Vaccinium macrocarpon

The common cranberry. An Amerikan tradition. A Thanksgiving staple. A group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines...found in acidic bogs throughout the cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

When I talked to Jessi Golly two weeks ago on the phone, he had just arrived in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, to begin work on the cranberry harvest. He had given his notice at Forbidden Planet, having made arrangements with his housemate Gabriel to work at the cranberry farm. Gabriel has worked there before so he knows the drill. Thursday was Jessi's last day at the bookstore, and he will have his job back after the cranberry gig, which lasts until just before Thanksgiving.

So on Monday he took the Chinatown Bus to Boston, then the southbound train to Buzzard’s Bay, where Gabriel picked him up in his truck and brought him to the farm. For the next six weeks he has a room in a doublewide, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with five other people, some of whom he already knew from New York.

It was good for me to talk to him after he had arrived and gotten situated. He's an adult, he's been on his own for a few years now, but to me and Gven he's still The Boy. We need to be reassured every now and then that The Boy and The Girl are okay. We appreciate their having their own adventures, and we can even enjoy the ride vicariously sometimes, but it isn't fun to be out of touch for too long.

Zelda came in the door just as I was hanging up the phone with Jessi. I hadn't really seen her in a few days. Monday is receiving day at her bookstore, and she had spent a long day unpacking, sorting, and tracking a shipment of books from the warehouse, making sure everything was there, recording errors and irregularities, like a nonfiction book is recorded as fiction.

There happened to be a lot of errors and irregularities, so sitting in the den with the crickets chirping outside, I learned a lot about the way they handle book shipments, and she is very good at breaking down the process in terms I can understand.

It had been an interesting day for me too, as in the curse “May you live in interesting times.” Work was slow, and office communication has been uneven, shall we say, making for some minor unease and frustration, which I managed to work out of my system with qigong and handstands in the fitness room and a bike ride home.

That night there was a small, peculiar drum circle at the percussion store on High Street, so I also got to indulge in the group therapy of improvising rhythms by wailing on stretched animal skins. You never know who will show up at these things, and this one was mostly old people (meaning anyone born before 1951) plus one hipster with dreadlocks and great chops on hand drums. The guy could really play, and a couple of times we got into a pretty good jam, with him in the lead and me providing mainly bass.

None of which has anything to do with cranberries, except circumstantially, in which case all of the above is closely connected, if only because it all happened to me within a short time-frame in which I was paying attention. This is the metanarrative, where I talk about the way random stuff occurs, and then it occurs to me to write it down.

A few days later Jessi called me at my desk, and I got a lot more information about what he actually does out there on the farm. It's a little more than the grunt labor I had pictured. Some days are long, like 16-18 hours, depending on the size of the order they have to get out. The crew of six does all phases of the process - from bog to bag - harvesting, processing, and packaging, so it's not too monotonous.

Some days they do a wet harvest: flood the field and use a machine that cuts and then pulls the floating berries through a long tube to the conveyor for and processing. Wet berries don't keep well, so this is only done when they are being sold to Ocean Spray for concentrate.

Other days they do a dry harvest, which involves another machine that works like a large self-propelled lawnmower. Someone drives it down the rows of plants, and it cuts berries, separates the stems, and collects the berries in a bag. It's tricky if the ground is uneven.

Another machine screens out the berries that are too small or not ripe. Additional sorting requires people to sit by the conveyor and pick out any remaining substandard berries before they reach the bagging stage. There two people fill up 12-ounce plastic bags, seal them shut, and pack them in boxes. When there are enough boxes filled, they stack them on pallets and load them on the truck for delivery to the buyer.

It's a family farm on Cape Cod that's been doing this for like four generations. It's agriculture. Plant, cultivate, weed, water, worry, harvest, package, sell. It sounds like a great experience, and I think he will learn a lot. When I was talking to Rachel about it during a pause from checking proofs before releasing files to the printer, I saw how Jessi is doing what the motto says is the mission of the college he dropped out of: Learning and Labor.

Go Yeomen!