How picking cherries in New Zealand can help explain the world.
By Molly May ’02
Illustrations by Chris O’Leary
“You are so American,” sputtered Bob as he propped his metal ladder against a cherry tree, “… always telling people what to do.” On the damp ground, our plastic yellow buckets were lined up like blocks, each one filled to the top with dark red-purple cherries. We made sure to separate our buckets into claimable piles in our shared tree corridor: me on one row of giant trees, him on the next. I had 11 buckets, he had 9. “Look,” I huffed, grabbing a thin, gray branch to steady myself on my 15-foot ladder, “just because I think women everywhere should have the right to free speech does not make me some sort of tyrant.”
Bob scrunched his round face at me and sighed from behind his eyeglasses. “Yes, good golly Miss Molly, you are right. You are veery right,” added Remy in his clipped Indian accent from somewhere in the flush of green leaves, “women are veery equal.” I pushed onto my toes to peer over the tree line. Farther down the row, Remy’s dark head bobbed amid the treetops, the rolling expanse of the New Zealand orchard at his back. He was picking the other side of my trees, and today he was ahead of me. I reached for a clump of cherries, snapped them off where the stem met the branch, and laid them gently in the bucket that was held against my stomach by a shoulder harness. Reach, snap. Another heavy clump into the bucket.
Sweat glistened on my sunburned hands. The thick, hot air smelled of fresh soil, with faint hints of tractor fuel. I reminded myself to speed up; I’d need to pick 22 buckets in order to make a decent daily wage.
A year earlier, I had marched up the long dirt driveway of Fairview Orchard to look for a job picking apples. After a grueling season of color-spot-checking, palming, and lugging 30 kilos of Cox’s Orange Pippin apples, I had returned in January for what my boss Nigel had convinced me was much easier work: picking cherries. Our gang of pickers came from around the globe. Remy, adept at being cheerful and telling stories about his life as a Hindu from Mumbai, usually shared a row with me. Bob, straight-laced and simultaneously quirky, partnered with Hydah, a handsome, quiet Malaysian who called himself a strict Muslim. Each of us came to the South Island’s Teviot Valley with the goal of earning money—word around the island was that if you were a swift picker, you could fill your pockets fast. Our Kiwi boss Nigel—legs like an ox, enough heft around the middle to call chubby, and buzz-cut gray hair—picked alongside us. He had never left Roxburgh, a small farming town of 750 people, because, as he said, “the world comes to me.” Tucked against the tussocked hills, Roxburgh prided itself on the icy Clutha River, which twisted up the valley like a wide, blue ribbon. The 40-some orchards in this rich fruit belt were originally planted by gold miners in the 1800s and had attracted seasonal laborers for generations.
After working on organic farms in Vermont and other parts of New Zealand, I wanted to learn about many of the things I had questioned. I wanted big-scale. I wanted nonorganic. I wanted to be submerged in global food markets—to round out my experience by gaining an appreciation for the sweat involved in any beautiful bunch of apples, cherries, carrots, or collard greens found at the grocery store. What I didn’t anticipate was the education I’d receive from the people I’d work with.
John’s tractor belched and chugged around the corner and into my corridor. “You’ll reach 22 by today if you keep this going—ayy?” he screeched in his high-pitched burr of a Kiwi accent. He was a senior picker who trucked the cherries from our fields to the pack house a mile down the road, where Kiwi women of all ages stood and watched for “bad” cherries to pass by on conveyer belts. Bleary-eyed, numbing labor—I was glad to be outside. I looked down at his wrinkled, toothless face and shouted back, “Yup, but it’s hot in these gumboots.”
“You were glad you had ’em last night, though,” he bellowed as he rumbled past. The previous evening, a flash thunderstorm had prompted all of us to slosh about in the orchard pulling rain covers over the young cherry trees. You can lose a whole crop to hail during one storm.
My daily attire rarely changed: a white, long-sleeve shirt stained with purple splotches; loose pants; rubber gumboots; a straw hat; and sunscreen smeared in thick white stripes across my dark tan cheeks. Everyone else wore t-shirts and shorts. From above, we probably looked like small bugs moving slowly along parallel lines of trees: Remy at the left, then me, then Bob and Hydah, with Nigel picking up the slack. It was early in the afternoon and a sense of purpose, of focus, had descended on us like a mist; there was silence except for an occasional swirl of hot breeze. Just us and the trees—I liked that.
Cherry picking was both romantic and mathematical; memorable moments between stretches of future profit justifying present effort, or postponement of effort. We had been instructed early on not to strip the whole tree, but to leave the younger red fruit. The incentive was a cycle-schedule in which each picker came back to the same row in two weeks. If you picked everything the first go-around, you’d be left with nothing when you came back, and thus no money. At $5 per bucket and for the health of the tree, you needed to be cautious.
Nudging the long-leg of my tripod ladder into a perfect position would allow me to reach all the cherries within a six-foot radius. The fewer times I had to move and clink down and up my ladder, the less overall effort I would expend. Efficiency separated the fast pickers from the slower folks. But this urge to be fast also made fools of us when a branch would slap someone’s face. Or worse: occasionally someone’s yelp would echo about the treetops as they struggled to stay atop their ladder. Nigel told us that once a picker fell and broke his leg. I had almost fallen twice, luckily nothing a quick grab for a branch couldn’t stop.
At its best, standing at the tiptop of the ladder felt like having incredibly long, sturdy legs. To be face to face with the long waxy leaves flopping in the wind and to smell the tang of sweet cherries was an experience unto itself. And up this high, I realized, I had a bird’s-eye view, not only of the swatches of trees’ foliage, but also of the extent of human effort and organization—the tractors pushing CO2 into the air, the trees pulling CO2 out of the air. Ultimately, the need for food was driving the whole cycle. If only I could zoom out farther, I thought, so I could watch the back-and-forth of the global food system’s big zigzags across the earth—a man in China eating California grapes while a woman in America drank Chinese tea.
“One for me, one for Nigel, one for me,” hummed Bob, snapping me out of my reverie. He tended to be relaxed about pace and tidiness in all areas of his life. I shared an on-site cottage with him and 25 supersize, empty Jiffy peanut butter jars stacked in the corner. “One for me …” he continued.
“Faster! Come on, Molly!” chirped Remy from ahead. “But,” he added, “you will never be beating me!”
“In my dreams I always beat you!” I yelled back. Truth be told, I had been picking cherries in my dreams every single night. Repetitive activity seemed to infiltrate all parts of my brain—not hard when these cherries were plump, glossy, and dark red. Nigel called them black beauties and sometimes by their official variety name, Lapin. Known for a sharp, sweet taste, some went down to the roadside, where the orchard owner’s wife and local teenagers ran an elaborate fruit stand for passersby or tourists; but most of these Lapins flew to the demanding markets of Japan and America. As with most niche markets in New Zealand—lamb, wool, and wood included—it all went abroad to be sold for the top dollar.
“Smoko!” yelled Nigel. At the call for afternoon break, I snatched the last reachable cherries, clanked down my ladder, then gently placed my half-filled bucket in the shade under the tree. Bob and I ducked under the drooping branches into Remy’s row to find him—stubborn—leaning off one leg from his ladder to a far-away batch of purples. Sensing our presence, he turned to flash a grin, brown eyes wide and black curls stuck with sweat on his forehead. “Soon, soon, I will be coming,” he offered. We strolled down the grassy corridor to where Nigel, John, and Hydah had already plopped themselves. Bob whispered to me, “I saw baby birds, but shhhh.” I winked back. We had made a pact not to tell Nigel when we spotted birds in nests, because he would clamber up the tree, yank the nest down, and stomp on the baby birds. No room for sentimentality here. Birds pecked at the cherries and were notorious for destroying whole acres of ripening fruit. The Lapins were, above all, a commodity. I found my spot, leaned back into a squat, and ended up cross-legged under the speckled shade of a tree, my sore back at ease.
Nigel, who had already rolled some tobacco into a thin flop of a cigarette, sat, shoulders hunched, munching on two butter biscuits from his wife. For the moment we were all quiet, absorbed in our own private relaxations. I gnawed on a hunk of bread while reaching for my toes to stretch. Then Remy came prancing down the row like an elf, both hands extended and full of cherries, as if we’ve never seen them before. “Here I am, Nigel, I am here, and I brought these for you, Nigel,” he sang.
“You know I don’t like fruit, Remy,” Nigel laughed with squinty eyes. “How was your fish?”
“Oh, most excellent,” remarked Remy as he nestled himself against a tree trunk.
“Delicious,” added Hydah, the ever-quiet one sitting up straight like a statue, a suppressed smile evident in the twinkle of his eyes.
Last night Remy caught two trout in the Clutha River and cooked them for us in his cottage. We sat on the porch under the poplar tree, ate, and gazed at the small patch of 100 apricot trees below us.
“But Remy didn’t eat any of his own fish!” I exclaimed .
“I was too excited about having guests. I cannot eat and serve at the same time.”
“And did you wake up hungry?” teased Nigel.
“No, Nigel,” Remy proclaimed with a hearty laugh, “because Bob played his most beautiful music.”
We all knew that Bob has been practicing one song on his classical guitar for three years. His goal was to play it for his parents, but only when had perfected it. He had only ever shared it with the five of us.
“It’s a beaut, that song. Ahhh, it’s hot; who’s got some water?” asked Nigel, switching subjects quickly. I tossed my warm Nalgene bottle at him.
“You’re not bad for a Yank.” He smiled and sucked a quick tight drag from his cigarette.
“Many thanks,” I laughed.
“Well, I got two Brazilian fellahs coming to work next week, and a Kiwi bloke,” Nigel explained. He took a slug from the Nalgene, then rolled it back with a Kiwi thanks: “Ta for the drink.” Our 15 minutes were up.
“Up we go, back to work,” he said in staccato. “We got to get this fruit off the trees before it rains.” Cherries, like most fruit, bruise too easily when picked in the rain. “And, don’t forget,” he added with a harsh-boss tone, “I’m coming to check your buckets. If you’re picking too red, gonna dock your pay.”
“Okay, Nigel,” we responded in a chorus as we lumbered back to our places.
Not long after the mid-afternoon slump, I was bolting up my ladder again and thinking about what I was going to do on Sunday. It would be our day off, provided there were no disasters. I’d ride my bike across the bridge to the horse farm on the other side of the Clutha, buy two boxes of boysenberries from the berry lady across the street, visit the courgette farmer next door and hope he would toss some blossoms in my bag.
In the heat and slow of the day, this fantasizing was like gold. After wiping the sweat off my forehead, I took a short rest to gaze. In the next swatch over, ripening trees were covered like ghosts in white bird nets. We would move over there in two weeks. Up in the distance behind my cottage, some heavy, dark gray clouds were forming against the green hills. I plucked a cherry from my basket, pulled it off the stem with my teeth, and ate it with relish. I thought: Maybe I’ll walk up those hills on Sunday and Remy will say, “Do not be so independent” and beg me instead to go to the pond to swim and race against him. Hydah will write letters to his beloved five sisters, and Bob will sit on his bed with his guitar and his one song.
“Nigel!” yelled Bob. “These cherries make me feel sick.”
“Ah ya, Bob,” Nigel punched back. “Wait till you get to the apricots. If you eat too many of them tasteless ones that the Americans love because they have a pretty bum shape, you’ll get rot gut.” Nigel loved to poke fun at Americans. Quiet again. I could only hear the rustling of us five pickers and the bird gun that had now started blasting every five minutes to scare the birds from the trees. BAAM. The exploding sound would echo off the hills for a split second. Steven must have turned it on. I was never quite sure where it was when I heard it start. One time, Bob and I went searching during our break and found a white, plastic, toylike cylinder under a tree firing the deafening air pop.
With about three more hours to go, I was on my 18th bucket, and I started doing math in my head. If I could make enough in these two months, I could go north to work on a llama farm. But for now, I loved the grit of this work and the daily thoughts it provoked. How long did it take these cherries to get to the mouths of consumers? Who loaded them onto the airplane? Who then loaded them onto a truck, and did the trucker snag a couple to taste on his way from Los Angeles to New York? By the time they got to the grocery store, did they still taste like real cherries? What if the shoppers who would eat these Lapins knew that Bob, Remy, Hydah, Nigel, John, and Molly handpicked them, in a small town on a distant island in the southern hemisphere? Did they think about things like that?
In the distance, over the peach trees, I could see a dirt cloud moving along the dusty road. Steven must be coming in his pickup from the pack house to report, as he often did in the afternoon. He skidded right up to the end of our rows and slammed the door. “Nige, come on down.” They whispered words that got carried away in a welcomed burst of wind. I continued to battle with my ladder, trying to get it in the right spot over a low branch. Up again, up up up, I stepped, into the leafy canopy. “Hooooooahhhhh. Stop, stop now!” yelled Steven to all of us, as he and Nigel walked into my corridor. “Can you hear me? Come on over if you can’t.” Close by, I simply sat on my ladder and glanced down as the others jogged over. “We’ve got a change. The market shifted just now. The Americans want size 24 red cherries, the small ones.” He sighed. “We’re just going to have to leave all the good fruit on the tree, and take the unripe ones, the reds.” Bob cackled a laugh up at me, raised an eyebrow, as if to lay blame. Steven sighed again. “Get to it. If I see any purples in your baskets, you know … pay gets docked.”
After he drove away, a hole of silence asked for filling.
I called out, “But what about all these good ones, Nigel?”
“You’re a Yank, what do you think?”
Molly May ’02 has worked on vegetable farms, fruit orchards, llama farms, seaweed farms, and sheep farms. She now lives in New York City and works for the publishing house W.W. Norton.