The DU Lounge

The farm always felt like the center of the universe. People came to you and there was little need to go anywhere else. There were so many things I loved about it. Working outdoors, constantly changing challenges, the sense of being part of something larger than yourself, the cooperative community...

My walk to work took me through a block of apricot trees, a dozen or so varieties. That's my idea of breakfast, right off of the tree. One part of my job was walking the orchard checking for ripeness; tart cherries (Montmorency), a dozen varieties of dark sweet cherries, a few light sweet cherry varieties, the apricots, Red Haven peaches, Bosc and Bartlett pears, a few plum varieties, nectarines, berries, a couple dozen apple varieties (Northern Spy and Mutsu especially). What a feast. Sweet corn, all kinds of squash, various greens, too.

To get tomatoes, melons, and potatoes, which don't do well this far north, we traded fruit with a grower a couple hundred miles to the south. I loved that run. Leave at dawn with a truck loaded down with cherries, get back at dusk with a truck loaded down with tomatoes. Each grower tried to out do the other with the best quality and quantity and no money changed hands. Capitalism? What's that?

There were a couple of brothers from Georgia who ran back and north bringing us Vidalia onions and taking back cherries. There were a couple of Italian grocery guys from New York who bought container loads of cherries for markets in NYC. One of the brothers would drive all night (800 miles) to inspect the load and pay for it with a stack of one hundred dollar bills.

Then there is the harvest bonfire with growers from far and wide, an ancient tradition; listening to the stories from the old timers over coffee around the stove in the winter. I remember one of them, long gone now, talking about driving apples to the rail head in a mule drawn wagon. The mules are gone now, and so is the railroad line. "They paved paradise, and they put up a parking lot." (Actually, a WalMart.)

It was great to see the whole cycle. Picking up lugs of fruit in the orchard in the afternoon, cooling them down and then loading the truck, leaving at dusk to get to the distribution center by midnight. There, trucks would be coming from farms all over the state and transferring produce to the semis for delivery to supermarkets. We'd get back at dawn and set the lugs back out in the orchard. Sometimes I would call one of the supermarkets in Chicago, pose as a customer and ask for the produce department. "Do you have fresh cherries from Michigan?" and "how do they look?" It was great to hear "they look great and they're flying out of here. Don't wait if you want to get some." Tree to table in less than 24 hours.

I like the ethics of the farm I worked for. "No one in this county goes hungry so long as we are farming" was one. "We are the employer of last resort, for those who need a fresh start or a second chance" was another.

The down side? $16,000 a year and 60% of your neighbors vote Republican.