Thursday, September 24, 2009

Cider House Fool

“You got a pair of boots?” the farmer asks me as I shake his hand. It’s early on the last day of summer, and we’re standing next to overflowing bins of apples in the brisk morning air.

“Uh, nope,” I respond.

“Go find a pair and come back. Get ready for some hard work,” he says with a hint of a smile in his eyes.

I’d always wondered if I came from a long line of stout Irish farmers, despite the milky, callus-free hands of a toddler beauty queen and the work ethic of a tree sloth with a trust fund. But getting sent home for real-man footwear pretty much ends that debate. I’m no farmer, at least not yet.

I’m spending the day with Rob Larocque, the owner and boss of Carter Hill Orchard on the outskirts of Concord. I’ve picked my fair share of apples and swilled a lot of cider in my day, so I decide it’s time to go on the other side – to live the day as worker on Rob’s farm – to see apples from the inside out.

I arrive (again), this time wearing boots; Rob’s driving a forklift, moving bins of apples in a line out front of the huge barn. He shuts the engine off and comes over. “Follow me.” We snake past a conveyor belt, a team of people grabbing, bagging, weighing and boxing apples. I follow Rob into a back room. The noise is overwhelming, and he hands me a pair of airport luggage worker headphones, muffling the sound. Rob leads me to a window in the wall where apples tumble down a steel chute, through a washer, into a hopper and up a rubber-spiked conveyor belt. Rob’s pantomiming what he needs me to do, which I’m hoping is not lose my thumbs. He wants me to keep the loose twigs, stems and leaves out of the hopper while controlling the ebb and flow of apples from behind the wall. There are men to my left, but I’m too scared I’ll miss a stick to see what they’re doing. Between the dull roar of the machines, the slippery floor and my fear these apples will never stop, I’m finding it hard to settle into a groove, and asking for a comfy bar stool seems risky. But twenty minutes later the apples stop, the twigs are clean, and I finally figure out what’s going on.

Two men are setting the presses to make cider. My cleaned apples have been pulverized into a foamy, tan-colored goo that one man hoses onto 3x3 slats while the other lays down giants cloths, covering them with wooden pallets. I watch them stack at least ten of these combinations on top of each other while cider drips down. They shift the entire tower underneath an enormous press, and the steel arm spirals downward as the cider flows into a white drum below.
After they finish pressing the cider, I meet Rick Duame. Rick co-owns the cider outfit with Rob, and he gives me a tour of the operation, explaining everything from apple types (“Macs, Galas and Elstars in today’s batch”), to the pasteurization process, and the length of the cider-making season (“twice a week from early September until late March – when the apples run out”). Rick pours me a pint of cider before it’s cooled and pasteurized. “It’s a little tart – you’re tasting the Elstar apples – that was the last kind we used. It’ll change once we blend it.” Now we wait for the 800 or so gallons to finish pasteurizing so we can bottle.

It’s then I learn the second important rule of farming – never stand around like you’re waiting for a bus because there’s always work to be done. Rob sees me loitering and yells, “Make boxes!” He grabs the guy from the cider press. “Paul’s from Jamaica. Paul, this is Tim. He works for you. Tell him to make boxes.”

“OK, mon,” Paul says, handing me a tape gun and a stack of cardboard. I work like a man possessed, determined to show these guys I can do something right. I make at least sixty boxes, Paul stacking them as I finish each one. Just as I near the end, Rob walks over, looks at the boxes and says to all within earshot, “He made them upside down!” Everyone pauses to have a nice laugh as Paul shakes his head. “It’s OK. Don’t worry about it, mon,” he says to me.
Rob stops Rick and points to me, “Upside-down boxes! And what kind of idiot comes to a farm without boots!” Another big laugh. I deserve it all and set my sights on earning back some credit as the cider bottles start rolling.

My job is to take the filled bottles - pints, quarts, half and whole gallon jugs – and pack them into my upside-down boxes. Rob tells me I’ll need to slam the caps onto the bottles, using his open palm to demonstrate. Five minutes into the parade of pints and my hand swells from slapping bottle tops. Fifteen minutes later I’m developing a case of cider shoulder from grabbing and packing, and if I don’t slip on the juice under my feet, I might throw my spine out of line by lifting the gallon jugs onto the pallet. But I keep up.

Rick and Rob yell a non-stop steady stream of menacing encouragement (“Keep it up and you’ll be picking golden delicious all afternoon!”) and selected phrases not suitable for sharing in a community-oriented newspaper. I’m holding my own, and after two straight hours of controlled chaos, we’ve bottled, packed and stored all the cider, and I’m still alive. Rick has me test the finished product, and I taste the blended cider, delicious and smoother than the Elstar-dominated gulp I’d had before.

We eat a quick lunch before Rob introduces me to Laura, another of his employees, for a tutorial in bucket wearing and apple picking. Laura grabs my bucket and shows me the right way to wear it. “Make an X with the straps, pull them over your head and across your shoulders – keep them wide or your back will hurt,” she tells me, showing me how to fold the cloth bottom across the front and fix the straps to the hooks along the sides. Minutes later we’re next to a tree of Mutsu apples – big yellow ones the size of small melons, and Laura tells me how to pick. “Don’t twist – it hurts the tree and the apple. Grab it and turn the apple up from the bottom towards the branch,” she explains.

Laura drops me off in a row of Macintosh trees, and I find Paul and two other men. Paul shows me what to pick and what to avoid. “Take only the red ones, mon,” he says. Desmond, an older man with weathered hands and a woolen cap, watches me pick a few, offering, “This is called spot picking – choose the right ones.” I’m desperate to show them I can do this as I reach up high for a few apples. Desmond adds, “Don’t stretch. This is hard work, mon.” As I fill my bucket, I drop an apple on the ground and lean down to retrieve it. “Leave it where it falls. Don’t pick it up. OK, mon?” Desmond tells me as he returns to his bucket.

I’m slow at the start, trying to remember I’m spot picking and not grabbing everything I see. But as I keep picking and moving in and out of the trees, I find my rhythm. The third man in the group, Winston, is talking in a language that sounds like English but isn’t. I give up trying to figure out what he’s saying. He’s not conversing with anyone and talking so fast it’s like background music as we work. Every once in a while, Desmond or Paul nods, but no one talks except Winston, so we keep picking.

These Jamaicans, I learn between buckets, come to Concord for four months every year. Winston’s been coming to Carter Hill for eight years, Paul for five. Some of them have farmed tobacco outside Hartford, vegetables north of Boston and sugar cane back home in Jamaica. These guys are the pros, and that realization makes me work faster.

The apples never stop - it’s like these trees sprout new fruit the second I turn my back to empty the bucket. We’re still in the same long row of Mac apple trees, our group grown by two more men, one picking and the other moving the bins back and forth with the tractor as we fill them with bucket after bucket.

It’s now after 3 PM, and I’ve been picking for almost four hours, filling and refilling my half-bushel bucket dozens of times. My shoulders and feet ache, and I ask about quitting time. Paul responds, “Six o’clock, mon.” He smiles as my eyes go wide in disbelief. Another three hours of this and I’ll need a super-sized Aleve smoothie with an ibuprofen flavor shot to recover.

On cue, Rob arrives to check on the guys and to take me away. “It looks like you’ve had enough,” he says, my sweat-drenched shirt and punchy gait undermining my confidence in my new-found farming abilities. The truth is I haven’t had enough, and apples will never taste the same to me again.