drive the tractor now.” Then Les would pipe up with “Look, over there,” and nod toward a spray of water moving back and forth across a faraway patch of dark green. “Phil’s irrigatin’ his beans again tonight. Must have a good contract this year with the cannery.” They’d point out a crew moving the water lines in a field of broccoli and tell us how a young man had been killed when the long piece of irrigation pipe he was moving crossed an electric line. From their lawn chair lookout, the McDougalls knew what was happening on every parcel of land.
Over the course of the 1970s, we bought several parcels of producing orchards from other neighbors, Ted and Verni Wirfs, who became our good friends as they slowly retired from farming. Ted showed his tractor skills helping us during grape harvest, hauling full totes of grapes from the steepest parts of the vineyard down to the winery. His expertise proved invaluable when it rained and the wet, slippery hillsides made maneuvering treacherous for less experienced drivers.
Verni knit Christmas stockings personalized with the names of each of our kids, provided us with one of her kittens when we wanted one, gave me starts from her unusual African violets, and showered us with a large box of her seasoned pretzel/cereal snack mix every Christmas.
Ted had an endless repertoire of stories about his years of farming, and he and Verni became a source of comfort and encouragement. After visiting with them, the problems we were struggling with always seemed more manageable. They lived from harvest to harvest with a curious combination of fatalism and optimism—making the best of whatever hand Mother Nature dealt and then welcoming each new year as a fresh start and another chance. As novices, we were grateful both for their advice and because they took us seriously. Many local farmers stopped short, looked at us sideways, and narrowed their eyes when we told them what we were doing. “You’re growing what? Why’re you doing that? Nobody’s done that around here.” Ted and Verni won our hearts and our loyalty by supporting us with their farming knowledge and their friendship.
I met many of the local farm wives when I accepted Verni’s invitation to join the Unity Ladies Club, which took its name from the local Unity School District, which had actually ceased to exist long before most of the club members were born. The ladies were older than I was, ranging in age from forty to nearly eighty. Each month a different member hosted and her dining room table, covered with a lacy crocheted tablecloth, would be laden with plates of freshly baked cookies, homemade pies or cakes, local walnuts and hazelnuts, and the obligatory dish of mints.
We chatted, sipped coffee or sweet punch out of flowery china teacups, and ate primly off the hostess’s best china. It was a Norman Rockwell painting and reminded me of the fun I had as a little girl having tea parties with my dolls and my mother, pretending I was grown up, and a lady. Here was the real thing. The ladies were very kind to me. When I was pregnant with Alex, they surprised me with the first (and only) baby shower I ever had.
Most of the women had lived their entire lives in the area and our conversation focused on their interests—mainly families, health problems, and crops. Meetings always had their share of “Did you hear about …?” Ruth Stoller, wife of one of the major turkey farmers, held the unofficial title of county historian, and entertained us with tales of local towns. In the early 1900s, stern-wheelers had brought people up the Yamhill River from Portland, giving Dayton, a little town near us, the name for its main drag, Ferry Street. Ruth showed us old pictures of passengers on one of the stern-wheelers, women in long dresses and bonnets and men wearing vests and straw hats.
The club leaders were the wives of the wealthiest and most successful farmers, the ones who raised turkeys, row crops, wheat, berries, or tree fruits. No one would have guessed, then, that within twenty years all the turkey farms, and most of the orchards and berry fields, would be gone, and nurseries and vineyards would be the area’s primary agricultural industries. By the turn of the twenty-first century, not a single turkey was being raised for sale in the county.
At the Unity Ladies Club in the 1970s, we weren’t looking to the future. We savored the moment, gossiping, exclaiming over the hostess’s culinary skills, drawing names for our “secret pals” each year, and exchanging homemade Christmas and birthday gifts. There was no reason to think our world would be any different in years to come. We could not have imagined how significantly the landscape would change over the next two decades.
AFTER BUYING TED AND Verni’s orchards, summer and fall turned into a continual harvest. We needed whatever income we could generate, so we kept the producing orchards going until we could afford to replace them with grapes. Life went like this: cherry harvest in late June, peaches July through August, prunes in late August, grapes in September and October, and walnuts in November.
The best part of our newly acquired orchards was that tree-ripened fruit introduced me to delicious new tastes. Before we owned the orchards, for example, I had only eaten canned Royal Anne cherries, which my mother would serve as a special dessert. How much better they were fresh and ripe off the tree. The whole family would go down after dinner and wander from tree to tree, plucking the biggest ones and popping them into our mouths for dessert. “Let’s go down and graze in the cherry orchard,” one of us would suggest and we’d all troop down the hill. I had also never eaten a tree-ripened peach. I couldn’t believe how much more flavorful it was than any I had bought in a store.
I felt it my duty not to let anything from our orchards go to waste. We were overloaded with fruit, even though I canned, froze, pickled, and made jam, preserves, and brandy. It became too much of a good thing. After about two years I admitted defeat. Worn out, it was a relief to finally accept that I simply could not use, or give away, all the fruit, and that I would have to let some drop to the ground.
The first orchards we took out were the peaches. They were the most difficult to grow and we didn’t have a secure market for them. Even after we had taken out all our trees, I liked to help Ted and Verni pick and sort their peaches for the fresh market. It was too big a job for the two of them, and they were so good to us that I was glad to help. Harvest started about five in the morning, while the peaches were still cold and firm and wouldn’t bruise from handling. We strapped on harnesses attached to large aluminum buckets so we had both hands free to pick. Unlike cherries or grapes, which could be harvested all at once, peaches had to be picked as they ripened, every few days. Everything about growing peaches was difficult, from fighting disease to propping up the trees laden with fruit, to the ordeal of picking. After experiencing a growing season, Bill and I concluded the only reason to go through all this was to enjoy the taste of a fully ripe peach. Besides being sweet and juicy, a tree-ripened peach has a perfume, intense and captivating. No other fruit we grew enveloped the senses so completely.
This was one place I couldn’t include the kids. Alex wanted badly to help me pick, but his hands were too small to get around the whole peach and twist it off without either bruising it or tearing the skin. Sometimes he would walk down to the peach orchard, about a quarter mile away, to find me when he got up. I think he knew we would be close to finishing and Verni would have something good for him to eat. We always finished the picking morning with freshly baked coffee cake. We sat as long as we could, until finally someone would say, “Well, guess it’s time to get back to work.” Alex and I would trudge back up the hill.
Cherry season had rituals of its own, from bringing in the bees in March to delivering the harvest to the processor in early July. There was nothing easy about any of it with the big old trees that comprised our orchard. Work began in the spring, as soon as we had a few dry days and could get in to work the soil. When the trees bloomed in March, we brought in beehives to pollinate the blossoms. We hoped for sunny days, but too often it was so cold the bees wouldn’t come out of their hives, and the beekeepers had to come to the orchard to feed them.
Full bloom in the cherry orchard enchanted me. Delicate white blossoms with a touch of pink covered the trees, giving them a gauzy,
