apples of wrath

We’ve started picking apples. We’ve since asked ourselves repeatedly what on earth we were thinking when we approached this new task with such gusto. I wish I remembered, but two days of picking has made it impossible to understand any bright sides to the business. I suppose we were thinking that we need money. And that maybe it sounds a little….fun? It’s sort of a romantic idea, really. We were young and idealistic then. Here is our older, wiser, more realistic picture:

I live in a caravan in an apple orchard. I share this caravan with Maggie, Malcolm and Lindsay. A caravan is like a trailor, but only one room and considerable smaller than any room of any given trailor. It has an oven with alarmingly similar size and effectiveness of Easy Bake ovens. It has a sink with a foot pedal to pump up the water. That’s my favorite feature because it adds an element of humor to the ordinary glass of water. When the water runs dry, you just hook up the garden hose and fill up the tank! So convenient! We have ants and flies, but Maggie has honed her fly-swatting skills, so the fly problem is almost a pleasure for her. All this is our very own (to share with each other) for relatively cheap rent! There is a mug in our “cupboard” that says “You are nobody until somebody loves you.“ We have three neighbors, all of whom share a single bunkhouse room. One is from Korea, one from China, and one from Japan. They are all really nice and more amazing by the day, as you will soon learn. We all share a bathroom and kitchen. The only really unfortunate thing about our set up is that the big refridgerator is located in the bathroom, so you don’t have access to food if any one of the seven people living here are using the bathroom or shower. It’s really too bad, considering we are all only ever home (instead of at work) to eat and bathe.

All of us pick apples at a different orchard. My roomies and I all work for and Enza orchard, which is one of the major NZ fruit suppliers. We are their first ever American workers. A bunch of trail-blazers! We work from 7:30 to 4:30, Monday through Saturday. We are paid based on how much we pick, not on an hourly wage, which we all mistakenly thought would make us rich because of our astounding determination and work ethic. Wrong. We were wrong. Before I tell you how it works, let’s play a game! Given the fact that NZ minimum wage is $12.50/hr and we work for 9 hours, guess how many pounds of apples each one of us would have to pick in one day to make minimum wage. Guess.
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Did you guess? Seriously, just guess a number of pounds.
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Answer: 3,000.

That’s right, folks. Me, myself and I will have to pick 3,000 pounds of apples each day just to make minimum wage. I hope this seems as crazy as it feels in my back muscles right now.

So you get paid between 25 and 40 dollars for each crate that you pick, depending on how difficult that variety is to pick. Generally it is about 30 per crate. Believe it or not, a crate is 800 pounds of apples. Yesterday (day 1) Maggie and I each picked 2 crates. Today, we worked as a team and picked 5 crates. Our team goal for tomorrow is 6. Remember how I said our neighbors are amazing? They each pick 6 crates by themselves each day. The best pickers pick even more than that. I, however, am one of the worst pickers, thus I don’t know if I have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making it to minimum wage. I have three weeks. We’ll see.

We carry around a bucket strapped to our front that holds about 50 pounds of apples. When you fill it, you walk to your crate and empty it and as you work a man on a tractor comes by every so often and moves your crate further down your row. You have to carry an incredibly heavy tripod ladder and climb to your very-near death on every tree, which takes forever and makes you pray, actually pray to God, that He will use his divine powers to deliver you a solid set of knee-pads. Once an hour or so the bosses, Steve and Mark, come check your crate and tell you if you need to fix something and throw out bad apples. So while you are trying to fill it, there are people simultaneously tossing apples out of your crate as if they were merely beer cans on the floor the morning after a keg party. I try to remain positive, but it is hard to ignore such demoralization. Our backs and shoulders KILL. Today at lunch Maggie and I had to take pain killers just to make it through to the end. When we get off work it is all we can do to shower, cook dinner and watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Not because we like it, but it comes on when we eat dinner and we aren’t capable of doing much else. Everyone is in “bed” reading by 8. Party on.

I so didn’t expect it to be this hard. But now I’m forced to admit that I am lucky. I’m lucky that I’m earning money for my on-going vacation, rather than for an entire family’s food. I’m lucky that living in a caravan with 3 other people is fun and adventuresome because usually I live in houses. It isn’t embarrassing or unsafe or depressing, just good silly fun. I’m lucky that I’m young enough to be ok with this life. I’m lucky that I probably don’t have to spend my whole life working such strenuous labor jobs. I’m lucky to speak English and even luckier to be well-educated. I have options, so this is all an adventure, without having to be my reality for very long.

Tonight on Who Wants to be a Millionaire a young woman won $20,000. When asked what she was going to do with it, she said, “My dad turns 60 in a few weeks, so I’m going to throw him a great party!” We did some calculating. We would need to pick 560,000 pounds of apples to throw that party. It better be one hell of a party.