(NOTE:  This is a continuation of the story: “Picking Grapes When I Should Be Counting Turds”.  It's about working in a vineyard.)

My headlights bounce errantly off row after row of sleeping grape vines as I slowly inch my way down the rutted old farm tractor trail in the dark. I’m on the cautious lookout for fox holes or deep muddy seeps, which to a farm tractor may be child’s play, but for my little car spells “s-t-u-c-k” in a very final way. It would probably take a tractor to pull me out. 

It’s almost too early in the morning.  It’s dark and I can see nothing outside of the cone of my headlights.  But I’m not really ready to go to work just yet, so when I reach my destination I shut off the engine and step out into the barely morning, where I sip on the remains of a pumpkin spice cappuccino and listen to the flitting of the morning birds.

It’s the first week in September.  The temperature today is supposed to go up into the upper 70’s/ lower 80’s.  But that’s hours away and at the moment it’s cold enough to see my cappuccino breath.    

This is always the worst part of the day: starting.  I slowly pull on rubber boots, a warm hooded sweatshirt, an old winter field jacket and a pair of thick cloth work gloves.  I look like an old Serbian washer woman.  At the moment I’m dry and toasty but within twenty minutes I’ll be soaking wet.  There’s no way around it.

I finish my coffee and pee once more in the corn.  With no further excuses, I can no longer put it off.  Rolling my head on my shoulders, I take a deep breath, exhale luxuriantly, fondle my pruning shears and grab the first vine. 

The gloves quickly become wet but the feeling is not totally unpleasant.  They act like a wet suit and trap a layer of warmth around my hands. The heavy morning dew is everywhere.  Each motion launches a rain shower into the air and tips a hundred drops beyond the angle of repose where they run downwards, dripping from leaf to leaf like a water sculpture.  I try to sing or whistle but it sounds alien, affected, much too loud.  So I work on in total silence.  In a distant field a gun shot goes off.  Someone’s up early shooting at the birds.

There’s something holy about the early morning.  I remember the first time I stayed up all night just to see if I could figure out if there was a certain point when night ended and morning began.  It turned out to be the birds.  On some cosmic cue the birds all start singing.

“A one, and a two, and a…” 

It’s definitely morning now.

•     •      •

Grape vines are referred to by convention as having a morning side (east facing) or an afternoon side (west facing).  In general, the rows follow the contour of the land, but regardless of how the row is oriented, it can be classified by which way it most commonly faces.  In the off-chance that a row runs exactly east-west, I assume there is some sort of tie-breaker similar to the NFL.  On this day I am working only on afternoon sides, which means that I am facing into the gathering light of the eastern sky. 

Suddenly, without warning, sunlight bursts through the trees and briefly warms my face.  At almost the exact same instant, the early morning commuter Amtrak howls as it crosses some intersection in the distance sounding like a bugle call.  My dark hood acts as a solar collector and I bask in the sudden warmth.  But as I continue down the row the sun falls behind a taller tree and I move back into cold morning darkness.  These little solar encounters occur more and more frequently until the sun finally stays above the trees and a curtain of steamy vapor rises from every surface.  The backlit grapes shine like little lanterns.

This little here-comes-the-sun moment happens most every morning when, despite my efforts to repress it, the spirit of the Beatles and Richie Havens comes rising up from the cornfields strumming manically on a guitar as the sun lights up the grapes from within. 

“Here comes the sun…

It’s alright…

doo-ba-dee

doo-ba-dee

doo-doo-doo-ba-doo!”

Once the sun becomes a fixture over the trees, the air warms rapidly and I begin to shed clothes.  The field jacket is hung on a post to dry.  Gloves are wrung out and laid upon the hood of the car where by noon they will be crispy. Eventually the hooded sweatshirt comes off and by mid-day even the t-shirt.  Back in the days when I was a chiseled, blond, muscle-boy, I spent a lot of time with my shirt off – proud as I was of my physique.  But the boulder pecs have slowly turned into man boobs and the abs of steel have gone to flab and I feel somewhat self-conscious.  Good for me that out here in the vineyard there’s no one but the grapes and the flies to be offended by another old man with his shirt off.  I hum the lyrics from The Girl From Ipanema as I jog a little up and down between the rows, trying to convince myself that I’m still twenty-seven. 

“Young and strong and tanned and lovely…”

But I stop when I realize that, at best, I’m only shooting for two of those, tops.  One if I’m lucky.  “Watch out old man,” I tell myself as I think better of the jog, “don’t step in a hole and hurt yourself.”

With the warmth comes the bugs – buzzing, annoying, distracting – like a bunch of little bin Ladens with exoskeletons.  The little bastards seem to go only for my ears but I know that they are equal opportunity annoyers and are bothering me everywhere.  If it wasn’t for the ear wax in my ears, I fear they might bore right into my brain.

Like a hunter culling the biggest bucks from the herd, I pop the fattest and juiciest of the grapes into my mouth as I go.  I crush the grapes against my pallet and let the sweet juices collect beneath my tongue and then trickle down my throat.  The younger grapes are a weird tart/sweet, the older ones smooth and fruity.  My favorites are the warm ones.  Like a participant in a Roman orgy I take only the best, swallowing the juice and spitting out the skin, pulp and seeds as I go. I tell myself that by spitting out the skins I’m minimizing the amount of spray chemicals that I’m ingesting although in reality I know that my reproductive days are behind me and the cancers that are eventually going to kill me are probably already in my body working their magic.  About all I probably stand to do by spitting is to miss out on a great fungicide buzz…  But somehow it seems like a good idea and besides, it’s fun.  So down the row I travel, pruning, tasting - spitting seeds lustily as I go, stopping only occasionally to brush the slop from my beard.

If pirates picked grapes, this is what they’d be like. 

•      •       •

With the harvest just a few weeks away, my job is to open up the “fruit zone”, removing excess growth from around the little bobbing clusters of grapes so that they can ripen in the sun.  My nemesis comes in the form of long, transverse, lateral vines that snake their way everywhere and clog up the system.  There is no real solution other than to yank them forward, cut them off and move on.  This takes lots of time and the owners, rightfully concerned with the impending harvest, want me to work rapidly.  I tend to fuss over the vines more than I should – making sure that they look nice.  It’s the artist in me. 

So I constantly remind myself that, in the event that anyone comments, they’re not going to ask “How good of a job did you do?”  They’ll only ask: “How far did you get?”  So I press on, leaving the vines a little messier than I would prefer, but moving as quickly as possible.

As I move along I leave large piles of severed vines and leaves behind, but they don’t last long - the fragile vegetation is so tender that large succulent green vines cut one day shrivel to brown nothingness the next.  By mid-day a knee-high pile of debris has withered to half it’s bulk, and by the next day it has become a barely noticeable flat mat of brown crunchy leaves on the ground.  The sun overhead beats down ferociously. The combination of sun, tedium and monotony is beginning to show as fatigue.  Large vines that used to surrender without a fight are beginning to tug back when I pull on them, sensing a weakness in my game.  The afternoon sun has forced me to retreat to the modest protection of a long-sleeve shirt and my floppy, wide-brimmed, straw field hat. 

Locked firmly in manual mode, I come to the end of the last row and realize that I am finished.  I’ve completed this entire field of grape vines. 

I’m done.   

Exhausted but elated to be finished, I shuffle to the barn and find the foreman working on a tractor.  “I’m done!” I announce with great pride and sense of accomplishment.  He looks up from the engine bolt that he’s struggling with and glances out the door towards my handiwork. 

“Uh-huh,” he grunts without comment, and moves me to another field.