The Teaching Fields

Boyhood reflections on bygone seasons in the sun.

What shall we do today? Laugh together, cry together, conquer the world together? Put on funny hats? Charm Caroline? Dig Clams? Groom horses? How about a trip to the strawberry fields?

Kids these days have no idea how we suffered in berry fields. They cannot guess the ungodly hour of our waking, the struggle to dress, the dreamlike trudge up the hill without a hint of gray yet in the sky, or our second waking on the cold bench to the hydraulic hiss of opening berry bus doors and Coach Clarkson behind the big wheel yelling, “Wake up!” They’ll never know a bus full of girls and boys could be so quiet as they were in those pre-dawn hours rolling down the dim country roads of our youth. They won’t see the lulling heads of conscripted latchkey kids with chins on chests and lunches cradled on laps, nor glimpse through drooping eyelids the passing miles of foreign fence and field caught between sips of sleep.

But we know, and we’re not gone yet.

The dewy fields glistened as we filed out into the dawn and collected flats en route to our assigned rows. In the distance, the bent backs of Mexicans or sometimes Vietnamese could be seen in adjacent fields, magnified by the mists like floating leviathans above a sea of fog. Perhaps they had arrived on an even earlier bus; perhaps they had never left.

Ever and anon an eccentric woman wearing a kaftan and flower hat would emerge from the misty trees with a dreamy smile, humming softly to herself as she leisurely plucked berries from stray bushes, eating as many as not. A gypsy? A witch? Rumor whispered up and down the rows was that she’d escaped from the insane asylum, or worse, a hippie commune.

“It’s true. Julia said so. And her father works with Joe, and Joe’s married to the sheriff’s sister, so Julia would know.”

Maybe there was rain, maybe not; either way, by the time the first flat was brought up to be weighed, our knees were muddy, our clothes soaked through with dew, and our cold hands stained already a deep shade of purple. It was silent work in these early hours. So much so you could hear the Click-Click! of the foreman’s punch marking out the pounds on pickers’ cards.

Your flat finally full, your card being punched now—

Click-Click! A silent nod, as if to say, “Lay it on the stack, son. Now grab an empty and back to your row; we’ve berries to pick, and the day is young.”

The late morning hours were the best. The birds chattered and flitted about as the sun rose above patchwork clouds and sent beams slanting down to raise a mist of petrichor from the soil and wake the warming fields. Our muscles limbered, our fingers thawed. Someone turned on a transistor radio—very distant, never seen, always tuned to AM golden oldies.

Snippets of chatter now in the strawberry rows: giggling gossip of children, and farther off, doubtless weightier talk in lyrical Spanish or choppy Vietnamese, all mixing in the airwaves with the voice of Del Shannon wa wa wa wa wondering why, and still looking for his little Runaway.

Somewhere in that morning field is a towheaded boy with a smudgy face—the long, long road ahead already hinted at in the working fingers and furrowed brow, the thinking races. He knows there is a long, long climb and always will be, further in and higher up; a life to be measured out in this work or that, but today at least in stacks of empty flats.

By noon everything was baked, and the cold damp morning seemed but a distant dream long vanished in the desert of dusty strawberry lanes.

The horn sounds: Hurray! Lunchtime at last!

Half-filled flats are abandoned as the fields are fled, the tiny troops drifting on tired feet to the narrow place where the cottonwoods grow. Little groups formed in pools of shade. The rustle of paper sacks and squeak of lunch pails being opened: a peanut butter and pickle sandwich, baby carrots, a Hostess Ding Dong, or sometimes cruelly, a berry pie. The timeless marketplace of lunchtime barter begins.

“Tuna for turkey!”

“Apple for Fruit Roll-Ups!”

“Snickers for Twinkie!”

Then silence as everyone eats.

By far the prize on these midday breaks beneath the trees was the ever present can of Shasta. It’s a mysterious alchemy only mothers know, by what complex formula of freezing Shasta soda and then wrapping it in layers of aluminum foil or old newspaper one creates a quenching grape slushy perfectly thawed for a parched berry picker at noon. A little cooling can of heaven. Twelve ounces to slake a bottomless thirst.

But the can is empty, and there’s the dreaded second blowing of the horn; so beloved just an hour ago, now sadly summoning us from our shade.

The afternoon heat was a test failed early by many, and eventually by most. Some would collapse in their lanes and rub berry juice on their sunburned skin. Others would succumb to boredom and start strawberry fights with enemy rows. A few had the bright idea to insert rocks into these sweet projectiles; it adds a certain oomph! Keep your head down, keep picking. The boys and girls who surrendered could be spotted sitting in the shade of the berry trailer, waiting for a ride home, their faces never again to be seen on bus or in field.

The towheaded boy focusses on his task, piling up flats, piling up punches on his card. For him this is no summer pastime. There will be no payday bicycle or build-your-own rocket kit for him. For him the fields are freedom, every berry plucked a step toward escape. Escape to where he doesn’t know, but anywhere will do so long as it isn’t the bus back to a crowded and unwelcoming home.

To this boy the Mexican men hold a certain allure. He inches closer every lunch, closing in, praying for an invitation. He admires their discipline, their ability to tirelessly toil but then shrug it off, their lugubrious looks leaving their sweaty brows almost instantly at the horn’s blowing; and now lounging languidly beside the river with flashing smiles and ringing laughter.

There was something here to learn. Something about a man’s place in the working world. Some lessons the absent father could not teach.

Closer the smudge-faced boy creeps. He has only his hope and a Shasta to trade, but he learns his first lesson: persistence always pays. His initiation takes place beneath a black cottonwood with slaps of encouragement as he coughs out his first drag of a clove cigarette.

As the days ticked by and the punches added up, the hands that remained strengthened, along with our wills, and the driver no longer had to wake us at the stop. The boy learned a great deal from his friends from the south. And not just dirty jokes. He learned to keep his head down and keep working, to finish what he had begun. He learned to leave his cares on the field for a while, to sit and banter and jest with men and negotiate the dangerous boundaries and tripwires therein. Most importantly, he learned that, held up next to theirs, his was just a little sorrow.

The berry bus was nearly empty by picking season’s end: just the dreamers and the desperate left. Driven one dawn without warning to faraway fields already picked thin, the boy misses his chance to bid farewell to his new friends; but he thinks of them often on this somber last march with nothing to mark the hours save a series of ever lighter flats of shriveled berries and dwindling pounds punched out on a stack of stained cards.

Then one day the bus no longer appears. It was the end of something, one of many to come, but an ending without any fanfare at all. And even in this there were lessons.

We lined up at Mayberrys’ trailer in the Boys & Girls Club parking lot to exchange our tattered punch cards for envelopes of cash. There were familiar faces about, though none the boy could match with a name. Most had dropped out early, trading the fields for afternoons at the lake. And why shouldn’t they? These enviable fellows already had what the boy so desperately sought waiting for them at home. Or so it seemed to him. So on and so forth, ever the line goes. But it’s his turn now.

“Punch cards please. Here you are. Good work, young man.”

Good work that amounted to a short stack of twenties and change, clutched in small, calloused hands. It wasn’t enough. Would it ever be? Blueberries maybe; or a paper route; or another year, another strawberry season; or petty larceny if he must. No, it wasn’t enough. Not yet.

When he did finally slip away into the world, the lessons learned in those fields would stay with the boy long after the suntan and berry stains had faded, though there would of course be many harder lessons ahead. Yet despite coming up short for his freedom, his sweat had earned him the right to be addressed by his friends as el joven, and by the foreman, in English, young man; and for a wannabe runaway seeking adventure, this was more than payment enough.

No, kids these days have no idea how we suffered in berry fields. And perhaps that’s for the best. I don’t worry so much that they’re missing the chance to test their mettle. That’s sure to be found elsewhere, in every childhood, in every age. What worries me most is that they’ll never know the simple joy of laboring beneath the sweltering sun for a little hard-earned shade beside a river and a frozen Shasta wrapped in foil shared with new friends.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: The Teaching Fields