pensamientos de los ultimos meses....

So much has happened. Luckily I took to writing things on paper. Here are some bits and pieces, some all the way back from summer:

6 August 2008: A few nights ago, as I was trying to fall asleep, I was closing my eyes for just a few seconds and then opening them again. Robert Frost was right! Every time I closed my eyes I could see a jumbled mass of branches, laden with cherries. Each time the same, only the cherries changed- sometimes with long skinny stems, or in big, thick clumps, bright red or deep purple. Ah, cherries. I even dreamt of selling cherry tacos.

22 August 2008: Except for the few hours a week that I spend in the library, I spend all of my time outdoors, working, eating, playing, sleeping. It's easy to forget what hot water and a non-stiff neck feel like. Flush toilets and mirrors have a novelty to them that I hadn't known before. My picking barely improves because I am so distracted by the beauty of the mountains, the trees, the sun, this life. Also, it's impossible to believe that money is more important than these moments.

21 September 2008: The community of pickers, so small, is one of the most gossipy groups of folks I've ever gotten mixed up with. I suppose there's only so long you can talk about cherries or ladders or snakes and people are undeniably fascinated by the lives of others. Eh. I really like walking between Vialo and Dawson orchards: tall grass, endless amounts of fresh, organic apples to sample, a feeling of hiddenness and solitude, if only for a few moments.

23 September 2008: He said it was like looking into a mirror. I am caught off guard and slightly astounded by having found him and by the fact that we have so little time and then there's life. I hear a heart beat and can't tell if it's mine or his. How nice that there is no awkwardness between people who have never been strangers to one another.

28 September 2008: Fall arrived exactly when the calendar said it would. Leaves are browning on the trees and the sumacs are already bright red. Snow fell on the mountains, folks not used to the cold are getting nervous. Thank God I have this little toasty cabin.

29 September 2008: Last night Sergio and I made a real, sweet, picker soup: #2 butternut squash that I picked at the Mariposa, carrots that another picker left behind, ginger, garlic, chiles that Abraham won as 3rd prize in the annual chile pepper eating contest in Keremeos, cayenne, parsley + thyme + chives from Seth and Melissa's garden, a cucumber also left by a past picker and some coconut milk. Making it even more wonderful was that we got to share it with friends as we laughed and leaped and stumbled over language hurdles and stomped the cold out of our feet.

The trees here are old, with birds' nests and gnarled trunks. I'm much happier working in these trees than in rows and rows of pesticide-laden "fruit twigs," as Seth calls them.

3 October 2008: At first I was tired and not feeling social but by the end of the night they had to swear to me that it was the last ride leaving for Dawson to get me go. If there'd been more cumbias on the pub jukebox, I probably would have stayed anyway. The partying allows us to open our hearts and minds in extreme bursts where suddenly torrents of camaraderie and love push through us, like dams bursting and when the cruda comes, the down, we are unsure. For brief moments we are allowed an incredible freedom of expression but afterwards we are left with wild, tormenting, beautiful, vibrating emotions and thoughts, all dammed up again, we feel damned.

4 October 2008: I've spent a lot of my working hours pondering my place in the system of agriculture, the food system. System, system, that word always appears. I'm an agricultural work, a fruit picker, a migrant. We have a little community and we joke about our meager and ever-changing lives, we share stories of hitch hiking and bosses and the lives we've had in other places, in other times. We even laugh together about the discrimination we collectively face by local business owners and employees. We talk about our families, our friends, our homes, desperate to share company, we fall in and out of each other's arms, cry on each other's shoulders, dream together, taking every moment in our hands, taking each other's hands, swinging around, jumping, dancing, weeping, falling, always laughing, all the colors and the time passing so fast.

I am such a small piece of this agricultural mosaic. I feel momentarily guilty for picking only the perfect cherries that are sent to wealthy consumers in Europe and Japan while perfectly good cherries rot in odorous mounds. But my place is so small and here the sky is so big that, with the stars and the mountains, one can't really feel personally responsible.

5 October 2008: Hard work is a miracle cure for anxiety and despair. By the end of the day I just wanted to keep charging up my ladder, thrusting myself into branches, twisting my aching thumbs around stems, pulling down bag after bag of golden delicious apples. I became immune to the scratches and the bugs, completely immersed in thought.

The moon is perfect and crescent-shaped tonight. Snow fell on the mountains to the north. Everything looks perfect and blue and purple and smoky, the taste of winter on every breath we take. Work is becoming ever more unpredictable.

6 October 2008: Today the cold bit so hard in the morning. My fingers burned and ached, every apple was a struggle, I really wanted to cry. Every day is getting colder, things are settling and I feel like I have to resist in order to stay awake, stay on top of things. Otherwise I'll fall into a dreamy hibernation for the winter.

16 October 2008: A couple nights ago Melissa and I both dreamed of bears. Both of the bears were big and neither of us were afraid. I feel quite connected to this place now. And though I've been a week without work and stressed out, the sunset gets me everytime!

In small towns like this..

..the woman who works in the liquor store will recognize you hitchiking and tell her husband to pull over, telling him "Oh I know those kids!"

..a chihuahua dressed in a pink dress keeps the post office lady company, and dances on command.

..everything is closed on Sundays and Mondays, and Tuesdays if they're able, and all signs that post a places hours say -ish

When the mountains are covered with snow,

it's time to head south. I've spent the past few months in a small town called Cawston, so named due to the local crow population (the murders!). I've been living and working on orchards, in garlic, tomato, and pepper fields, packing organic squash and carrots, watching the sun's rise from and fall behind the mountains grow ever quicker with each passing day. And now, I'm heading east!

Hopefully when my computer usage allotments are greater than 15 minute public library blocks, I will be able to recount some of the many, many stories that I've heard, been a part of, and found in the strangely beautiful and magical Similkameen Valley.

Ironically, 2 months after my first visit to Keremeos in which we worked on a farm called the Mariposa, I now find myself on another farm in Keremeos of the same name. There are a lot of farms in this area, true, but it's still strange that in this tiny place there are two with the same name and that I happened to have worked on both of them.

But besides their name and the fact that they both have employed me, they couldn't be any more different. The first was large, with fruit orchards both in Keremeos and in Cawston, and the owner was callous and cold, a typical businessman/farmer, always in a rush. The second, where I am now, is a small organic farm mostly dedicated to squash with a few other ground crops thrown in and the farmer is very friendly and warm to us, and if the squash don't get picked today, well they'll only be riper tomorrow, right?

A WWOOFer and a couple other workers share the land with us and I can honestly say that it's the most beautiful place I've ever worked in. A river runs right next to the old 5th wheel camper that Lucero, a 19 yr old Mexican girl, and I share. A few ancient pines give us shade and it's so quiet that even when every one is working at the same time, the loudest sounds are the flocks of red-winged blackbirds and the buzz of bees tending to all of the flowers. The pace of work is much slower, so I'm not making as much money as in the demanding fruit picking orchards, but right now I wouldn't trade it for anything.


On our side of the mountain we can even see the moon at night, who would want to give that up?


So far I've gotten know, whether by picking or packing or both, spaghetti squash, orangetti squash, red kurris and funny-looking turks, pie pumpkins, and tomatoes. I've gladly come to the realization that I am much more of a ground crop gal than a fruit picker; for whatever reason I work better the closer to the earth I am.

looking back and forward and up and down

When I left Creston a couple weeks ago, I piled into a camper with 9 other pickers and headed for Nakusp, BC to the hot springs! During one of our many stops (for food or gas or beer or cigarettes or coffee, with so many people, someone always needed something), my eyes happened upon the newspaper stand. 'Ah,' I thought, and said to my friend standing near me, "Hey, Georges, remember that there's a whole world out there?" He gave my a funny look, as usual, and I picked up the only newspaper left on the stand, The Globe. "Uh, Georges, I think we missed something," I said, as I showed him the front page: a photo with a burning orange and red background and 3 Chinese soldiers in the foreground saluting a flag, with everything tilted at an eerie and disturbing angle, all above the headline: "China's Totalitarian Success." There was no other explanation to be found on the front page and I decided it wasn't worth flipping through to find one. Perhaps the world is best left "out there." Until I'm ready, at least.

The hot springs were beautiful. From the camper we walked a path through a mossy pine forest and then stumbled and slid and ran down a ravine towards the river. Alongside the river, some in small rocky enclosures and others with sandy bottoms, we found the hot springs awaiting us. I even found a bottle of white wine tucked into the roof of a small shelter. Nothing like drinking a bottle of BC wine in a warm natural bath under a sky so filled with stars there's no room for the moon. At night we couldn't see a thing but we ran through the forest, ducking under fallen trunks and breathing an air so fresh it made our lungs new again. We left with everything wet, there was no way to avoid it.

And now, back to work. Apples aren't the most motivating crop for me because I actually really enjoy the picking. I could spend all day delicately lifting each apple, snapping the stem, and placing it in my bag, or atop my ladder watching the valley fill the space between the mountains with green and purple and red. But that's no way to make money, which is what I need to do in order to get to Quebec in a few weeks and learn French, so I might try looking around and seeing what other work is available.

I tried plums for a few days and my arms still bear the wounds of those prickly trees who fight to keep their fruit and give long scratches and bruises to those who dare to pick it. Tomatoes were nicer to pick but instead of scratching my arms, they scratched my hands to burning pieces. Ow.

And, it could be anything from a plant, to the air, to pesticides, to just plain coincidence, but as soon as we got back to Keremeos my skin erupted into an itchy allergic reaction. Eh. I like the constant sunshine and clear skies at night, but I really could use a little more moisture in the air.

I'm staying at an orchard right now, but working in another because after Creston I have such a desire to share coffee with people before work and food afterwards. And bears!

A couple nights after Marie and I awoke to a bear running straight for us and we ended up sleeping in a Honda Civic, today at breakfast I just couldn't come up with the name for the animal plodding slowly past us, a mere 15 meters from our breakfast table. Sputtering in half English and half Spanish, people finally just followed my finger and watched a good-sized black bear amble away. Bears follow me, why?

Cherry season has ended! And so has my time in Creston. The last couple of weeks were filled with a little working, a little partying, some inter-orchard volleyball tournaments (we made the finals!), and going to the river, watching sunsets, playing cribbage, etc.

Now, Keremeos again!

cambios

In the morning the air is frigid and by mid-day sticky and hot. When we first arrived to Creston we would hear helicopters in the morning flying low to dry the night's rain off of the cherry trees. Last week we watched the helicopters in the afternoon flying high to spray water over the dangerously dry pines. Dry, hot, cold, wet. Last night it finally rained again.