Picking Apples

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

We were high school kids in New Hampshire and it was fall. My best friend Dicky already had a job picking apples at Farnum’s Orchard and said I could get one if I wanted. Trips to Farnum’s to get apples were a fall tradition so I knew the place and remembered Mrs. Farnum. She was a large woman, typically wearing a gingham print cotton dress and was always on hand in the barn. Whenever we showed up she would insist each of us children look over all the apples in the wooden bushel boxes and pick out the one we wanted and take it to eat. The names still resonate; MacIntosh, Cortland, Northern Spy, Baldwin, Jonathan, Winesap.

So sure, I’d pick some apples. Dicky and I would go up to pick in the afternoons after school. That he had a Corvette convertible (old and battered but who cared?) and I’d be riding with him was a thick layer of frosting on the cake. For a high school kid, no matter where you’re going or what you’re up to, getting there in a Corvette is beyond cool. It was a beautiful fall day, crisp and sunny we put the top down and roared up the hill to the orchard.

The superintendent, a rough edged guy named Harley was all business and pretty unpleasant about it. To him, having to deal with high school kids was probably a pain, and legitimately so, considering how little work we got done compared to the migrant pickers from Canada. Having us come tooling up the driveway in a Corvette couldn’t have helped. This was my first exposure to the world of work, the world of a man’s perspective. Harley had a crop to get in, he had a crew to manage, he had trees to care for and on and on. And a boss who wanted to turn a profit. And then the guy had a life of which I knew nothing. I was a boy to whom all of this came as a shock. This was not fun and games.

Harley handed me a bucket to pick into and set down some ground rules as we walked into the orchard. Do not climb in the trees, stay on the ladder. And use a certain technique for picking the fruit so it retains the stem. This was important, twist and pull. Otherwise if the stem gets pulled out, the fruit becomes a cull and in a relatively short time will rot from the inside out. And one rotten apple will spoil the barrel.

Harley took off. Wow, it was beautiful standing there for a moment, the air was permeated with the smell of apples, the sun was shining. The trees were drooping with heavy loads of the shiny red orbs. This was nature at the height of its abundance, and to be in the middle of it filled me with a tremendous sense of well being.

Picking apples is hard work. A half bushel in the bucket starts to weigh something and it’s up and down the ladder all afternoon. We got paid by the bushel so were encouraged to hustle. In neighboring trees the migrant workers were hustling and yelling back and forth in French. My two years of (Parisian) high school French didn’t do a thing for me. These were some tough guys, sunburned and all muscle. And they could pick apples. I don’t remember the quantities, but what I picked paled in comparison. We stayed out of each other’s way. They had work to do and I was intimidated.

Turned out I wasn’t very good at picking apples. It didn’t do anything to occupy my mind and when I did the math, the few bushels accumulating in the crate times the pennies paid for each… well, heck I might as well pick that big bright red one over there, sit in the tree, enjoy the view and have a snack. Harley would come by and yell at me for climbing in the tree and for how few apples I was picking. Within a week, we agreed it wasn’t working out and that was the end of my career picking apples.

It was however a turning point between boy and man, and taught me that ultimately work is swim or sink. There’s a world of compromise and sacrifice in work. The reward is often not commensurate with the effort and we are reduced to being a tooth on a gear in a machine. We make the best of it.

Gordon Bunker