Ergg, Traugg, and Swoob

"Seasonal worker" was the job title I adopted during my tenure at the Vegetable Trial and Demonstration farm. Although I never called myself that--I felt too much like a migrant worker that way; I chose to call it my Seasonal Field Experience--yesterday my coworker remarked dryly that we sure were experiencing all seasons in this job.

We were stamping around a stubbly wasteland of a cornfield, hefting around iron tamping bars and shovels, in the blurry gray slant of incoming snow.

Iron bars are unforgivingly cold on wet snowy hands.

But I had one of those moments, where I could grow a little taller on a platform of perspective, gazing snowily out over that corn stubble, and hold for a moment all the time and all the seasons I had spent at this farm. There was the spring: the rain, my personal turmoils of leaving a mountain and a man out west, the seeding, the minuscule hopes of minuscule plant babies sliding tremulously through the roofs of their tiny potting soil rooms. Then was Summer I: the rich long days of light, the exuberant growth of teenage plants, the laughably insurmountable task of fighting back weeds. The expectant first tomato eaten with a happy hop, the squash blossoms like so many suns, eagerly anticipating the onslaught of food to come. And then later Summer II, the glut of too many zucchini, parties at the farm, the joyful aroma of basil, hoeing, watering, sweating, eating melons in the field. I wanted to have tee-shirts made, complements of the sunshine, all the vegetables consumed, and the constant physical work: "We Are Not Fat and Pale Here." Then Fall I, the golden glow of trees turning, harvesting pumpkin seeds, needing a scarf to bicycle to work, the abundant freedom to harvest anything and everything because everybody was ready. And now, Fall II, which is beginning to think it is winter: pulling out dead plants, scraping rotten tomatoes out of the beds, putting away the decorate planters.

So I stood there damply in the blowing snow and surprised myself by not feeling resentful of it (I have a history of dreading winter and the dark and cold and sickness) and was grateful for the beautiful diversity of all the earth had shown me over my time here.

Someday I will stay in one place longer than 8 months and will truly feel the cyclical nature of it, in a way that has not been possible recently. I've only had a single full winter in the snowy north since 2008, all of the others I escaped to Australia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Seattle, and Thailand. We'll see about this coming one.

Back to the iron bars and snowy stubble. Why? What could we possibly be doing out there?

Putting in a hop yard, of course.

Hops, a member of the same family as marijuana (I have my probably unlikely theory as to why an IPA gives you an extra delicious buzz), are becoming increasingly in demand in NY state due to the emphasis on local beer from local ingredients, and the farm decided to jump on the band-wheelbarrow (as it were). The hops enjoy climbing--really climbing--and so a hop yard is really a climbing gym for them: a series of phone poles in the ground with cables strung across their tops.

Installing a hop yard is serious work: the sort of work requiring a crew of strapping Mexicans, tractors with augers, and tasteful grunting and swearing. Our work with the iron tamping bars was to fill in the holes after the phone poles had been inserted (that's where the strapping Mexicans come in). It felt a little bizarre and diminishing to be out there in a barren field with all those poles looming above us, panting slightly as we shoveled soil into the holes around their bases and used the heavy iron bars to pack it in.

Not all jobs can be done with tractors and I realized we were working like humans have been working since soil was new, how the pyramids and ancient temples were constructed. With the power of arms and backs.

"This feels rather prehistoric" I said to Coworker Eric as we whacked and tamped iron bars into the dirt, then added after our implements accidentally knocked together, sending a shock wave of sound and vibrations through my arms: "sorry about that, would you like to come over to my cave for some mastodon later?" Then I decided that Coworkers Eric and Traci both needed prehistoric names. "Ergg" I decided for Eric, and Traci became "Traugg."  Ergg then decided I would be dubbed "Swoob." 

Looking up at the looming wood above us, I added: "I'm Pole-ish."