Pop Tarts

 

 

The blueberry harvest is coming to an end in Maine. When it is finished, all the legal/illegal migrant labor will head off to the next area in the US where another kind of crop is just about ripened. I had never known migrants went as far north as the Maine coastline to rake blueberries. To me, migrants mean forever stooping Mexicans picking lettuce heads in California’s Central Valley.

Shows you how much I know…

I’ve been to Maine twice. As a kid visiting Portland and Sebago Lake and as a young 30’s guy skiing down SugarLoaf USA out in that thick and overgrown western part of the state. In the Carrabassett valley, our little tour bus had taken a stop at a Quickie Mart on the way home and a local wanted to sell us a German Shepherd/Wolf dog hybrid. I had looked in the back of his cabbed pick-up truck to see this dog. Once it noticed me, it fixed it’s eyes on me like the targeting avionics of a HellFire missile. I read his face and I swear it said that if I put one finger into the open crack of that back window, he was going to cruelly snip it off with his crossbreed teeth.

It was in Portland as an 8 year old that I discovered rock candy and Kellog’s Blueberry PopTarts. My Dad, infuriated with driving the jammed streets bitching at the other tourists, had pulled over and we all went browsing the stores in hopes the traffic would lighten up when we got back. In some store, my brother had found a non descript box marked “Rock Candy!” He pulled out a string of huge, clear crystals of sugar. We had never seen anything like this before. After begging Dad to buy it, he relented but told us not to eat it till we got back to the car. Once back in the car, I luxuriated in the sweetness of it and it’s bizarre shapes. Candy created by NASA scientists it looked like, perfect latticed prisms on a string. Now that I remember it, we two in the back seat were quiet as church mice while we ate it and I figure my Dad’s proscription to wait to eat it made sure he’d have a quieter drive.

Today they have all sorts of flavors of rock candy and I bought some a few years ago to relive that Portland memory. It took me 10 seconds to be repulsed by it. “Ughh! Gawwd! TOO MUCH SUGAR! Auuughh!” I never finished it.

At Sebago Lake, which is shockingly cold in late July, my Mom had brought some small snack items along. I watched her open a package and hand me this square thingy. It smelled like pastry and was dry and easily crumbly. I had asked what it was and she said “a blueberry PopTart.” I had heard of blueberries but never actually had any until that day. So I bite into it.

“POWWWWWW!” My mouth lit up with this intense flavor which I immediately liked. I had never known any fruit could be this nice, as I thought most fruits sort of sucked. (As a kid, I pretty much hated anything plant based, except oranges, those I loved).

After asking a bunch of questions I learn blueberries were grown right in the state we were in but along the coastline, the good ones anyway. At 8 I learned of high bush vs. low bush blueberries...how the hell did my Mom know anything like that?

**

I’ll call him Ray as he looked pretty close to Ray Walston. He was a nurse at a facility in Pawtuxet village and he and I began to know one another after some doing on my part. 

 

Ray Walston (Mr. Hand)

 

He was raised in Aroostock county Maine, about as far north as you can get and about as far from any urban sophistication you can get as well. He had that typical New England standoffish-ness but multiplied by 10. I knew it wasn’t plain rudeness as I recognized the attitude. Add the fact northern rural New England produces these kine of people that are even more unconvinced of your authenticity. After 10 years of closely watching you, maybe then they’ll trust you and open up.

When Ray and I sat beneath a tree in the back, I would talk to him and all I got were four word responses at best, mixed with a strange accent. He’d answer my questions fairly truthfully but never elaborated on them. I wondered if he thought I was far too gabby and wished me to shut the hell up.

The breakthrough happened when I learned he got his nursing degree through the US Navy. I had a best friend who spent his life in the Navy and I could talk with some credibility on the whole experience. Once I mentioned Navy ports such as Rota, Doha or say Diego Garcia, he opened up like a book finally.

Growing up in northern Maine was incredibly insular but you didn’t really know that, he said. The only idea you had of the larger world was TV.

He had gone to the regular schools, worked on farms, froze in the winters and hunted with his Dad. After graduation, he was expected to find a full time job and do what everyone else did, work. However, he tells me there were no longer any good jobs around. There was lumbering, if you could find it, farming but that was tight as Maine’s soil totally sucks for large scale farming or some other piddly service job that paid nothing. The most coveted jobs, the ones his Dad and Grandads had, were in the paper mills. But they were leaving one by one for cheaper labor elsewhere, till they eventually vanished.

Ray tells me, “I had seasonal jobs in farming, tourism...picking crops, that sort of thing...none of them paid.”

I asked what he picked and tells me “I used to rake blueberries in August.”

I light up and tell him how I loved blueberries and he agreed but gave me a more knowing look about it.

“You ever rake them?” he asks.

“Nope...wouldn’t know how.” tell him.

“You gotta be strong, and being young helps, but it destroys your spine in time if you keep at it, never get out of it. You work 12 hours rain or shine, constantly bending over, standing up and repeating that all day.”

He goes to tell me it was in a blueberry field was where he made his decision to flee Maine and join the Navy. He had been told by some of his teachers he was smarter than your average bear and would benefit from further education. But how do you pay for it and there are no fabulous universities in Aroostock county.

But the US military would educate you if you qualified.

He signed up and left.

I asked him if he ever went back to Maine as to hear him tell it, it was the last stop before you fell off Edge of Earth.

“I have visited...relatives, friends...I miss the quiet, the very slow pace of life...but there are still no jobs there to this day...it’s the Nebraska of New England you know...so very little there. But you know what? I’ll probably retire there, everyone ‘goes home’ in time.”

“The blueberries.” I tell him.

“Yes, there are those, but you can’t pay the rent with them. When I go back home, retire, I’ll have the money this time.” 

 

South American migrants in Maine...see the cowboy hat no real Mainer would ever wear?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Low Bush variety and tiny, the best. Not those blueberries the size of  your thumbnail you get in Stop & Shop.

Probably takes a while to fill one of these, but you have a field boss telling you to "hurry it up" I bet too