Deer Apple Picking

A week or so ago a friend said she was going to help her grandfather, a man of 75, with deer apple picking in his small orchard. She told me this because I had invited her for tea, and it is the reason she could not come. Instead I went to her grandfather’s orchard with her partly because I now had the time free and partly because I had never heard of deer apple picking. I was raised in dairy farm country.

For two and a half hours, we scrambled around under lovely apple trees picking apples off the ground, putting them into five gallon buckets and dumping two buckets full into one bushel basket which her grandfather would sell to people at $5.00 a bushel. There are approximately 50 pounds of apples in a bushel.

I loved the smell of the rich fruit and the sound the apples made hitting the bottom of the bucket; it was a clear thump until the bottom was covered then the sound was softer. When the bucket was nearly full the bigger apples would off to the ground. I tossed those spunky apples directly into the bushel basket.

My friend told me that people would come to their farm and orchard and buy several bushels of apples to feed the roaming deer and to protect their greenery from hungry deer in the deep winter months to come, and some people just like to feed the deer and other fruit eating animals.

During that two and a half hours, we’d stop and rest and chat and drink water or juice. It was chilly and damp, but not all that bad. The two and a half hours went very quickly. During one of our brief chats, grandfather told me that any apple that touched the ground was not allowed to be sold for human consumption. I thought that was odd because when I was a kid all the apples we ate were ones we picked up off the ground and many of the apples I picked up for the deer seemed perfectly fine to me.

Afterwards, we went to her grandfather’s farm for sandwiches and coffee on the porch. We weren’t allowed inside because we had mud on our shoes and clothes.  There was a mud room off the porch where we could wash, up but since I had no change of clothes, I could not get clean enough to be allowed inside the house. The coffee was hot and rich and dark and the sandwiches were hot and served on warm crusty bread.

I had had a wonderful morning and when I got home a long hot shower was a treat. I was tired but felt satisfied and fulfilled somehow with the labor and my small contribution to my friend’s family life and the survival of deer over coming winter.

The morning was so intrinsically satisfying that when a week later I saw an ad in one of the local free weeklies calling for Deer Apple Pickers for day labor and payment of a $1 a bag, I called and arranged to go. The man, Gary, said he would pick me up, ‘along with the others,’ in his red pick up at 7:30 AM and named a corner to meet. He stated that the work day was 8 AM to 4 PM. Payment would be in cash at 4 PM. I said that I would be there.

I began having thoughts and memories about when I was the lead DUI Therapist in Boulder, Colorado, working with men (mostly) who were paroled from jail, unemployed, and mandated for community service, education classes, and group therapy. My clients were also mandated to pay $10 a session for classes and for group as a condition of their parole.

Many of my DUI clients paid for their classes and groups by doing Day Labor. They told me they would gather on a street corner and trucks would come by. A man on the truck would point to men and gesture for them to get on the truck. Filling a truck took less than three minutes of pointing and leaping and driving off. There might be as many as ten trucks lined up at a precise time. Competition to get on the truck was fierce and sometimes fights would break out. When that happened all the trucks drove off before the police could come. At the time, this sort of employment was not legal in Colorado.

With these thoughts in my head, I prepared for my day by eating a good breakfast, boiling eggs to eat and packing water and juice. I dressed in my worn out jeans, a long sleeved undershirt and two sweat shirts. I found my old torn sneakers, put on socks, and wrapped my feet in baggies before putting on the sneaks. I had an old timey plastic rain hat that tied under my chin and took that, too. I carried my beat up old tight leather gloves along in my back pocket. For some reason, having the gloves in my back pocket made me swagger a bit.

There were five others at the corner, three middle aged men and two high school girls. The red pick up pulled up at precisely 7:30.

No one spoke on the cold ride to the orchard. The sky was dark and it had rained most of the night. It was 53 degrees. I hunkered down out the wind. I tried not to think of eight hours. I shivered.

At the orchard, Gary handed each of us a bundle of 20 orange mesh bags and a five gallon bucket. Each bag would hold 50 pounds of apples. He dropped each of us off at a row of apple trees and said he expected no less than 20 bags per person. His demeanor was pleasant, but his eyes were serious. He told us that two full buckets made one whole bag.

I stood and looked down my row of apple trees. They were beautiful against the deep grey sky. The row was so long that I could not see the end of it. I took a deep breath and set to.

I had filled and tied off three bags when Gary came by in his truck. I had been squatting and duck walking so standing up again took some effort. Gary pulled some apples out of the longer grasses behind me and tossed them in my bucket. “Pick the ground clean,” he said, and put a couple more apples into my bucket. I thanked him for the apples; he smiled and walked towards the grasses between rows. He bent and picked up an apple that I had pitched as not good enough even for starving deer. Gary told me that all the apples were deer apples except the ones that were brown all over, “the color of a paper bag”.

I took a break when Gary drove off and ate an egg and drank juice I looked back to where I had started then down the long row. I heard the wind in the trees and an apple fall. It was a wondrous moment of feeling totally alone in a magical space.

Growing up I got the idea that if my name was on something, I had to do my level best. So I went back a few trees and gathered the apples that were hiding in the grasses. That left me feeling a need to catch up, but to what I didn’t know.  I worked quickly for a while before I settled into a steady rhythm of pick up apples, drop them in the bucket, fill the bucket and empty it into the orange bag. I had another five bags filled when Gary stopped by again.

Each bag holds 50 pounds of apples



Gary said, “You’re a good picker.” That made me feel what I thought was inordinately good. When he left, I gave up any attempt at being clean and was on my knees in the mud picking up apples. My work was steady and the wind wasn’t bad near the ground under the trees. When next I took a break, I realized that it was raining lightly and that I had to pee. There was no porta-potty or outhouse. I stood on the turf between the rows and saw a tree about four trees up where all the branches reached the ground. There was no one in sight. So I went. I had handi wipes in my pocket and three napkins. So all was well if a bit cool.

I had 18 orange bags filled and lying on the ground when I went to dump a bucket into a bag and simply could not hold both the bucket and the bag to accomplish that simple task. I wasn’t even sure that I could will myself to go on. I felt I had used up all my reserves without even being aware of having done so. I was chilled and weak. I was sure my complexion had paled to grey. I didn’t even try to take my own pulse. It occurred to me that I had not carried my wallet this day and therefor had no identification on me.

A voice in my head said, “Move around.”  I rolled my shoulders and bent from the waste then made airplane circles with my arms. I did cleansing breaths and jogged the distance of seven trees and back. I tightened each muscle group then relaxed it. I did jumping jacks, then stood quietly to breathe. I ate my last egg, drank some juice and water. And felt my second wind start up with the flow of fresh blood warming my body. I went back to work thinking that I had chosen to do this and about so many laborers who do this type of physical work every day for similar pay and no hope of ever having my choice.

I began to make up songs about the labor, about the sounds, about the silence, about apples and deer and about survival. I remembered my first Clinical Supervisor and his commitment to working with the migrant communities near Longmont, Colorado. I opened to a new sense of community with faces and persons and cultures of people I had not met but felt I now shared some small insight into how they were made and how I am made. I felt a longing for that shared community where a look, a nod, a smile would mean, “I know.” I also wanted to be one who could look or nod or smile and show that I, too, “I know.”

Gary drove by calling out "Tie off the last bag!"

"WOW," I said aloud, "Can it be 4 O'clock?" I haven't counted my bags and realized, child of some small privileges, I didn't give a damn how many bags there were lying at the edges of my row of apple trees."

Gary drove slowly up my row, counting. He stopped and handed me my pay and told me to hop in the truck and he would take us all back to the corner where he'd picked up in the morning.

I gasped. $30! I couldn't believe it. $30 meant 30 bags; 30 bags meant 1,500 pounds of apples that I had lifted not once, not twice, but THREE times. Once off the ground, once from the bucket to the bag, and once moving the bag to the proper place on the row.

We picked up the last man and we sat in the truck and smiled shyly at one another. Although we had not seen each other since the ride in, we now shared something beyond words. We were a small community that could look at one another and nod and smile and show, "I know."

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