When we were in college, one of my friends dated a fellow who’d grown up on a potato farm in Presque Isle, Maine, and I remember the stories about everyone in the community pitching in come harvest time. Throughout Aroostook County, schools closed for a couple of weeks, and the kids worked the fields.
Even at the time, this sounded like something straight out of the 19th century: Laura Ingalls Wilder meets Charles Dickens.
I knew automatically that, as exciting as it would have been to get sprung from school, stoop labor wasn’t going to be a very good trade-off.
Not that I had much direct experience as a field hand, other than picking wild blueberries and occasional forays into apple picking. Blueberries we picked every year in the Worcester Airport woods and/or at Hadwen Park. As for apples, every once in a while, on a trip to Brookfield Orchard, my parents would decide that, this year, it would be fun to pick our own. Once we started picking, we would all realize that a) it was colossally boring after the first two or three apples; and b) it took a lot more than two or three apples a piece to fill a bushel basket. After this dose of reality, for the next couple of years, we’d just go ahead and buy an already picked bushel. A few years later, either my mother or father would forget how much we despised apple picking, and get the bright idea that this year, we’d pick.
The bottom line was that, although descended from farmers on both sides, we were all city people, and farm labor was just not our thing.
While we didn’t have to toil in the fields, all of the Rogers children were enlisted, make that dragooned, into the annual family leaf raking festival. We had a pretty big back yard, with lots of trees and abutting a full woods. Plus a shady front yard. So we had lots of trees. Which lost lots of leaves every year.
It’s leaf round-up time! My father was the trail boss, and we were the cowpokes. Yippee-ki-ay!
Somehow, ‘Don’t try to understand ‘em, just rake, bag and dump ‘em,’ doesn’t have quite the poetry and romance as ‘Don’t try to understand ‘em, just roll, rope, and brand ‘em”, which was the Rawhide theme. And we didn’t actually bag our leaves, we raked them onto old worn out chenille bedspreads, and hauled them a ways into the woods to dump them there. Through most of my childhood, I believe that leaf-burning was still legal, and autumn always meant the smell of smoldering leaves that people had raked into the gutters and set fire to. But we weren’t leaf burners, we were leaf dumpers, but a ways into the woods, not near our yard.
We also owned a bit of the woods and, when spring sprung, we had to rake the leaves in our part of the woods. I used to think that my father was insane. Who rakes the woods? But I now believe that he wanted to make sure that the neck of the woods that we owned was clear of dead leaves to that we’d have a firebreak just in case some kid drinking up in the woods dropped a still lit cigarette butt into a pile of dried leaves.
Anyway, while I am just as happy never to have had to participate in an Aroostook County potato harvest, I’m a bit saddened to learn that those potato harvests ain’t what they used to be, as The Boston Globe reported a couple of days ago.
For one thing, school lunch programs may be declaring something of a fatwa on French fries and potato chips, which would put a crimp in demand for praties. Which I’m guessing follows a potato-eating decline that’s been going on for years. When I was a kid, almost every supper included potatoes. Once in a while rice; pasta only when the meal was pasta-based. But these days there are so many more starches to choose from: cous-cous, bulgur, quinoa. Back in the day, starch = potatoes, especially when you came from a family that was half-German, half-Irish. Talk about Potatoes ‘R Us.
So now it’s the harvest-by-school-kids that may be on its way out:
It used to be that all the schools got out for three full weeks in late September and early October, but now it is just the high schools; the middle schools close for a week, if at all. Student hand labor - the tedious back-breaking process of picking potatoes off the ground and piling them into baskets - has been mostly supplanted by the harvester, increasingly skillful machines that dig up and start the process of sorting potatoes from the clumps and rocks.
The good news, it can’t be outsourced to India or China. The bad news is, automation can now do the task. (Or is that good news, too?)
The last hand-picking farms disappeared a couple of years ago. Most students work on the harvesters, working along a conveyer belt to finish the sorting process, but the state says you need to be 16 before you can put your fingers near those open grinding parts.
While the harvesting used to involve pretty much everyone, last year only 20% of the kids at Presque Isle high school found harvesting work.
Despite the low numbers, talk about ending the harvest break outright has gone nowhere. The Presque Isle superintendent has been told to bring the topic back to the school board when the number hits 15 percent, but in the county, the favorite argument for keeping the tradition alive is the tradition itself. It is, as much as the potatoes, what the county is known for.
Some of the kids seem to enjoy the experience as a connection to what their parents and grandparents did. And, needless to say, most of the old fogies think it’s good for kids to learn the value of earning a buck through hard physical labor. As a major proponent of everyone - especially those who will go one to professional, white collar, clean-hands work - having jobs that are dirty, backbreaking, exhausting, and ill-paid at some point in their life, preferably when they’re still kids, I think that the old fogies have a point.
But time, and automation, march on, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that required kids’ hands-on.
Too bad.
We are all so removed, these days, from “the real”: from knowing where our food comes from (From the store, dummy! Duh!), where our clothing comes from (From the store, dummy! Duh!), and where are iPads come from (From China, dummy! Duh!).
What is it that we’re supposed to do again, once all the routine and boring stuff is automated or outsource?
Oh, now I remember. We’re all supposed to be entrepreneurs.
Maybe some Aroostook County high school geek is, at this very moment, creating an Android app, a game that lets you knock clumps of dirt off of potatoes and pile them into mountains.
No muss, no fuss, no tender little fingers near those nasty grinding parts.
Almost, but not quite, like the real thing.
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