APPLE HARVEST
Note: This is an example of a place essay. The point is to write about a place for some purpose—in this case, to argue that inevitable change, while sad, cannot erase the precious memories that define us.
It is October. A few lights still twinkle in the wide, deep trough of the valley below. In the south beyond the distant horizon, beyond a serrated edge of faraway frosted crags, soft fingers of gold and pink cotton wander, wispy in the dark sky.
Behind me, behind our cozy farmhouse, behind the orchards in the darkness of early morning looms the Grand Mesa, an immense plateau ten thousand feet above sea level. It dominates the horizon so much that it smothers a third of the compass, stretching from the west all the way around to the northeast. A month ago its aspen-cloaked slopes glowed in an autumn blanket of gold and orange and scarlet; now its September glory has faded, and only a vestige of crimson remains, here and there, among the bare trees.
September. Stands of aspen in the foreground and the top of Grand Mesa to the west. Wikimedia commons
The only sound outside the farmhouse is the rush of water. Below the tall, golden trees flows Surface Creek. Its icy, clear snowmelt falls and laughs around and over and under a jumble of charcoal lava boulders. In spring it thunders, white and big and brawling. Now, it's a peaceful, uniform sound, like grain flowing out of a silo, or the wind coursing through a stand of aspen.
In the orchards, the apples await. Hundreds of thousands of apples, huge and heavy, bending the boughs of the apple trees low. Red Delicious, bright red, with golden flecks; and Golden Delicious, yellow like sunlight, all of them ready to be harvested.
Two ancient tractors fitted with forklifts sit by the barn. We use them to raise and move huge wooden bins full of apples. In just a few hours we'll fire them up. They're as old as my father, but they still run. My brother and I are only kids, barely teenagers, but we're in charge of driving bins from the orchards down the bumpy, muddy tractor tracks to the trucks that will carry the apples to market, without ripping out any trees, without turning over the tractors, without so much as bruising a single apple. These enormous, lovely apples aren't headed for the applesauce plant. They're not juice apples or pie apples. They're eating apples. We will eat them all day long, every day for two weeks, picking them right off the branches as we drive past. They'll be crisp and sweet as candy, and cold juice will explode out of each bite. We'll wipe our chins with our flannel sleeves.
At dawn it's near freezing outside. Curtains curl in the draft of fresh mountain air flowing into the upstairs bedrooms through wide-open windows. The scents of cedar and sage drift in.
My second-floor room overlooks the front yard, and a twisted old sugar pear tree, and a towering intrepid yellow pine undaunted by the threat of summer lightning. Beyond lies the sleeping valley and the jagged San Juan Mountains far away to the south.
My room is actually Grandad's room. He sleeps on the other side of the room. His head lies buried underneath his pillow, just the way he's always slept, every night of his life, since serving with the Merchant Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II, when he first burrowed under a pillow to shut out the noises of the ship and the war. In a painting overlooking his bed, a snowy white topless maiden lounges by the side of a pond.
Outside, under that old sugar pear tree, a buck lifts his head. Dewy antlers remain motionless for a moment, then, placated by the sound of the rushing water, he resumes eating Grandad's lawn. He's safe here, away from the legion of autumn hunters up on the Mesa, tramping through the snow clad in flourescent orange camouflage with their rifles.
But he isn't supposed to be here. Years ago the federal government paid for a ten-foot-high wire fence that circumscribes the entire property, to keep the deer and elk out, because they damage the fruit trees when they rub their antlers against the bark. Grandad can't bear to keep them all out, so he leaves the front gate open.
Grandad used to rise before dawn every day, back when he owned dairy cows, back when he had farm chores to finish before breakfast. But he's older now. He'll sleep until breakfast.
I'm always the second one up. When I open my eyes, jubilation surges into me, and I don't even care that I could remain, for another hour at least, warm and cozy under a hill of blankets so heavy they keep me from tossing and turning at night. I'm out of school for two weeks. I'm a city kid in the mountains of Western Colorado. And someone special awaits my arrival in the living room below. I'll listen to Grandad snore for a second, then I'll leap out of bed and rumble down the stairs.
She'll be sitting in the living room, in a fluffy robe and fluffy slippers, a cup of black drip Folger's in her gnarled hand. She'll be listening to the crackle of a fire she's started in the red brick hearth. She'll be gazing out the picture window, out over the valley. Her name is Wilma. Dad calls her Ma and Grandad calls her Slim and my brother and I call her Grannies.
I'll burst out of the cold stairwell and into the warmth of the living room. Together Grannies and I will watch the sun rise. The snow and ice of the distant San Juans will blaze in the morning sun.
Then we'll talk in the kitchen while she makes pancakes, and bacon, and toast, and eggs over easy, and bowls of cereal with Half & Half and brown sugar, and dishes of hand-canned fruit from the summer trees: apricots, peaches, plums, cherries. She ladles them out of glass mason jars into white porcelain bowls. I've never seen orange juice in this house. Never has orange juice seemed so superfluous.
Later, Grandad will emerge from the cold stairwell. He'll conceal his mysterious, elusive baldness underneath a thin cotton stocking cap (think Ebenezer Scrooge). For a man who'd give up everything to drink from the fountain of youth, baldness is his life's most cruel injustice. His hair went away when he was young, and now he keeps his blighted scalp hidden under this stocking cap, or under his plaid wool hunting cap (think Elmer Fudd), or for special occasions, under his odd brown toupee.
While we eat breakfast, he'll try to make my brother and I laugh by teasing Slim. He'll say something coarse, she'll respond angrily, "ROY!" and we'll giggle and giggle.
Then we'll be out the door to harvest the apples. Grandad will have hired Mexican nationals or Hopi Indians to pick the apples. They'll work for very little, less than my grandparents, who work for not much. Someday, when Grandad's gone, the orchards will vanish too, because there will be no one left willing to work that hard for not much.
It's good that I'm not old enough yet to feel the loss of these mornings. It's good that I'm not old enough to contemplate the sad future, the changing world. I wouldn't want anything to poison the joy I feel this dawn when I first open my eyes, and remember where I am.
The newly-paved blacktop road in front of the house is silent. No one passes this early in the morning. Across the road, a new house now sits, bulky and unsightly, unseemly in a farm community, a mansion out of place, like an Oriental tiger in Iowa, or a banana tree in Idaho. Every day another old farmer sells his land, and his orchards are cut down, and the land is subdivided. In twenty years, by the turn of the century, the apple farmers will be gone, and the only year-round people left will be the commuters, and the housecleaners, and the Wal-Mart employees, and the natural gas workers, a minimum wage feudal fiefdom beholden to landowners who have gentrified and stratified a community now dominated by offroad thrillseekers and conservative evangelicals, all of them missing the irony: that it was they, and not the liberals on the "Left Coast," who slew another corner of smalltown America, transforming it from close-knit socially interconnected farming families to isolated disconnected strangers living next door to one another.
Soon, sooner than I think, I'll be done with college, proudly independent, and forgetful of a place lacking cable television and expensive coffee. I'll not miss bathing in a bathtub. Grandad will pass away in his sleep. Then, because neither my father nor his sister nor his sons desire the meager existence of fruit tree farming in a global economy, the orchards will be razed. Then Grannies will succumb to Alzheimer's, and wither painfully in a nursing home a few miles away.
Someday, I'll eat a store apple and I will discard it after a single, bland, mealy bite. It will be nothing like the apples in Grandad's orchard.
Then someday, I'll visit this magical place one last time, and sit on a lava rock in a horse pasture that used to be an orchard, and gaze down at the deep, wide valley, and at the San Juans glinting in the distance, and back at the ancient Grand Mesa and its quaking aspen, and I'll be sad about the way the world keeps changing.
But not today.
I inhale two lungfuls of mountain air and I throw off the blankets. I hurry downstairs and open the door.