j'aime la cerise

For the past 2 weeks I've worked as a fruit picker, cherries to be exact, on a few different orchards in Creston, British Columbia. My days have gone more or less like this:

4:30 - 5am: Wake up to shouting and murmuring in French (we finally found out that the howling owlish sound actually means something: Where are you? in French). After grabbing picking clothes, stumble out of tent to waiting coffee. Grab harness, walk or jump in a car, depending on where we're picking.

5:30/6am - 8:30am ish: Pick pick pick! Crew boss runs around, shouts at us, hands us stickers, punches holes in a card for each 25lb box that we fill. Muscles warm up, some old aches stretch out and some new aches show up suddenly. Up and down and up and down the ladder, always making sure to set it right and not fall off. Pick pick pick!

8:30 ish: Coffee break! The first day they only shouted it in French. Alex and I are the only ones who don't speak French so when we were the only ones to not show up for the coffee break that day, they started shouting it in English (and sometimes Spanish) too. Lots of sugary things with the coffee: muffins, cookies, brownies, sometimes struedels or little quiches (one orchard owner that we worked for used to have a bakery, yummmm).

9ish - 11 or 12 or 1pm: Pick pick pick! Ivan, our crew boss, runs around and makes sure everyone is smiling and has water. The sugar slows me down a bit but the coffee helps. The sun starts to come out so we have to pick faster before the cherries turn soft and burst in our fingers and we have to stop. Swampers run around and pick up boxes dumping them into large wooden bins, 11 totes per bin, soon to be scooped up by a tractor.

Afternoon: Freedom! People leave the orchard filthy, tired, covered in pesticides and in a sort of stupor that doesn't allow you to do much until the sun starts to go down. An icy shower perhaps or a cold beer or a trip to the river. I can rarely eat after I work, after all the movement and sugar and coffee, my stomach is too tied up. So I usually drop down in the shade and wait for the heat to subside. The river is beautiful and deep down in a canyon so when you sit on the rocks or sand all you've got is cold river and big blue sky.

Night: Typically a little beer drinking but most people go to bed a little before or after the sun goes down because picking starts so early. Sometimes games. Living with Quebecois is like living in a circus, someone is always juggling or throwing fire or hula hooping, I'm surprised that I haven't seen someone ride through the camp on a unicycle yet and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it happened.

I'm struggling to learn French but it's going slow. Today I learned some Quebecois swear words, they all have to do with the church, which the folks from France find absolutely hilarious. Words like chalice, tabernacle, the bread that you eat in church..all of these are swear words! They sound so grandmotherly, I like them a lot. Tabernack!