The Flying Adventures of DOUG

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...