind Pig. He carefully and imaginatively writes on a piece of brown paper sack: Eggs Any Style. Glop Any Style 1 Day Old...bowl .80 2 Day Old... $1.60 Mudd Heavy Duty Industrial, Commercial and Fleet Use, Farm and Home Grade, Special Applications. House Beers: GENERII, “MABEL,” and “GREEN DEATH.” For The Refined Swine, the menu offers THE GREENHORNED GRINGO: A Float with Rainier Ale, Chocolate Mint Ice Cream, Smothered with Sprouts and TOPPED with an old Sardine. THE DESENEX BURGER: A Ground Kangaroo Tail Patty Melt with Bleu Cheese, Anchovie Paste (something else?), and, of course, Desenex. Dave reads the menu outloud for the approval of the others. On the day of the payout party, Thursday night, he will finish the menu with THE PENICILLIN BURGER. What will be missing is “the Tylenol Sundae.” Darn it! The Davies anting to find out the grow- FF ers’ side of apple production, one evening I visited with Lois and Paul Davies, who own a fourthgeneration family orchard, in Orondo. Of 48 acres. His Welsh grandfather came here early on. (Orondo got a post office in 1888. John H. Smith, the founder, named the town after one of the chiefs of the sunken island of Atlantis.) They raise not only apples, but also cherries, peaches, and pears.. Paul’s dad processes the crop in the family warehouse of Standard and Davies. With its weathered boards and aluminum roof, it does not look at all like the grim windowless mausoleums of Trout, Inc., Tree Top, and Blue Chelan. Where the oxygen is reduced to 3 percent and the temperature dropped to 34 degrees. Those poor fresh apples are stored cryogenically, to be resurrected sometime in February or June of next year. I asked them both what happens at the warehouse. They said I should visit and see for myself, but went on to explain: The bins of apples are week, while sleeping in my car, I could reach out and drink from the Big Dipper, tipped on end. The air was transparent! The Milky Way, which the Chinese call ‘‘the River o f Heaven, ’’ quenched my sleep and intoxicated my dreams. dumped in chlorinated water. They float, go up on a conveyor belt, and are hit with dripping soap. They’re carried onto rollers with brushes, and a jet of water washes the soap off. “So they almost get the pesticide scrubbed off?” I brashly ask. “What pesticide?” Paul quips back. (He believes the danger with pesticides occurs during the appliction. That their potency is short-term, that the farmer doesn’t overuse them because they cost so much per gallon.) “Then they ‘wax,’” Lois chimes in. A device shoots wax on the apples as they go through “a cooker” — of about 180 degrees — for 10 feet. “If we could sell ’em unwaxed, it’d be great!” Paul apologizes. “Who demands that apples be ‘waxed’?” I ask. “The supermarkets?” “It’s the lady buying the produce,” spunky Lois responds. “She demands a nice shiny-looking red apple. If you taste a Jonathan or a Winesap, you’ve gcrt a good-tasting apple. If you taste a Red, it’s like a potato! If you try to sell a Winesap or a Johnnie in a store, no one’ll buy it.” Then the apples are graded, Fancy or Extra Fancy, according to size, and put in 48-pound boxes. A fingernail cut in the skin makes an apple a cull. Fit only for juice. A bruise, a stem pull, or a limb rub diminishes their value. “With real rotten fruit, on a bad year,” Paul says, “a farmer might owe the warehouse money.” Paul chuckles, rather darkly, “The greatest year will be the year you get the crop, and your next door neighbor loses it! We can do better, hopefully, on a bad year. This year everybody and their dog has got apples! The price is peanuts.” As I spoke with Lois, who is charmingly pregnant, and her husband Paul, with the sly dry sense of humor, I began to feel real respect for their efforts. Trying to make it year after year with a relatively small orchard, which had to provide a living for three families. Lois emphasizes farming fruit trees is an 11-month-a-year job! Their 2-year-old son Jon, with a runny nose, bangs against my knee. Will he become a grower like his dad? A grower, like a gambler, is always banking on Clinton St. Quarterly
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