Plum Picking

I left the comfort of my lap-top today for a sojourn out in the orchards. Big Grand-dad would have been proud, as this was my first foray into the world of the "harvest." While I like to imagine that I slipped into the folds quite inconspicuously, I'm pretty sure I stuck out like a sore thumb with my pale arms, my novice hands and my american accent.

Jacob, the person in charge of the picking crew, said I looked like I was shopping in the orchards. Everyone has these canvas harvest

bags with a wide strap and a distend-able bottom so that when your satchel is filled, you can unlatch the bottom and let the plums tumble out into the bins. Most of the women and men wear the heavy bags slung over both shoulders or with the straps balanced on their head, (which surprisingly is how the Nepalese bore their harvest burdens,) but I took a slightly different approach. I put the strap on one shoulder, thinking that having one side free would allow me a greater range of movement when reaching for those high-flying plums. What I didn't realize was that this bag posture made the utilitarian bag look more like a personal, casually slung shopping purse. I can only imagine what I must have looked like out there, walking slightly dreamily through the rows, scanning the trees for the big, red plums and then reaching out to place my new picks into my little hip-slung satchel.

However, for all my out-of-place oddity, I absolutely loved spending the day out in the orchards. As with all things new and novel, I was enthralled with the whole process of the picking line; it’s amazing how much we relish what is different. Having spent all my working life behind a computer, doing something physical and present in your surroundings is immensely satisfying. I loved the fuzzy, dusty residue that was left on my hands at the end of the day, and I actually enjoyed the down-ward tug of a full picking bag. How great it is to work with something that has weight and shape!

Apart from the sheer physicality of it, the energy in the orchards was palpable and was like stepping into a different world. Unlike in the winery, where the product is already bottled and labeled, in the field I was working on the ground stage. Everyone with me was a worker on the farm, and it was nice to be in the minority. One of the hardest adjustments for me, when I first got to the Western Cape, was the inverse homogeneity of the people around me. In Malawi, I was normally the only white westerner around, while, in the Cape, I am almost exclusively surrounded by white South Africans. In this country, there are large separations between the cultures-- from the whites to the blacks to the coloreds (the names they use to refer to their own racial/cultural heritages)-- so it was nice, even if for just a moment, to get to sink into another sphere.

Of particular interest in this new world of the farm, was an older woman who led the team in my row. An expert picker, her hands seemed to flit from branch to branch with a speed and assuredness all their own. While I would pick one individual fruit at a time, relying on my sight to find the red in the undergrowth, she would dive into each plant, using her hands to search out the crop. The speed of her picking never faltered, and she seemed to be possessed of an inexhaustible store of meticulous energy. She had the most exquisite face, with crevices and textures of epic story, and I got to wondering how many harvests she had gone through.

For a long time, I fell into step behind her, trying to sink into her measured rhythm. I got to wondering-- what, if anything, does she daydream about?

While the women manned the lower part of the trees, picking the low lying fruit by hand, the men carried ladders to clean off the upper reaches. From top to bottom, man to woman, there is a great sense of humor shared by all the workers, a hilarity which is punctuated by the gender-bifurcation of this picking scheme. The men stand from their ladders, and call out jokes to one another, occasionally stopping to heckle one of the ladies below. They talk about the plum trees as females, and a constant rallying call among the men, when talking about the thickly laden branches, is "get up under those skirts, you never know what surprises you will find."

Like with the women-- who range in age from late teens to late seventies-- there is an amazing mix of the young and old amongst the men. From your weather-worn pickers of the older generation, you have your young fellows who saunter from tree to tree with the ladders jauntily slung over one shoulder. The demarcation in the generations can be seen in their head-ware. Two of my favorite young guys, who were particular "jowlers," wore an All Blacks hat and a NY yankees hat, while one of the most interesting older man wore a hat that he had made out of a springboch-- complete with horns and all. We think the older man may have been a witch doctor, but, even if not, his animalistic headdress was certainly a presence in the vineyard. The stark contrast between this home-spun, indigenous originality and the commercial, globalized baseball caps of the other boys was certainly a visible proof of the gulf that exists between the generations.

All in all, I was enthralled by my time in the orchards. I realize that I have an overly romanticized, reflective account of my time with the plums, but it really was a glimpse into a part of the farm life that had been, hitherto, hidden. At the end of the day, as in Malawi or Nepal, I found that what I took away from this short orchard jaunt was my impressions of the people. Hardworking and all too often care-worn, each seem to hold such a wealth of stories and experiences. Though there is a disappointingly sharp language divide-- they speak Afrikaans which I am only just, just beginning to learn-- there is more than enough in the faces and the interactions to keep the cultural observer utterly entranced.