After camping in the Canadian Rockies, my friend Shawn and I hitched out of the mountains in a rainstorm. Our ride ended at the same time that the rain stopped, which was in Kelowna, BC, nestled in a valley lined with orchards. It seemed the perfect place to enact our plan to make some much-needed cash as migrant laborers. We found our way to the farm labor office to apply for jobs as pickers and blithely made up fake Canadian Social Security numbers as we filled out our applications. We’d decided to pretend that we were from Toronto, since Shawn had spent some time there and we could fake it.
I felt like a true hobo as we rode the bus out of town to a crossroads and then walked the rest of the way to the farm, passing squawking geese, ragged children, tumbledown shacks and crate after crate of perfect McIntosh apples. The couple who ran the place, the Masons, showed us to the army tent in their backyard that was to be our home for the next week or two, however long it took to bring in the harvest. I could tell that we weren’t their usual migrant laborers- they were very solicitous, almost apologetic, that we had to sleep in a smelly old army tent.
Early the next morning, we all went out picking. The way it is done is that you climb up a three-legged ladder wearing a canvas bag attached to your chest that has a metal frame at the top to keep it open. The bags untie at the bottom, so that after you’ve filled it up, you can easily pour the apples into the bin that you are filling, which is enormous. It didn’t seem possible that those tiny apples could ever fill that much space. Payment is by the bin, so there’s an incentive to pick quickly.
It was on my very first tree, in my first half-hour of work, that I reached for an apple that I should’ve left alone. It was just out of reach, and no one had told me never to stand on the top rung of a three-legged ladder. I leaned out for the apple, and then I was flying though the air, landing with a splat on my apple-bag. I tried to make a joke, say “Oh no, I made applesauce”, but the words wouldn’t come.
The next thing I remember we were all in the car on the way to the hospital-I’d broken my right wrist- and I had no idea where we were or who anyone was except Shawn.
“Where are we?” I asked
“Kelowna”, Shawn answered nervously. This did not ring any bells.
“Where’s that?”
“In the Okanagan Valley?” She tried. I looked out the window at the unfamiliar landscape.
“Where’s that?”
Shawn kind of sighed and said, “Pauline, we’re in British Columbia”
“British Columbia?! We’re in Canada? When did we cross the border?”
“Oh!” said someone in the front seat, “You’re Americans!” Poor Shawn; she was so worried that we’d be in trouble for lying, and now her travelling companion was an amnesiac.
Thanks to Canadian socialized medicine, they set my arm at the hospital, put me in a soft cast for a week, and even though I had worked less than an hour, I was eligible for worker’s compensation, $50 per week. I spent one slightly sedated night in the hospital, and while I was there the Masons’ invited Shawn to stay in the house in their daughter’s old room, and when they picked me at the hospital the next day, I moved in there too.
I felt pretty guilty that next week, as Shawn filled bins and I wandered around the orchard and the town waiting to get my hard cast put on. I arranged to have my Worker’s Comp checks sent to our destinations in California, so at least I’d be contributing down the road. The Masons practically adopted us; we ate dinner with them every night and all were teary-eyed when we rolled on out of there, me with my fresh white cast.
Then there was then a postal strike in Canada; I didn’t get my Comp. checks for months.
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