K-K-K-K-Keremeos.....

We spent 2 weeks in the village of Keremeos, nestled in the valley at the feet of K mountain, alongside the Similkameen River. At the Mariposa orchard, we were given a little plot of land under an enormous willow tree to pitch our tent and even a place to plug in our electric stove ($5 garage sale find!) and the discman. Within a few days we met our neighbors, four solitary men who live in separate cabins in front of where we camped: Joe, a former convict, current "Peace" officer with a booming voice who works in the village of Osoyoos, about an hour from Keremeos, and deals primarily with people's complaints about their neighbors or their neighbor's dogs; Gee, a French Canadian with a 12 year old chihuahua named Titchi, who let us use his stove and bathroom and entertained us with stories about bears and selling Xmas trees in Queens, NYC; Wayne, who we didn't talk to much but saw often talking to himself and rushing around, he was rarely home; and Hart, who we never talked to but saw occasionally crouched down and smoking a cigarette next to his cabin. He's Joe's brother and, according to Joe, highly anti-social. Outside of our neighbors, our interactions with other people were almost completely with other pickers, all either Quebecois or Mexican. I've yet to meet another picker who speaks English as their mother language, but we all manage to communicate whatever our respective levels of French, Spanish or English are.

In Keremeos the laundromat, due to the fact that the owner lives an hour away and is never around, became the hangout place for the small community of pickers. On any given afternoon you could stop by and listen to a Quebecois playing the piano (yep a piano in the laundromat) or take a shower gratis, since no one ever showed up to charge anyone. People would usually move the chairs outside and buy cheap cans of beer around the corner and sit for a while. That's actually how we met the group of pickers we became friends with and got plenty of tips about Keremeos ("shampoo and soap are cheaper in the pharmacy," "this farm's owners are jerks," "Wednesday night is 25 cent 'wing night' at the pub," etc., etc).

We picked cherries almost every day for several days, struggling to get up at 5am, usually getting up at around 7am, and finally filling a few boxes, making a pittance, but gaining experience all the same. Experienced pickers can pick between 30 and 60 boxes a day. We were lucky if we made more than 7 each, but the fact that we're completely new to picking and only worked for a few hours each day actually meant that we weren't doing that bad. Around noon it gets too hot and the cherries turn soft, so picking can be dangerous to the cherries. I had no idea what a fragile fruit they were. You have to move them and drop them carefully as to not bruise them and make sure they are never left in the sun. If they get wet and then hot, they split and are no good. They have to be packed within hours of picking so that they stems don't dry out and fall off. Picking requires lots and lots of patience and care, to not rip leaves off with the cherries and to keep the stems on the cherries and, preferably, the cherries still in clumps. Once you get good, you can get fast, Gee told us. Ay, but by the time we starting getting good we got tired and sick. Allergic reactions and infections are common among pickers, both of which we got, but we were lucky at least that we didn't fall off a ladder (also pretty common and it happened to a couple pickers we met).

In our free time in Keremeos we went down to the river and watched eagles fish or stopped by the free store to see what we could find or tried to get the pizza place to give us free slices of pizza late at night. The local employment office let us use the internet for free so we usually stopped by there every few days. But, finally the work ended and we both felt the need to move on from Keremeos. Our farmer wasn't the nicest either and instead of inquiring about our health when we were sick, he told us we weren't cut out for farm work. Eh, whatever. So, with one last grand story by Gee, this one completely invented for the effect it gave, about him befriending the son of the president of a South American country and going to buy old Soviet missles in Europe, we took off with the advice: Anything can happen if you just believe. Thanks, Gee.

Ah well, somehow I got roped into the exciting rumor that everyone can go to Canada, pick fruit and camp and earn a glorious living. Easy, fun, lucrative. This rumor is running like wildfire among young kids in Mexico and we got caught up in it and here we are.

We arrived in Calgary on the 1st of July and were thoroughly interrogated by immigration to the point where we had to go to a special waiting room while the officers called to verify our Canadian friends' contacts. They asked a lot of questions, even absurd ones (like why Alex's mom would give him money to travel), and checked our bags one more time until they were disappointed to find that they just couldn't find a good reason to send us back to Mexico, thanks to God. Whew.

Thanks to Couchsurfing, a nice Polish lady and her daughter were waiting to pick us up at the airport and take us to their huge home in the Calgary suburbs. Like everyone else in Calgary, Dad works in the oil industry, hence all the luxury. They welcomed us with a backyard bbq (even though they don't celebrate Canada Day, just happened to be the day we arrived) and we stayed for a few days in their house, enjoying the luxury but not the long bus/train commute into the city. So, for our last couple days in Calgary we stayed in another CSer's place who was right downtown, next to the river.

Getting out of the city was nice. We "hitched" a ride off of Craigslist to Kelowna, where another Couchsurfer opened his home to us, despite the fact that he already had 4 other folks crashing with him. Kelowna is much smaller than Calgary but still too big of a city to move around by foot, so a couple days later we moved on to the village of Keremeos. The first night we camped in the city park and the next morning, with some luck and a tip from a Quebecois, we starting working at the Mariposa farm. First some weeding, then some cherry picking. The air is hot and dry in the Similkameen Valley, so the work that we weren't accustomed to was a bit more difficult still. Our fingers turned black and ached and when we tried to sleep we couldn't close our eyes without seeing cherries and stems and leaves and branches. Ay, the life of a migrant fruit picker. I'll never be able to think of cherries like I used to.