This past Sunday a lady in my church and I were talking about the upcoming potato harvest. Now, I have always been a rugged guy even when I was a lot younger. My trouble was my hands weren’t fast at all. Some people would pick potatoes with such speed it seemed their hands were a blur. Alongside some of those people, it would be like comparing a Volkswagen Beetle to a Lincoln Navigator. So, with that said, the first chance I got to work on the back of the truck, I took it like a dog would a brand new butcher’s bone.
We were told the first day of digging that if we dropped a barrel wrong when we were stringing them and the truck ran over it, the person who dropped it would pay for it. That was all right with me as it meant I didn’t have to be on the ground picking. The only drawback was that we had to be at the farm an hour earlier in the morning, as the farmer also had dairy cows, and if they were in the barn we had to drop hay down for use during the rest of the day. We also had to stay after the pickers were done to clean up the field of full barrels, so if it rained or we got a big frost, the potatoes wouldn’t be harmed.
We used two trucks and had a truck as a spare. The newer of the trucks had a slower hoist on it, and that was the truck I wanted, because I still had a lot of uncertainties even though I was where I chose to be. The other truck was fast as lightning. If you pushed the button you had better be ready, because it seemed the second you pushed the button the barrel was there in front of you. The spare truck, if we used it, was so slow that you could hit the button and by the time you got to the next barrel in the string the one you had grappled might be close to the body.
I had been working in the potato house since I was 14 years old and at 16, rolling a barrel of potatoes was something quite familiar. The iffy thing was we had to roll the barrels full of potatoes on a moving deck of a truck. Bumps were hazards, wet spots were hazards and side hills could be a hazard. You did, however, learn to adapt to each field and its quirks.
All the first week we never lost a barrel. Then Monday morning, the first load of the morning was my turn to lay the string. All was well until about halfway through. The farmer was running the digger and the sun was shining and warm. The other fella working on the truck with me was handing me the barrels and I was stringing them. He handed me one of the few new barrels we had that year and I dropped it, only to have the bottom edge strike a good-sized rock, and it bounced ever so nicely right under the truck.
By the time we had hollered “WHOA” to the driver it was too late. We heard a huge crunch and the barrel was dead, flatter than the proverbial pancake. The problem was the farmer had stopped the digger and was talking to one of the pickers and he heard the crunch as well. He bellowed, “I heard that! Twenty dollars this Friday!”
Well, there was no sense lamenting the loss, so the day progressed, and when he quit digging for the day, Jim and I helped clean the digger off between trucks and he sort of grinned as he told me, “Scared ya, didn’t I? Nah, you don’t have to pay for it. Those things happen in digging time — just next time try to have it be one of the old barrels!” I told him I would try.
Ahhhh, the good old days. Now as I see the harvest getting ready to gear up, all I can do is sit and Remember When . . .
Guy Woodworth of Presque Isle is a 1973 graduate of Presque Isle High School and a four-year Navy veteran. He and his wife Theresa have two grown sons and five grandchildren. He may be contacted at lightning117_1999@yahoo.com.
