Hood River 1971
With a good paycheck in my pocket, I got back on the road. Three days of hitch-hiking through some of the grandest country on earth landed me in Hood River, Oregon. I spent the first night at a campground at the bottom of Mt. Hood. There I met another Okie in his sixties, sitting there at the campfire with his beat up Gibson guitar. There was a school bus and several other vehicles containing long hairs from northern California and Oregon. The old fellow was glad to have the company. We were all there to pick fruit. He was aiming for a tractor-driving job. He noodled on his guitar and sang a church song about a better life a'comin, away from this world of woe. He sang a song from the 1930s by the singing brakeman, Jimmy Rodgers... sang it like it was his own days gone by, sang it through his gray beard stubble and missing teeth, all mournful, but with an impish smile. I think he had taken some acid.
"but sometimes I still recall
my good old rough and my rowdy days
yodel lay ee, oh lay ee, oh lay ee"
Late in the evening he put another chunk of wood on the fire, looked up at me and said, "Keep the home fire burning," with a shy expression, as though that somehow said everything worth saying. He was the last authentic dust bowl Okie I ever saw.
Picking fruit is not just hard labor, it is a performing art. The stage in this case was Mount Hood cradling the hilly valley in its arms as they reached to the Columbia River. Green forests, green apple and pear trees, luscious green grass underfoot. Because of the narrowness of the valley, this was not the Big Sky of Montana, but it was just as blue and full of sunshine and clouds working their way east from the Pacific Ocean. In 1971, pre WWII biplanes still did the bulk of crop dusting work, winding intricate patterns through the air above the complex grid of orchards. On the ground there were tractors and flatbed trucks, but for a picker there are only three tools beside your own body and your own wits: a three legged ladder, a picking bag and a large wooden bin to put the fruit in. You spend a lot of time in the air, up a ladder, which I believe tends to give you a healthy philosophic perspective on the ordinary scrambling about of men and machines.
The Hood River Valley in August can hit 105 degrees. A full bag of pears weighs about 40 pounds. A competent pear and apple picker picks 3-4 tons of fruit per day in about 10 hours. Some pear trees require a 14-foot ladder in addition to the more usual 12-footer. On some days I literally staggered out of the orchard at the end of the day and managed to shower and eat by sheer force of will before collapsing into bed. But after a few weeks of this you are in pretty good shape — your legs and back are strong, it has cooled off a bit and the harvest moves on to apples, which are lighter in weight. Unlike pears, apples are ripe enough to eat when you pick them, so you can munch on them all day, which helps meet your caloric requirements which are understandably huge—one of the side benefits of hard labor, you get to eat a lot.
Now that the work is no longer as physically grueling and you have brushed up on your technique, the aesthetic pleasure begins to manifest more clearly. Picking apples efficiently, safely, and without damaging the fruit is a highly complex suite of physical and mental skills that no creature on earth other than Man can perform. Balance, hand-eye coordination, handling a ladder, imagining and carrying out sophisticated sequences of motions all come into play. Many of the skills become largely automatic once learned. They require only enough conscious monitoring to deal with the novelty and uniqueness of each moment, which leaves you free to think about other things like Nietzsche, or sex, or what you will do with the money at the end of the harvest. It becomes a graceful dance, which is extraordinarily satisfying.
Adding to the satisfaction is the sense of community. At that time nearly all the fruit orchards in the Hood River Valley were family farms being actively run by family members. Owners, pickers, tractor drivers, biplane pilots, all took pride in their work and cooperated to get the harvest in. If they could keep up, tractor drivers would move your bin in order to save you 2 or 3 steps. Farmers would give you a ride to the grocery store or the dentist. You were putting food on America's table. You lived in a little cabin or had a room in a bunkhouse with a shower and a washing machine and you dwelled in the midst of the emerald green of the Cascade Mountains in a truly beautiful place and you got paid for it. The entire valley depended on the fruit harvest and your labor was a key element in that and so, however temporarily, you were a valued member of that community. You could get a library card, cash a check, get a ride on the highway. It was not only beautiful. It was economically successful. It was humane. Of course, like on the high-line, when your job is done they expect you to move on. That's the way things are here on earth.
Hood River 1972
By the time I got back to Omaha and the house on Hamilton Street, the downstairs part of the house had also been taken over by hippies. The people were more diverse and generally the scene was not as calm. But there were still plenty of low-paying jobs around and it was all still interesting. We all got by. By the time August came round again, Andrew and I had bought a Jeep Wagoneer together and were making plans to go to Hood River. Craig, a guy from downstairs heard about this and wanted to go too. We had very little cash after buying the Jeep. Craig had none, but he did have a grocery sack full of home grown marijuana. We tested this and decided it was marketable. Diana packed some food for us and the three of us took off for Oregon.
We stopped in Valentine, Nebraska to get gas and spend the night. To our surprise we managed to sell a bag of pot to a local couple. The next day we drove into Rapid City, South Dakota and, emboldened by our success the day before, began approaching hippie-looking people and trying to peddle our dope. We soon met an interested party. She called several of her friends who called some of their friends and by nightfall they had pitched in enough money to buy the whole grocery bag full which was a very pleasing transaction for all concerned and gave us enough cash to head on west.
We arrived a little early for harvest but we got a job and a place to stay. The library park was where hippies foreign and domestic hung out then. As Andrew and I came out of the library one day, our companion Craig introduced us to a local guy named Don who had some pot for sale. We had sold every bit we had in Rapid City, figuring we needed the money more and that it was safer to travel clean. So Craig took off with Don and $10 to go get a bag of weed. Andrew and I went back to our orchard cabin. Craig never returned.
The next day we went back to the library park and managed to find someone who knew how to get to Don's house, which was out of town, in the woods at the edge of the valley. We got there around noon. Don had just got out on bail. When he and our mate and several others had arrived at Don's place the day before, the cops were hiding in the woods and shortly swooped down upon them and took them all to jail. They had found very little dope, which was of course disappointing to them, hoping as they probably were that they were smashing a major and heinous criminal enterprise, but they charged them all with possession anyway and locked them up. Being a local guy with money in the bank, Don wrote them a check when brought before the judge that morning but a few others, including Craig, were still sitting in the hoosegow.
Don was friendly and seemed in good spirits about the whole deal. We smoked a joint with him. He told us a few weeks earlier a friend of his had shot himself in the leg with a Colt .357 magnum while attempting to twirl his pistol in true western style—right where we were standing, which we all thought was sad but pretty funny. And Don suspected the raid might have its roots in that, since gunshot wounds are reported to the cops by hospitals. He gave us a tab of acid for Craig by way of apology, and said he didn't think things were actually very serious.
Andrew and I went back to town and parked near the jail. We discussed what we should do. We were sure we didn't have enough money for bail. Andrew suggested we go talk to the prosecutor and tell him the truth... we were here for the harvest and Craig just wanted to buy one itsy bitsy little bag of dope for personal consumption and... Andrew wasn't quite sure what came after that, but I thought the idea was so outrageous I immediately agreed to it and we went into the courthouse. Andrew had that kind of effect on me.
Like I said, I played the harmonica in those days. I split my repertoire between John Mayal blues and ballads that I played slow and mournful. We were dressed in our raggedy best, both with hair to our shoulders and me with a tab of acid in my pocket I had forgotten about. We found the prosecutor listed on the directory and proceeded upstairs to his office. I played Old Susanna on my harmonica, which echoed down the long hallway and high ceiling of the halls of justice. When we went in the secretary was off somewhere and the prosecutor invited us into his office. He had heard us coming of course. We sat down and gave him our truth-telling spiel. We were so ridiculously honest and naive and unthreatening and childlike and just plain unusual that he began smiling almost immediately, and though he tried to hide it he was obviously enjoying the whole thing immensely. We charmed him like a couple of 4th graders. Through his office window we could see the mighty Columbia River flowing toward the Pacific. He told us he would see what he could do. We thanked him and left. I was by this time fully aware of my role and responsibility in this bit of theater. I played the chorus of My Darling Clementine as we exited and the curtain closed.
As we went around the back of the courthouse on the way to the Jeep, Craig called out to us. The jail was in the back and he was at the window. The window had bars and expanded metal mesh and glass with chicken wire embedded in it but nevertheless, there was a small hole in the lower corner, obviously designed to allow the passage of small items in to prisoners. We told Craig what we had done. He too, seemed in good spirits. I remembered the tab of acid and passed it in to him. He ate it on the spot. Andrew and I left. The next morning the charges against Craig were dropped and he was released, slightly the worse for wear by his acid trip behind bars but... on the loose again.
