Harvest by Richard Horan

Author:Richard Horan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The next morning, we arrived back at Brenda Cobb’s bog ready to dry-harvest cranberries. And we did just that, commencing right at 10 a.m. and concluding at 4 p.m. It was a full day’s work, and Brenda, from the glowing statements she made regarding our workmanship, was quite glad to have us there. It was a clear, crisp fall day. No rain in sight, although there were plenty of fat cumulus clouds marching overhead, but they were the friendly kind, the very same that have inspired artists through the years.

Dry harvest is a heck of a lot less mechanized than wet harvest, demanding truckloads’ more elbow grease and manual labor than mechanical engineering. The equipment? Those two push-behind harvesters, scores of burlap sacks, a wheelbarrow, and a tractor with a little flatbed trailer. They are carried to market in three-foot-square-and-tall bins. There is a strainer that is placed on top to prevent the cloying vines from entering the storage bins. The harvesters, as I said, look and work like sideburn trimmers. The teeth trim, side to side, through the berry plants, pulling the berries off the vine and upward via a conveyor into a burlap sack hooked in place under the handlebars. The person wielding the harvester is obliged to trim with the vine, not against it. Brenda had me work the harvester almost from the start, and it didn’t take me too long to get the hang of it. The trick was finding and following in the wake of the harvester in front of you, and only trimming half a row—about eighteen inches per pass. If you tried to trim off more than that you would miss too many berries. Plus, the teeth got clogged easily with vines. It was slow, arduous work. On top of that, the burlap sacks filled up very quickly. I kept forgetting to change the sack under my hands, and by the time I remembered, my sacks were bulging with berries—seventy or eighty pounds each, when they should have been no more than thirty or forty. I learned the error of my ways when Brenda took me off the harvester detail and put me on sack collecting.

Larry Cowan, Brenda’s dad, showed up before lunch and hopped right on the tractor. Larry first bought the bog in 1978. When he retired in 2002, he turned it over to Brenda. With his gray hair, light blue eyes, and rimless glasses, Larry was in good shape for a man close to eighty. Medium height, but on the slim side, he was a classic New Englander who spoke little, but when he did it meant something.

Whenever we finished a round, and before heading back out to the bog, he would recount a little anecdote about the old days. He told me about the Cape Verdeans who were the original pickers back in the day, before there were any harvesting machines. He went inside and came back out with a traditional cranberry picker. It was quite an ornate contraption.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.