Act Seven
The Internship
from Halloween
Scene One: Standing in front of maintenance garage at Chipman's Farm.
Voice over:
“This is zakk, he'll be your Mexican for the day.”
-Doug
Narrator:
It was under such circumstances that I was called in. After looking like I wasn't going to get a paid position for the summer, Doug called me in to replace one of the Mexicans who left rather abruptly. And though I started under such unpredictable events, it turned out better in the end, offering me a different pace and opportunity than I had originally planned for.
My first day was July 18th. I crawled into the dew soaked bed of an old (old) Dodge and rode out to the beat field with Salvador ( Mexican team leader and translator). Other than learning their intensively fast paced harvesting methods, I was getting good use of my high school Spanish lessons. Working daily without hearing any English to speak of gave me much time to think and take in what was going on around me. It also gave me a chance to interact with a whole different culture, not necessarily Mexican culture, but migrant culture, which is as I see it a little different. I am not interacting with them as they would be in their home environment but we interact together as two different cultures meeting on a 3rd party playing field, or neutral ground, both disassociated from our home field advantages.
The first day we harvested beet greens, peas, beans, cucumbers and strawberries from the fields as well as zucchini, summer squash and tomatoes from the greenhouses. For the first week I started with beans and strawberries in the mornings and peas and cucumbers in the afternoons. My work ethic was pushed daily as I tried to match the Mexicans. When the intensive strawberry season ended and Doug moved some of the high schoolers onto our crew (working with mostly vegetables) I was only motivated to work harder and faster as an example to their slower pace and somber whining. The faster and more efficiently we worked the sooner we could move on to something else. That was the attitude that made 2 hours of bending over in a cucumber patch easier on the back.
By the beginning of the second week I had found my niche and my rhythm. I had even survived a two hour round with the raspberry bushes (this probably being harder on the stomach than the hands). But things started to change with the harvests. By the end of the second week I was only picking beans for two hours each morning before I was thrown into a late 60's standard (three on the tree) box truck to take morning deliveries out to the farm stand in Gray. After this I was to head over to the garage (simply being a greenhouse with a concrete floor and all the farms tools) to help Jumpin' Jeff with Pumpkin Land preparations.
Jumpin' Jeff is the head (and the only) mechanic for Doug's numerous trucks and tractors as well as the sole mastermind and creator of Pumpkin Land's Haunted village and Day-ride. Jeff is a wiry old guy, with glasses and a beard, who hints only occasionally to his tour days running sound for acts like Frank Zappa or Rush, to name a few. Pumpkin land is a whole month of Halloween based festivities. During its busiest weekend there were around 5,000 kids running amok, picking pumpkins, playing games, riding the Haunted Day Ride (a massive attraction that consists of a hayride through a long dark forest with hundreds of animatronic monsters, aliens, skeletons and creatures), playing in the Haunted Village (a miniature haunted story land), and walking through the 3D carnival in the basement of the farms biggest and oldest (over 200years old) barn.
I spent much of my time working for Jeff building scale model scenes in the garage or sketching out props, writing up material lists and making numerous trips to the lumber yard. As October approached emmy switched from the blueberry fields to painting everything we built, and then some.
Working out of the maintenance building offered me many random experiences for which I am thankful. From changing a broken tooth on an old cycle bar mower to massive re-constructive surgery on Doug's 8' rear hitch deck mower. As a massive distraction from Pumpkin land, Jeff and I spent three days with a mig welder and a sledge hammer forming and fitting steel plates to patch the deck. As much as Jeff seemed disturbed by the inconvenience I was pretty happy with the opportunity to play with a welder all day.
Working with Jeff has been not only interesting, but exciting. The random jobs we got to do broke much of the mundane routines that I seem to struggle with. We installed wildlife cameras at an irrigation pump out in the woods of New Gloucester in hopes to catch kids who repeatedly cut the main line to 5 acres of trickle line. I have also been given the inside advantage when it comes to knowing all of the chemicals used in the fields. The farm uses a lot of Green Mountain Fertilizer (46-0-0), from Milton, VT, which is supplemented by the 50+ geese who live in the main irrigation pond. Needless to say the water is unhealthy for humans, but the added nitrogen to the water seems to be loved by the farm's thick leafy plants, ones massive in comparison to our leggy dwarfs at home. I also stumbled upon a pallet of what looked like propane tanks. It turned out to be Methyl bromide, a soil fumigant they use every four years in the strawberry fields. Jeff said its the worst stuff they use on the farm, and as much as I don't agree with sterilizing soil, I can see some justification. Strawberries are easily susceptible to bugs and rot, and with the acreage that they are working with for strawberries alone there isn't much for alternatives.
When you have as many people as Doug does depending on him for paychecks, one bad season or infestation could spell disaster (D-i-s-a-s-t-e-r) for the business. Still, methyl bromide is nothing I would consider using personally. And in situation like this I reflect back to Kirt Webster's notion of profitable downsizing, or simply staying small. But that is me, and I am not Doug. As funny as that may not be, who am I to pass ethical judgment on someone who is neck deep in responsibility and who is simply trying to keep up with competition to feed his family and the families of those that he employs.
Other than trips to the farm stands, lumber yard and occasionally the Hannaford's local refrigerated warehouse, Doug put me on Farm Share duty for a couple of weeks. Farm share is a state funded program in which Chipman Farms delivers fresh produce to three retirement homes a week. The State gives everyone in the homes 200$ per season in credit. We pull in and set up tables, keep track of how much everyone buys and how much credit they have left. Altogether, I feel it is great benefit for these people.
When we pulled in to the first place they were already waiting with anticipation. Granted, some of these people are the pickiest of produce consumers and won't believe you when you tell them that its beet greens not swiss chard, but they all enjoy the opportunity to see the seasonal produce at its freshest. Other than talking a lot of baseball with retired Sox fans, I have heard numerous stories about family farms. “You wouldn't believe the size” is a common phrase when talking about anything, from cucumbers to zucchini or tomatoes, that people remember from their parents or uncle's farm.
By the end of the internship (November 5th) I realized how advantageous my internship, working from the garage, turned out to be. Instead of doing the tedious, first hand experience of wiping and boxing tomatoes for hours or picking all the blossoms off from a 5 acre strawberry field one at a time, I got to see the rhythm and the hiccups of the farm as a system. The garage where I worked functions like the heart for the entire farm. It is centered next to the main barn and the first of the three farm stands. This is where everyone meets in the morning and after lunch to see where they need to go. It is also where all the produce is brought back to be washed and stored in giant walk in coolers. Most often it is where everyone comes if they need something fixed.
I listened daily to Doug on the walkie-talkie, telling people what needs to be hoed, picked, pruned, or watered. I even periodically got called away from my current task to make deliveries, help fix anything from a starter in one of the farm trucks, to a broken fence, or to go pick an emergency order to refill one of the stands if they ran out of produce.
The internship offered me a great opportunity to gain first hand experience, not only with different crops than I had otherwise been used to, but with the innumerable problems and considerations that must be taken into account when trying to manage a successful operation. I had many opportunities to talk with Doug about good verses bad business decisions, organic certification and how big the world feels when you finally get time to step off that (relatively) small piece of land and see what the rest of the world has been doing. We don't agree on everything, that became apparent during some of these conversations. But that didn't seem to impede our ability to find a rational understanding of each other's choice of methods or preferences. The learning experiences I gained from such a short stay of employment were invaluable and offered me the confidence I lacked to step out and start something of my own. And if those plans don't pan-out right away, I have been offered a permanent position if I ever choose to return.