The Flying Adventures of DOUG

I have plans. I have tickets. I have a deplorable lack of information. That's right... I'm going to Greece!

I talked to Bertrand (manager of pickers at the orchard) yesterday about finishing on Friday and now it's all set. I'm getting all my money for the five weeks I will have worked on October 1, posting stuff home on the 2nd, catching the train to Paris on the 3rd, flying out on the morning of the 4th for Athens, and this has all come together over the last couple of days. I'm looking forward to being a tourist again, although I'm a little scared at travelling with myself because I can sometimes suffer from near-fatal bouts of disorganisation.

For example, having left this plan-making until the last minute (well, one week before is more than one minute...) I now have a train trip that arrives in Paris at 2345, while my flight isn't until 0940 the next morning. What am I going to do? The current plan is to catch the metro - assuming it's still running so late - from Mont-Parnasse station to Charles-de-Gaulle airport and crash in the flight lounge - assuming the airport doesn't close up. They may even have vagrant-spotters whose job it is to catch and expel loiterers like me. Here's hoping; I want to get a photo of a man in a camouflage jumpsuit wearing a badge that says "Vagrant Spotter". Or perhaps they'd sophisticise his title and call him an Expectorator of Undesirables. Hmmm, that would be cool!

Pascale and Ara, my kiwi friends, are going to Athens almost exactly a week before me and heading out to the Greek Islands after a couple of days. I'll spend at least a day in Athens (here's to bloody, blistered feet and snapshot-RSI in my index finger), then set out by ferry to hunt down Azza and Pazza. After that I expect we'll go to Turkey, and then I'll try and find my way as cheaply as possible back to France. I'm trying not to think about the logistics of this; the combined weight of my inability to speak Turkish, the general expensiveness of flights and the importance of booking in advance is all too much of a burden for my mind to assume at this point in time. I'm thinking of trying to work my way stepwise back to France, just choose a city on the map each day that looks closer to where I want to go, and go there.

Back in France, my plan is to go to Nimes so I can visit the Pont du Gard and the Maison Carée, then to go to Paris and have a good explore around. Ah, there are SO many things I want to visit there, especially le Sacré Coeur and le Musée de Picasso! And le tour eifel, I guess; I'm going to take the stairs! And I only really want to visit one wing of le Louvre, where they keep the Venus di Milo, Nike of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, and works by a whole lot of Rennaissance painters including Carravaggio (sp?) and Rubens who are amazing. I've seen a couple of theirs now, in different galleries, and they really are all they're cracked up to be, in my opinion.

As for life on the orchard, the last two weeks have been spent picking by the bin (as opposed to by the hour), destroying all positive preconceptions my French campadres may have held about NZ'ers and thouroughly establishing my status as the worst picker in the world. I am so slow that they had to pay me by the hour anyway, because otherwise I would have been earning less than the minimum wage... I don't feel like I'm slow: I work solidly all day, don't take breaks except for lunch and toilet, and somehow (no matter what I do) I always pick 3 bins per day. Even if I go super fast, it still ends up being three bins. And if I go super slow? Three bins. Weird huh? I think part of the problem is that my conscience won't allow me to put in any apple that has a fault - they all go on the ground as they're supposed to. Dad, on the other hand, strips whole branches at a time and dumps everything in, pausing to pluck out excess leaves and sticks and to hide faulty apples in the corners buried under pristine apples. The quality control men only take apples from the top when they do their sampling.

I anticipate that this week is going to be difficult. I'll probably spend all my time bobbing up and down, jiggling, and saying, "Are we there yet?" Having a goal is not always a good thing.

Money is going to be very tight from now on. I'm going to eat at supermarkets and sleep under parked cars. If I can find a dog, I could become one of the many dog-people (as Dad and I call them) who sit on street-sides in all European cities hoping people will give them money. I think the dogs are a kind of help-me-I-have-twenty-children-and-five-disabled-wives-to-support ploy, except it's help-me-feed-my-dog, which is perhaps a little less tear-jerking/wallet-greasing. Tears make a good lubricant for stiff wallets. I want to have enough money left at the end to have a wee bit of fun in England when I get back there... Man, I hope I'm not being a naive wishful-thinker and massively overestimating my ability to pinch pennies.

Anyway, take care all. Sorry for missing a week last week!

Ach! I'm disgusted. How lame! What a terrible pun; what a schmuck! It was the only title I could think of, and it's at least somewhat appropriate...

For the last week I have been picking pears, and they are worse than apples. The trees are forty years old and they are Trees; not like the apple trees we've been picking from, which are splayed out on wires like vines, shortened and pruned and limbs loose for ease of plucking. These pear trees are massive, spiky, and tough. You have to climb right to the top step of your ladder and teeter around leaning far off-balance to pick the top fruit. Sometimes you have to put one foot into the branches, or climb off your ladder altogether, and with a heavy bucket full of picked pears sagging on your front, this is often a hair-raising feat. Sometimes the ladder sinks suddenly into the ground at opportune moments, pitching you forwards or sideways, or you lean so far to one side that the ladder helpfully leans equally far in the opposite direction, to even things up. This is almost as fun as a rollercoaster that is not actually attached to the tracks, but does loop-the-loops anyway; you stay in (on, alive) by luck, acrobatics and sometimes by gravity (it can work in your favour).

By the end of the week I was a drooling idiot, and spent Thursday afternoon picking slowly, climbing up and down slowly, walking as if in a trance and sometimes sitting atop my ladder singing songs quietly to myself; or were they in my head? This was partly due to the heat. It has been a very hot week. On Friday it had rained during the night and the morning was cool. We were picking apples again, just a few of us cleaning up what dregs had been left by previous pickers. It was like a cold bath on a hot day, a long cool drink by the pool, and I still coudn't get much energy up (also the trees were wet, so I was working one-arm-in at a time, to avoid slick embraces with armfulls of leaves), so maybe that had been the problem all week: I was tired. At the end of the morning all the pickers met by one of the big barns and we were given instructions for what's happening next week. And that was it! No afternoon work, no Saturday morning to get up for, the whole weekend free and a change on the breeze for the next Monday!

Next week we are picking the reds. As in, Red Delicious. They're paying us by the bin (crate/case, whatever). Up until now I've been earning 7.61 euros an hour, before tax (which isn't as high as I thought: it's more like 25% plus a bit more taken off for our lodgings). Next week I can earn up to 16.50 per crate, if I manage fewer than 3.5% defects! That's heaps. I just hope I can pick fast enough; I wasn't exactly flash-hot this week just finished. If we are really slow, we just get paid at the hourly rate again, but I'm aiming to pick around 6 crates per day, which would get me a bit of extra pocket money. So far my best has been about 4 crates per day (which is ok) but with the added incentive I think I can do better. I'm kind of scared all the other pickers will zoom through and I'll look like a floundering sludge-fly, but as Dad says, noone else will be paying me any attention. I predict a fury of flying leaves, a dark undercurrent of foot-tripping and eye gouging, smoking fingers and related injuries, and little conversation. I just hope it's cool (Lord, let it be cool, let it be crisp and overcast, but not rainy!).

Notes on accents
It's funny when you're surrounded by non English-speakers, how much English you think you hear. If you're not concentrating, you can hear things like, "leg loose talk talk!" or "bacon fresh twinning!" Sometimes you even hear complete phrases. I understand this is because you hear the shape of the word more than you hear the sounds, so that if I was paying close attention it would all remain gibberish, but in my semi-preoccupied state I hear familiar shapes and my brain interprets them as words. The most complete one I have turned into a story fragment, as follows:

*
"D'ya think so?" One ganster to another. A major Gangster to a minor one; not even a gangster really, small-fry, a ganger, lacking the sophistication of sibilance and the snap-frost violence of a 't'. A major silhouette, with a trenchcoat and a hat. A cigar. A match. A small stream of smoke and a tiny glow that whizzes down, down, and merges with the smooth, reflective pavement. Street lights in a puddle, or are they windows of the still-awake? Random light of a restless city.

An inhalation; an exhalation. There will be violence. There will be scruff-of-the-neck grabbing, low-voiced hissing, leg-wobbling and maybe cigar burns. There will be blubbering cooperation. Or perhaps a gunshot. Maybe both.

For now, a voice made of smoke. "Well? Do ya?"
*

The original phrase I heard spoken by a Laosian fellow-worker while saying something entirely different to his friend, is the first bit, the D'ya think so? The rest is what I came up with to describe the way it sounded, and to pass the picking time with a mostly intact brain.

I have three short stories now, although only one of them is actually written down. The other two are in note form because I am too tired to write on any day but Sunday (or perhaps today, given that I have it off) and even then I am frustratingly slow with pen and paper. Computers are easier, because I can type much faster and lose fewer good thoughts in the mean time, and because of the ease of erasure. I hate making mistakes and feel compelled to correct them, which is a nightmare because I make so many. I also have two novels, one of which is started, the other is still in my head. I don't see either of them coming to fruition anytime soon. This (one story and a straggle of notes in two and a half weeks) is more prolific than I've ever been; fruit picking must be good for the creative juices...

When I was little, I watched the Gremlins movie. It was one of the first "scary" movies I had seen, and boy, it freaked me out. That night it took me ages to fall asleep; the thing that eventually comforted me enough to allow me to fall asleep and turn my back to the dangers of the dark was repeating to my self, "There's no such thing as gremlins. There's no such thing as gremlins...," as I huddled in bed.

Now, apples do not exist. What don't exist? I don't know, they're not there, 'A' is for Aardvark... Don't try to convince me otherwise. I am an expert by now on the non-existence of apples. I spend eight hours a day, five days a week, plus four hours on Saturdays, contemplating how thouroughly and completely apples are not part of the material plane. They are a figment, an illusion; at most, a ghost of something once dreamed of and never realised.

In short, I got the job on the orchard. The French have an interesting system in which every rule that says you can do something is contradicted by a rule which says you can't. Sweet. So it took a while to get my work permit as some official in Perigueux (local government) decided which rule he was going to believe in. I guess he blinked the other, contradictory one out of existence. Like the apples. I've been working for a week picking nothing off rows and rows of trees. It's surprisingly hard work. I wear a big bucket strapped to my front which becomes pretty heavy by the time it's full... of nothing. Nothing is surprisingly heavy. And noisy. The sound of nothing pouring out of the bottom of my bucket into a big crate, and bouncing over other bits of nothing, is a multitude of tiny rustling thuds, like hundreds of flies colliding with closed windows. Non-existant apples can also be pretty gross: sometimes their far side is squishy, brown and speckled with white bits; or cracked and blackened; or covered in slugs that feel like dough saturated with far too much milk...; nothing is surprisingly tactile.

I'm doing pretty well though. I'm working for six weeks (only five left, now) and then taking off for some more flying adventures with a wee bit of cash burning through my pockets. I hope to catch up with some friends of mine, Ara and Pascale, who are in France at the moment but will probably be in Turkey by the time I finish working. So, maybe I'll get to Turkey afterall!

The days are tiring, but I've coped so far, to my surprise. It's the mental game that I was expecting to lose, trying to switch my mind onto other things while my body does tedious menial labour for eight hours, but it's been ok. I've made up stories, planned trips, and inserted myself into the plot of Harry Potter to pass the time. I've even delved into random fantasies like, "Doug winning an Oscar." It's all very silly, but it's better than thinking about apples or wondering what the time is.

Our house is pretty good. We live on the second story of a cottage with a red tile roof, in the middle of the orchard with views of the Dordogne, apple trees and crates. The washing machine works. The fridge works. The gas stove works. There's hot water; it's pretty sweet. This was not my initial impression. When we first walked in the floor was covered in dirt and dead flies. There were so many! I've never seen so many flies in one place before. Dad says that it wasn't that bad, but HE went for a walk to the supermarket while I swept and scrubbed all the floors. The nearest supermarket and telephone is a good forty minute walk away, towards Bergerac, so Dad was pretty stuffed by the time he got back. It was a necessary trip, as the only things in the cupboards when we arrived were two jars of mustard (best before sometime in 2003), a box of filters for a phantom coffee machine and an almost empty bottle of tequila.

I spent the next few days (Thurs-Sat) scrubbing the bathroom walls and the kitchen sink and writing the start of my first novel while Dad worked in the orchard. I cooked each night, too. My wife is going to be a very lucky woman. I started work on Monday afternoon once my permit had arrived and my contract had been drawn up, and the rest is history. We've received one pay (they come monthly) and we appear to be losing almost 40% of our earnings to tax or social security, to save for our pensions and medical expenses. It's a shame we won't be here to draw a pension and can't use the French health system for free, as we're not citizens or residents. Ah well, maybe there's some way we can claim some of it back. Our supervisor told us (in French) to take it up with Mister Chirac.

Due to the distance, lack of transport, and work pressures, it looks like I'll only be able to make it into town to use the internet once a week. Which is good, because it means I'll have lots of emails to read and answer after they've had time to stack up and because I'll save money on internet time. On the other hand, I'll miss being able to communicate as frequently as I was. I hope you'll all cope...

When I get home tonight I'm going to draw up a chart of how many days/weeks I have to go at work. Then, I'm going to savagely cross out the first week (it will be very satisfying), leaving only five weeks to go. Dad says the time will fly by, but I don't know how many times I can imagine winning an oscar or attending Hogwarts before it begins to get old. Any suggestions for other mental time-wasters would be appreciated!