FORT KENT, Maine — Every so often, a column or story strikes a particular chord that resonates with its readers. For writers, that is a truly rewarding part of what we do and is made even more so when those same readers take the time to share what made that particular story or column stand out.
I had a feeling when I wrote a piece about potato harvest memories two weeks ago, it would dig up additional reader recollections.
Turns out, I was right when I wrote “anyone who ever pulled a mud-caked potato from a freezing cold field has a story.”
Even better, they wanted to share those stories.
One reader wrote to tell me of traveling to northern Maine as a child from New York every summer and, before returning home, would have time to join in the start of the potato harvest.
“We would go over to a potato harvest and follow the pickers, gathering up the potatoes they missed, putting them in grain bags and storing them on the back floor of our Model A in preparation for the long journey back to New York,” he wrote. “One year there must have been a glut of potatoes because the government ordered the harvest stained green in order to keep them off the grocers’ shelves. So that winter we all ate green potatoes.”
A reader from California wrote to tell me about growing up working on his family farm in Mars Hill and how the only day during harvest his Jewish family would not be in the fields was Yom Kippur, as he said it is the highest holy day of the year for Jews and is a day of atonement.
“We had a skeleton crew on that day,” he wrote.
Others wrote of long days picking by hand to earn 25 cents a barrel, then taking those earning to buy winter clothes; listening to Boston Red Sox games over old transistor radios in the fields; falling behind other pickers when answering the call of nature by running over the undug rows of potatoes to the nearest stand of trees; and breakfasts of oatmeal and eggs, eaten bleary-eyed before heading out to the fields with bags of bologna or ham sandwiches.
There are memories of televisions all over Aroostook County turned on long before daylight to catch the Potato Pickers Special on the local station.
“In the early mornings, I’d stumble into the kitchen for breakfast [and] broadcaster Wayne Knight was on ‘potato picker’s special,’ informing us of weather, whether farmers were ‘going on time’ and admonishing us to do a good job for that farmer,” one reader wrote. “And to help us along, he would play Dick Curless’ song ‘Tater Raisin’ Man.’ I grew up hating both Knight and Curless.”
For those who grew up on or near farms in Aroostook County more than three decades ago, it was a different time, superintendent of School Administrative District 27 Tim Doak said.
I was talking to Doak this week about budget issues in his district, and we somehow managed to turn the conversation to harvest.
Anyone who knows me and my love-hate relationship with the budget process in general should not be at all surprised to know how delighted I was the conversation took that turn.
Doak, 46, grew up in Fort Fairfield and remembers that living near potato farmers meant never, ever lacking for paying work.
“There were so many farmers around back then,” he said. “Probably 85 percent of Fort Fairfield was in farms. And there was always something to do on those farms every season, so we never really needed full-time jobs.”
Unlike students he sees these days who hold down permanent jobs while juggling school work and activities, Doak said back then, when he needed money, he went to a farmer.
In spring, he picked rocks out of the fields. In the summer months, he would find work cleaning or making repairs in the potato storage houses. And when fall came, he was back out in the fields, picking those potatoes or driving a truck.
“I tell the kids that today and they look at me and say, ‘Really, you did what? Picked rocks?’” Doak said. “I tell them, ‘Really, anything bigger than a basketball went into those rock trailers and was hauled off the fields.”
Doak recalls losing weight, hefting 25, 50 or 100-pound burlap bags of potatoes for shipping during the winter months.
“That was real manual labor,” he said. “We worked hard, ate well and slept really well. It was a really nice way to be brought up in Aroostook County.”
On his best days, Doak said, he could pick 75 barrels of potatoes, but there was always that one picker who consistently broke 100.
“For us, it was a guy named Billy,” he said. “Every day, we’d ask Billy how he did, and he’d always be at 105 or 110 barrels.”
Doak admits his own best days were the Saturdays his mom came to help him.
“She was phenomenal,” he said.
Families were a big part of the harvest, Doak said, recalling his uncle driving north into Quebec to pick up parents, their children and their furniture for the temporary move to the “picker shacks” for the harvest.
And it wasn’t just potatoes, according to Doak.
“The pea industry was huge in central Aroostook,” he said. “For three or four weeks, you could work around the clock driving the pea harvester or the truck back to the processing plant.”
Harvest time was a great equalizer, Doak said, with kids working side by side in the field for three weeks as best friends, only to not see or talk to each other again until the next year.
“You know, it’s really the sounds I miss,” he said. “To this day, when I hear it, I can tell by the sound when a rock gets caught in the digger. There’s that sound the empty barrel makes when it hits the ground or the sound of the barrel hoist when it perfectly hits and picks up the barrel. All of that brings me right back to the harvest.”
As fewer and fewer acres are planted in northern Maine, fewer young people experience those long days of earning cash money for a job well done.
Luckily, the one thing we do have plenty of are those who have been there, done that and are more than willing to share those memories.
I hope they never, ever stop digging them up for us to hear.
Julia Bayly of Fort Kent is an award winning writer and photographer, who writes part time for Bangor Daily News. Her column appears here every other Friday. She can be reached by email at jbayly@bangordailynews.com.
