1/12/10: Tropical Facts

In all of these adventures I have carried myself high and proud, stomping through obstacles even when the rain was in my eyes. But this is a different challenge that I am experiencing now. There is no bridge to build, no orders from bosses, no Katahdin. There is only me and vast and uncaring land. There are numberless pieces of fruit dandling on thousands of branches across hundreds of acres and countless hours to pass.

Romantic poets referred to Nature with a capital N, because they believed in its mystic, living correspondence. What i have discovered here, near the Southernmost point of the country, and on young and broken volcanic land is something inhuman a nature without the capital spirit. There are wonders here which have no equal in anything I have ever experienced. Bright birds, bright flowers, bright skies, black Earth and glowing fruit decorate this near imaginary landscape. The weather is called idyllic anywhere else: consistent temperatures of 75 degrees, low humidity and almost no rain. Here is is just commonplace.

My job here basically entails picking fruit. In supermarkets my eyes used to glean over oranges carelessly, but no w have been honed to fasten on every pore. Color is crucial in this industry, so the difference between light and dark orange, the fickle threshold of ripeness, is the hinge of the job. Wasting a single piece is expensive collateral. These little orbs command a picky customer following along the East coast and throughout the islands. They are grey, speckled with dark spots of red, and misshapen, but all organic and whereas the golden spheres with the Dole sticker have a sugar content of three percent, these are about fourteen. They really are like liquid gold.

Picking is not too hard a task, but it can be very tedious. It requires a wiry neck and strong shoulders, since its all done with a retractable 15 foot pole, and a constant amount of looking up. I think of my mothers nervous face, and hear her tell my brother to get down from a tree, every time I am dangling 20 feet above the ground on a limb with a pole reaching far for a piece of fruit.

After work I come home to the worker housing. There is a complex of eight tiny cabins and one communal kitchen and bathroom. They are rectangular shacks of thin wood and tin, with insect screens for windows. It is very much a camp environment, but without the carefree spirit.

The comfort is not in the buildings, but in the people. In a few days I feel that we have already become family. There is a couple from Washington, a student from New York, a mystical Puerto Rican woman, and an eclectic, comical, dirty rogue and former marine, who serves as our overseer. The bosses and owners of the farm are polite and industrious, after seeing the color orange become the color green for thirty years, but they are uncaring humans.

There is no cell phone reception here, no televisions, radios or computers, and hardly a whisper of the world outside this island. But who else in the nation can see the source of their bananas and oranges?