Onions
The other day, for no particular reason, I went driving through the Black Dirt fields again, the man on the radio said it was ninety-five degrees.
Maybe there was a reason. Maybe it’s something I need to do at least once every couple of summers to simply appreciate the time that has passed between boyhood and old manhood.
The temperature coming off that dried muck had to be near one hundred-twenty-five degrees. I’ve never before or since felt heat like that peculiar heat coming off those goddamned onion fields.
In Orange County, in the 1970’s, to have worked out in the Black Dirt is a rite, a passage, it is something you did so that forty or fifty years later you could tell your stories with authenticity, and daily appreciate you no longer toil and sweat in those ungodly long rows.
Out in that dirt, come late summer, I was a dumper, a particularly good dumper, I was told. The honor and glory of being a good onion dumper was somehow lost on me - then and now.
Standing on an 8-foot-high shaky stack of broken pallets dumping eighty-five-pound crates of onions into a hopper—all day long—for a buck and a quarter an hour. Or, bent over in that roiling sun pulling weeds from the onions in rows that seemed ten miles long. When you finally finished a row, you turned around and started the next endless row.
The days spent dreaming of fame and glory and taking all my onion money to buy me a nice Corvette, while some less sweaty boss-man yelled at us to work harder in a fractured mix of Polish and Spanish.
One important thing I learned out there in that dirt was that the worst day at just about any other job, anywhere, was better than the best day you could possibly have in those hot fields.
I worked next to the migrants. We sweated and swore together. We drank from the same dirty canteen of water.
Taking that canteen from an outstretched, wet hand, and looking back at a smile missing a couple of teeth. My replies always in broken Spanish, always wondering if I said the wrong thing or the right thing; was I even close to saying the right thing?
Beautiful young girls, with long dark hair, in cotton print dresses who seemed to pull weeds with an effortless elegance, never dirty or sweaty, and old men, faces caked in black mud, inelegant and tired.
Out there in that burning dust everyone’s back was wet. I learned everything I know about equality and equity and my place in the grand scheme of the universe in those fields. I’m no better or worse than the guy in the next row pulling his own weeds.
I got to go home at the end of the day and take a long shower and watch the black dirt form thick rings of muck on the walls of the bathtub. I got to wash off the day and become a white boy again with a nice house and a TV that worked most of the time.
The migrants went back to trailers parked out on the edge of the fields. Blue and white trailers, brown and yellow, with missing windows covered with cardboard and duct tape. Other windows filled with some rich man’s discarded air conditioners, and towels and sheets and more duct tape keeping the hot air outside, while the broken machines blew some semblance of cooler, never cold air inside. The outside air was never more than just a breeze of hot wind.
I walked up and into those trailers many times, went inside and smoked and drank beer in the tiny living rooms, sitting on some jettisoned old lawn furniture some boss up the road had placed out along the highway as junk. Laughing at the wealthy guy who’d discard such good stuff. We’d smoke and drink and eat spicy Spanish food and tell jokes that I never fully understood and then I’d leave. I was always with them, but I was never one of them. We all knew somehow, I’d never end up the old man with the missing teeth, and the muck-stained face telling dirty jokes out among the tall green onion tops. I was a welcome visitor, maybe an enigma… why would the white boy come to these fields? No one ever asked me, but I knew the question was asked, and probably often.
As with everything else in my life, every experience, every trip into any one of a thousand other lives, I was simply a visitor to these fields, a witness to that somber and real existence.
I suppose that’s why I never looked down on those guys, because they were me and I was them and it sucked to be us on those hot days.
But I got to leave, I was simply a reporter.
Some days, like the other day, a part of me strangely misses some or all that, and there is no logical reason why. Maybe it’s simply that I miss being young and able to toss around eighty-five-pound onion crates like they were fluffy pillows, but I sense it was more. I miss the honesty of hard and good work and the sweat of the people and the profanity of genuine camaraderie.
That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.
Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!
Bill
I think what you are missing Bill is how you felt in a time before the world showed you just how horrible it could be. A world before you became less trusting, more jaded, and fearful of the person you had become. As we get older, I think we all wish to find that place, even though we know we can never return to it.
Stay safe my friend.