the green field, leading to pickers—and the blue outhouse, for my searching gaze. The Deblois airstrip, the blueberry corporation’s own, is in the midst of a vast blueberry field.
Allen turns off the engine and we sit momently in sudden silence. It nudges the craft. It whistles under the wings. Wind. It speeds across the barrens with lonesome desolate force.
. . . Uh-oh. . . .
I’m numb from the long ride aloft in a vibrating machine. I reach, and manage to flip the latch, swing the door open. Out I climb, stiff. Together we start down the dirt path toward workers . . . and the privy. Allen stops to scoop a handful of blueberries. I keep walking toward the workers, toward the outhouse nearby them. Lining the path are those piles of red I saw from the air: plastic berry boxes.
Writing for the Bangor Daily News, Clayton Beal told of fluctuating and uncertain raker rates. Box prices vary year-to-year and are often not revealed until the workers are in the field. In 1986 the rate dropped 35 cents a box because they had picked an outstanding crop the year before. This is the reward of the diligent seasonal worker?
According to the Salt Center for Documentary Field Studies, harvests are accomplished by crews of 40 to 45 rakers who work for a leaseholder. Crews are Canadian and US Native Americans, and Mainers, local descendents of settlers. The latter eke out the livings of teachers, fisherman, clammers and loggers. Of the former, Micmacs, Malecites and Passamaquoddies all take part. When Europeans first landed and explored these barrens, they found the native peoples communally harvesting barrens in a prudent and proven manner.
It’s morally estranging that these are the workers who go hungry before they feed you and me. Migrant workers, whose hard-working hands are so ready to feed us, depend on the indignity of handouts before they can begin work. The Good Shepard Food-Bank, a faithful make-do operation, knows about the problem in Maine. In a paper entitled More Than Food, I will soon be reading about red-tape bound General Assistance. The bureaucracy, which stands in our stead as taxpayer’s steward, will neglect to provide for arriving workers because precise documentation is lacking. Rules change, labyrinthine paperwork fails, people who would feed us go hungry. All prior to the start of harvest. Here’s a precise document: a hungry body and weary soul that is nonetheless eager to work. And this situation is that of agribusiness in general, usurping land that (morally) might be owned as familial and communal. As it once was: by the clan or family in the midst of a healthy community.
A man goes into the portable outhouse. I stand away, surveying this section of barrens, these locals, trying to take everything in. The minutiae as well as the vastness. A blonde woman straightens up from berry-raking. She moves stiffly toward a big old gas-guzzler parked by the privy.
I smile foolishly and say, “Hi!” What am I to these workers—someone who came down from the sky to use the privy? Someone with enough money to spare for a junket?
She fumbles with pieces of wet clothing laid out on a sheet of plastic on the trunk of her car. A twisted pair of panties falls into the dirt. “Goddamnit,” she says. “At this rate I’ll never get the laundry done.” (Making a joke of it?)
The man steps down out of the portable privy and walks away. I move toward it, Allen having caught up with me is now also waiting to use it. When I come out, the blonde raker, her laundry, and the car, are gone, having sped off for parts unknown. Did I scare her away—or has she begun a fifteen or twenty mile torture trip over jolting gravel to find a dryer?
I watch a man and woman stooping over the task. They stoop to scoop, and turn, dumping berries into red containers. Stoop to scoop, and turn to dump. Stoop to scoop, and turn to dump. Continual stooping, stooping and turning. I begin to feel it in the back as I watch. While Allen takes his turn in the portable, I glean snippets of conversation from the two rakers, finding myself too shy to approach and ask nosy occupational questions.
The woman says something about stiffness and ointment.
“I’m about Ben-Gayed out,” returns the man. He wears shorts, a bandanna and has a long bushy beard. The sweeping wind makes it hard to catch every word. Then “. . . some strange man crawling into bed with you.” He laughs.
I grimace. Why is it I just don’t like talk that robs lovemaking of its beautiful appeal: words which bring sex down into the dirt instead of raising it up on the cool stems of orchids or lady slippers (which, however, spring from the dirt)? The man has a beautiful form—tan and fit from his labor among the fruit. The fruit he picks is shapely, sweet, a pulpy container of seed and emblem of ripeness and sexuality. He works mechanically, ten back-breaking hours a day in the sun on a barren full of fruit, the result of sexual reproduction. Because of the monotony of his repetitious action and industrial proportions of the work, he must see and feel his hand scooping blueberries all night long. The days are spent turning blue fruit into green currency, the source of his living throughout the month of August.
Perhaps the fortunes of these workers will change when the mechanical harvesters overrun the barrens. The world’s largest harvester (at this writing) is a steel monster, 16 ft. wide and 20 ft. high, with 700 rakes mounted on belts. Three years ago, in 1987, it was picking 1000 boxes a day with the aid of four people. When the machine ousts them, migrants will be further cut off from the land, inexorably losing their connectedness with the source of their bodies, the soil. This blue fruit of beauty in its green bed is the mediator of life between them (and us) and the soil. Ten hours a day, a paying fruit and a broken back are better than absence, machinery, and no pay. The best is to own the land you tend, the fruit you pick for your family. Familial and communally, yours.
Allen joins me and we turn to walk back toward the plane. Is it absurd to hire a plane and fly—clumsy, mechanical, noisy, polluting, and anxious—across the state? To a county at the opposite end, get out, go to the toilet, hear a snatch of conversation out of context, grab a handful of fruit and fly away? Is it absurd and fantastic? Ayuh.
Walking, I reach down into the low berry-laden bushes for the guilty handful. The practically rainless July has our Department of Agriculture thinking the season’s harvest will be half what it was last year, but this patch is burgeoning. There appear to be two kinds of berries, two shades of blue. One is dark, purplish, reminiscent of grapes; the other a light blue, like pale dense sky. The Cherryfield-Narraguagus Historical Society sent me a packet containing essays for a contest they sponsored. Eighth-grade essayist Renee Foss of Harrington wrote about types of lowbush berries. Some are prone to disease, causing crop loss. One is a fungus attacking the blossoms when weather is cool and wet. Other diseases include witches broom, redleaf, leaf rust, powdery mildew. The variety within the Maine wild blueberry makes for resistance. Resistance not found in the uniform. It is part of the elegant mechanism of nature, of her complex tapestry of land races, the enduring various species.
I crush the thieving handful between my teeth and juice pours over my gums and down my parched throat. How dry and tight my throat has been, how refreshing and necessary the taste of blueberries just now. I long to sit down and eat, to feed among the berries, but they aren’t ours, and there is another pilot waiting his turn with the plane at the Oxford Airport.
I grab onto a wing strut and fit myself into the cockpit. The plane rocks and creaks in the wind.
. . . Uh-oh. . . . The little answering quiver wakes in me.
We bank away above the barrens and I look northward toward a stark geometrical plot of rich brown earth. It’s scored with darker lines and limned with white. Trenches and piping? At one end is a clean white structure with three silos. Children’s toys. Where’s the organic in the articles below? If I were down on the ground with them I’d have a sense of their lack of proportion. Are gigantic boxes, cylinders, networks of pipes necessary to our nourishment? By monstrous mechanical harvesters? Does it reinforce the deceptive view that
