Working in the Rain

There's a certain satisfaction to be had in doing something you know few others would do.  This is assuming of course you chose to do what you're doing, and not just being driven to do it by someone else who either doesn't want to (or maybe gets his satisfaction in making others miserable).  You have to consider it a game for the magic to happen.

One of these things would be working in the rain.

My dad bought an apple orchard in the early 70s.  Convinced the economy was going to spiral out of control, he wanted a place down the road where we could grow our own food.  It didn't get all that bad but the farm was still a good thing.

The "soil" in Olathe, Colorado is adobe, laid down long ago as sediments on a sea bottom - very fine grained and light.  When it gets wet, it's best not to walk on it, because it takes on an incredible stickiness.

Without exaggeration here's how it unfolds.

You step on the ground, and your shoe acquires a second sole of mud equal to the depth at which the rain has moistened the ground.  This stays attached until you make your second step, which adds another layer almost as thick (some squishes out to the side at this point).  When the weight of mud on your shoe reaches a critical mass, it overpowers the tack, and the glom falls off.  This often happens in mid-step without your knowing, and you step down an extra two to three inches more than you'd anticipated.  Every now and then this surprise, combined with the general slipperiness of the ground, will cause you to acquire a layer of mud on your face.

This is the backdrop of half of my little story here.  When we bought the orchard, a lot of it was in disrepair, and this included the 40-bushel apple bins.  Pickers - not just immigrant labor, sometimes ourselves - would load these up, and then we'd come around with a forklift attachment on the tractor and load the bins on a big trailer to be hauled off to the juice plant in Delta.

The bins were getting really loose and nails just weren't doing it any more, so my dad borrowed a banding tool from the lumber yard.  He could only keep it one day because they'd need it when they opened for business on Monday. 

It started to rain like hell, and didn't let up.

We waited for a couple hours and there was no change.  "Blast" he said, thinking about the time he'd spent talking the man into loaning the tool to him.  He could have spent that 15 minutes more productively.  Worse yet, some of the bins would disitegrate before he got the thing lent to him again.

"I'll go out there if you will" I said.

"Really? I wouldn't ask you to do that, you know."

"I know.  Let's do it."

With a little smile of twisted glee, he agreed.

It was what you would expect.  We regularly fell to our knees, leaving mud coated on our lower legs that needed to be scraped off when the weight became too much.  We fell often enough.  We couldn't make it work with the bin standing upward, so we would put the bins on their sides and rolled them over the band, and each time accumulating a full load of mud all around.

We did the forty or fifty worst bins.  Since there were no neighbors nearby, especially none out in this downpour, we left our clothes at the door and took turns in the shower.  The next day, after the mud on the clothes was dried, we shook off the clumps of dirt, washed them a first cycle in the ditch and then in the washing machine.

It was glorious.

The rest of the story is as follows.

About 10 years later, I was volunteering to do a weekly radio show at KVNF in Paonia, and as I was driving up there it was raining.  I passed a large field of adobe mud, where men and women were picking watermelons and loading them into bins for the fork lift. It was pouring, and unusually cold for that time of year.

I got up to do my show, and began with something like the following:

"Today is Labor Day.  The Swamp Stomp Show is dedicated to the men and women I saw down in Delta this morning, picking watermelons in the rain."