by Bud Kenny
I had been asked that so many times, I had a standard reply. “Not really. Because the people asking them are all different, so that makes the questions different.”
However, near the end of the interview, one of them did ask me a question I had not heard before–and I wasn’t able to answer it.
It was the desk who said, “If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?”
New York became the Empire State by way of the Erie Canal. When it was completed in 1825, the three-hundred-sixty-three-mile waterway connected Lake Erie at Buffalo to the Hudson River in Albany. This gave the Great Lakes access to the Atlantic Ocean, and it firmly established New York City as the front door to America.
Farmers and loggers in central and western New York were the first to take advantage of this new access to the world. It was a cheap way to move a lot of goods. And it didn’t take the rest of America long to catch on. Ships sailed from as far away as Duluth, Minnesota, to offload products in Buffalo bound for New York City. Traffic was so heavy, that just ten years after it opened, the Erie Canal had to be widened and locks enlarged to accommodate the traffic.
We were near the canal, about five miles west of Lockport on Highway 31, when a man with his five-year-old grandson stopped and asked if he could take our picture. He had seen us on the evening news a week earlier and just had to stop.
During our visit, I said, “People have treated us good here in the Empire State.”
The man shook his gray head. “It’s the rust state.”
“Huh?”
“You just walked through Buffalo, didn’t you? What did you see? I’ll tell ya. You saw lots of factories, all of them closed and rusting away.”
He was right. On our walk through Buffalo and the outlying communities, we saw several abandoned manufacturing plants, and the prevailing color was rust. In varying shades, it was on old water towers, dilapidated chain-link fences, and idle machinery that had been left behind. In some places this industrial decay was surrounded by cornfields, apple trees and other crops.
“Used to be, if you didn’t have a job it was because you didn’t want one. We had factories all through here. But now they’re gone and never coming back. Ain’t nothing around here now but farming.”
“Why did they shut down?”
“Unions, that’s why.” He was putting his camera in its case. “And I was a union man all my life.”
He’d worked for thirty years at a General Motors plant on the edge of Lockport. “In the old days, unions did lots of good. But now they exist just to keep themselves alive. My last few years on the job, they’d have us strike just to prove we needed them.”
After buckling his grandson’s seat belt, he slammed the passenger door, turned to me and said, “I had all the benefits I needed, I was making great money, why would I want to go on strike? But every couple years they’d find some reason to hit the picket line.”
He slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine. “The American worker has priced himself out of the job market.”
CHAPTER 14
WHERE APPLE TREES SPEAK SPANISH
CHRIS WAS POURING BEER FROM the pitcher into his glass as he said, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had an American picking apples for us. You’ll be our token gringo.”
A sinister grin grew under his Hitler mustache. “This ought to be real interesting.”
Chris, and his wife Karen, owned and operated Watt’s Fruit Farm. It was a mile north of the Erie Canal at Albion, New York, and it was not just an orchard. Besides their four-thousand apple trees, the Watts produced cherries, apricots, peaches, raspberries and they had half a dozen pumpkin patches. The farm also had a market with a gift shop, café, huge greenhouse, a straw maze, playground and petting zoo
They also had a train called, “The Orchard Express.” It was an old flat-bed truck that had been made to look like a locomotive, and it pulled three wooden passenger cars that could carry one hundred people. On the weekends, they used it to give tours of the farm and take people into the orchard so they could pick their own apples. Through the week, school groups boarded the train for an educational tour that explained not only the workings of the farm but the workings of nature. Under a giant oak, students sat in a circle on logs while a woman in hiking boots explained photosynthesis.
In the green house, a deaf woman–dressed as a bee–did a demonstration on pollination. And because we were camped in the orchard near the oak tree, we were added to the tour.
The Watts had six orchards at different locations around that part of Orleans County. It was October 21st when we arrived at the main farm and apple harvest was in full swing. So Chris had lots of pickers in the trees, and all twenty-nine of them were Mexican.
Most of the pickers stayed at a migrant camp in an orchard nearly ten miles from the main farm. It was a long concrete block building that looked like a dumpy motel. Each room had a door and one window. In the middle of the building was a huge community kitchen with communal bathrooms and showers–like the ones back in high school.
The upper echelon of the migrants–the manager, tractor and truck drivers–stayed in a two story, rambling house at the main farm. Known as the Harding House, the red brick core of it was built in 1834. After many additions, the Harding House now had eleven bedrooms, and for the past ten years had been a migrant house.
“How would you like to stay there for the winter?”
Patricia asked me that question shortly after she and Karen Watt returned from a trip to Walmart in Batavia. Then she said, “Karen told me that usually a few Mexicans stay through the winter, but they’re all going home this year. So she asked if we wanted to move into the Harding House and help them take care of the farm.”
That night, Chris and Karen took us out for pizza and beer at the bowling alley so we could talk about it. Besides taking care of winter chores, Chris wanted us to cleanup the Harding House. “It isn’t going to be easy. Been nothing but Mexicans living in it, and they don’t take care of nothing!”
Chris was my age and about my height, but he weighed half-again as much as me. Besides a hefty stomach, his other distinctive feature was the Hitler mustache. “If we get them all out of there for a while, maybe you can make it civil again.”
But it was going to be at least a month before they left for Mexico. Until then, the Watts said we could live in the upstairs of their house. Karen and Chris only used the bottom floor. The house was about five miles from the main farm, adjacent to one of their other orchards.
It was after we got that all figured out that I asked Chris about picking apples. He said I could start Monday. So, over the weekend I built a stall for Della in a barn near the Harding House, and put up a paddock for her. Then Monday morning I bicycled the five miles to where I was to rendezvous with the farm manager, Chooey.
We were to meet at seven. I got there a few minutes early, so I leaned my bike against the Harding House and waited. Adjacent to the house was a lane that led to a network of gravel roads into the orchard. While I waited for Chooey, carloads of Mexicans filed past me. I waved at each one, but only a couple of hands waved back–and they were half-hearted. Most of them looked away when they saw me. I was beginning to feel very much out of place. And each passing car made me feel worse.
Suddenly, six jabbering men came bounding out the back door of the house. All of them were laughing as they climbed onto the tractors and into trucks parked in the yard. The morning air was alive with words like, “Arriba!” “Manos a la obra!” “Andando!”
Right then, I was wishing I had learned what Senora Schubach tried to teach me back in high school Spanish. I may have been an American on an American farm, but I felt very much like a stranger in a strange land.
“Sorry I’m late,” Chooey said. “I had to stop at one of the other farms.”
He spoke the kind of English that can only roll off a Latin tongue. With r’s that rippled and j’s that were missing in words like Jesus and Juan. He was a dashing,
light-complected man who had worked on the Watt farm for half of his thirty years.
“So, you ready to pick apples?”
We met Chooey the day we arrived at the farm, and I liked him right away. He was mature and serious when it came to business of the farm, but under that professional veneer I sensed a mischievous boy. Opening the driver’s door of his black late-model pickup truck, he said, “Put your bike in the back.”
After he slammed the tailgate, Chooey motioned for me to get in the passenger seat. I barely had the door closed when he put the truck into motion and sped toward the highway. At the edge of the pavement, he stomped on the accelerator, and the back tires screamed as we fish-tailed out onto the highway headed toward town.
“I’ll show you where to pick. But I’ve got to take care of something first.”
We stopped at a convenience store and he bought us both a cup of coffee. Then a few minutes later he pulled into an orchard on the east side of Albion where he had a rapid fire Spanish conversation with a man on a tractor.
A few minutes later, as he drove out of the orchard, Chooey turned to me and said, “Habla Espanol?”
“Un poco?”
“A little?” Then he commenced to babble at me in Spanish.
I held up my hand and said, “Whoa! When I say little, I mean very little.”
When Chooey laughed, he suddenly had round cheeks that weren’t there before. His eyes narrowed to slits and a blush flooded his face. “Oh, okay.”
We were on a bridge over the canal, when he turned to me and asked, “Why do you want to pick apples?”
“Well, I’ve never picked apples before. So I thought it would be a good experience. And we need the money.”
“You don’t make much money picking apples.”
“A little money is better than none.”
We both laughed a bit before I said, “I figure if you folks earn enough to make it worth your while to come up here, then I should be able make enough to get me by.”
Chooey had sort of a pensive expression on his face as he nodded. “Okay.”
“And I’m thinking once I get the hang of picking, I should do pretty damn good. You know, being tall and all.”
“Oh?”
When I turned to look at Chooey, the corner of his left eye brow was raised. And I swear, little horns poked up through his hair when he said, “We’ll see.”
While we rolled along the gravel roads between the rows of trees, I spotted several of the cars that had passed me earlier. Some were parked at the end of the rows, others were in the aisles between the trees. Many had doors open, but none had people in them. They were in the trees.
The main farm was dissected by Oak Orchard Creek, which had been dammed up more than a hundred years ago. Behind the dam was a pretty pond with willows weeping over it and ancient autumn oaks standing tall around it. Several geese and ducks were gliding across the shimmering surface.
After we crossed the dam, Chooey stopped his truck on the east side of the pond beside a row of loaded apple trees. At the end of the row was a small wooden sign that identified them as Jonah Gold. Chooey opened his door, “This is where you start. You pick these three rows.”
Apple pickers use a metal bucket that the Mexicans call “buche” (pronounced boo/cha–long “a”). The bucket was concaved on the side against their bellies and hung from their shoulders by a strap that went around the back of their neck. The bottom of the bucket was open with a two foot long canvas tube around it. Stitched across the bottom of the tube was a length of rope with knots on each end. To close the bottom of the bucket, the bottom of the tube was folded up to the top of the bucket and secured by slipping the knotted rope into metal clips on each side of it. When the buche was full, they took it to a wooden bin and released the rope from the clips so the apples could roll out the bottom of the tube into a bin.
“But you have to be careful the apples don’t drop out of the buche,” Chooey said. “You want them to roll out, because if they drop, it will bruise them.”
Then Chooey donned the buche and commenced to pick. His hands and arms moved like they were part of a machine. While he snatched the fruit from the lower branches he said, “You don’t want to drop them into the buche. That will bruise them too. Lay them in it and don’t use your fingers. Use your whole hand.”
He showed me how to caress the apple in the fatty part of the palm. Then with his forefinger and thumb he pinched the stem and twisted it from the branch. “Don’t squeeze, that will bruise the apple. You’re picking fresh fruit here, and they can’t be bruised.”
“Isn’t it all fresh fruit?”
Chooey laughed. “Yes. But when I say fresh fruit, that means these apples are what you buy in the grocery store. The rest go to processing, for apple juice and sauce.”
He had the buche filled in less than five minutes. Then he waddled to the bin about ten yards up the aisle between the trees. After he showed me how to empty it, he put the buche strap around my neck and helped me adjust it. “You got any questions?”
“What about the apples on the ground?”
I was relieved when he said, “They’re for processing. We’ll get them later.”
Thousands were on the ground, and just the thought of being bent over that long made my back hurt. Thank God I didn’t have to do that.
“Just try not to step on them.”
Then he taught me how to shuffle through the fallen apples. Chooey also showed me how to manipulate the three-legged pointed aluminum ladder in through the branches. “But you want to pick the apples on the bottom branches first.”
“Why?”
“So you don’t knock them off when you’re up in the tree.”
After he left, I went to work. I couldn’t believe how much fun it was to pluck the golden and red orbs from the tree. Within minutes, my arms were working automatically among the branches. They wove through the limbs to the rhythm of Mexican music from radios of the cars parked among the trees. A base line of tubas in a polka-style beat embellished by trumpets, guitars and Spanish voices. From all directions in the orchard, live voices sang along with the radios. The sun was out, the music upbeat and the voices in the trees were joyous. It was all very festive.
When the buche was full I started toward the bin with the load wobbling on my stomach and thighs. While I waddled between the trees, I wondered, “Is this what it’s like to be pregnant? Having to lean back to balance the burden in your belly, and only able to waddle because the weight prohibits you from taking a real step.”
With the bottom branches picked, I started up the ladder. Suddenly the fun turned into a struggle. When I tried to climb up through the branches, they snagged my clothes, entangled my legs and grabbed at the buche. Finally situated on the ladder, I began to pick.
Soon my buche was full, so I started down the ladder. When I took the first step I heard something tumble through the branches below me. I looked down just in time to see the last apple fall out the bottom of the bucket.
“Dammit!”
The knotted ropes on the bottom had come out of the clips. I figured the knots weren’t big enough. So I put another knot in them and went back to picking. When the buche was full, I started down the ladder again. As I stepped on the bottom rung, I heard tumbling apples. Just the right side had come undone, but it still let all the apples out.
I yelled at the tree, “What am I doing wrong?”
So, it was back up the ladder. This time when I started down, I kept my eyes on the knots. Half way down, a branch snagged the left rope and yanked it out of the clip. When I leaned over to grab the bag, a twig jabbed into my right eye. Instinctively, my lid shut. But that didn’t stop the twig from ramming into the socket between the bridge of my nose and my eyeball. I froze as apples bounced off the ladder and down to the ground.
It felt like I had a whole tree in my eye. I was afraid if I moved, it would rip my eye ball out, but I couldn’t just stand there. So I slowly backed my head away from the branch
. As it came out I could feel the knobbiness of the twig rubbing my eyeball, and I expected to find blood and eye tissue on the twig. Would I be forever blind on my right side?
I wasn’t. My vision was blurred for a while and my eye was sore, but otherwise I was all right. Apple picking wasn’t so much fun anymore.
Before I went back up the ladder, I tied the ropes into the buche clips so the tree couldn’t rob me. By the end of the day I had filled three of the twenty-two bushel bins. At fifty-five cents a bushel that first day netted me $36.10, and a stick in the eye.
“Why don’t you take the day off?” Patricia said.
The next morning when I stood up from our bed, I moaned and quickly sat back down. Every inch of me hurt, especially my shoulders and arms, and my right eye felt like it was three times the size of my left. Patricia rubbed my back as she said, “You aren’t used to doing this kind of work. Give your body a day to rest.”
“They’ll all think I’m a sissy.”
When I stood up and walked into the bathroom, my muscles were screaming, “Bud, we are sissies! Please don’t make us do this!”
After I cooked and ate breakfast, and packed my lunch, I went out in the yard to climb on my bike. I was strapping on my helmet when Chris came out the door and said, “You want a lift to the farm?”
“No thanks, I can ride.”
He opened the door to his pickup “How many bins did you get yesterday?”
“Three.”
He walked around to the back of his truck. “So how do you feel this morning?”
“Fine.”
He opened the tailgate and turned to me. “Who do you think you’re kidding? I’ve picked apples all my life, and even though most of those people in the orchard are half my age, I bet I can still out-pick any of them. But I also know, if I filled three bins today, I wouldn’t be worth a damn for a week.”
He motioned me over to the truck. “Put your bike in the back. Let me give you a lift to work, old man.”