TOWNSHIP 19, Maine — Each summer, from late July through mid-August, raker camp communities clustered among the open blueberry barrens of eastern Maine come to life as about 1,500 people from different cultures and backgrounds roll into the region to pitch tents, park campers and bunk in tar-paper shacks.
The work is strenuous, with rakers hunched over in the fields, rain or shine, for as many as 10 hours per day, swinging short-handled rakes through the low bushes to pluck the berries off the stems. The effort pays well, however, with weekly paychecks often ranging between $1,000 and $2,000, depending on how many plastic trays (about twice as big as a shoe box) a raker can fill for $2.50 apiece.
But the draw of the annual harvest goes beyond the money, according to Vincent and Sarah Simon, a married Micmac couple from Thunder Bay, Ontario, who have come to Maine each summer for more than 50 years, since they were children tagging along with their parents and grandparents.
The Simons, who grew up in the Micmac community of Elsipogtog, New Brunswick, also known as Big Cove, say the chance to be with familiar faces, many of them other Micmacs from Big Cove or Eskasoni, Nova Scotia, is a big reason why they return every year. White people from Maine and other states, some of whom stay in the camping area overseen by the Simons, and Latinos, some of whom have settled in Maine permanently, also make up significant portions of the seasonal rakers spread out among several large blueberry farms in Hancock and Washington counties.
“It’s the tradition itself, and also the opportunity to live together and work together with family and friends,” Vincent Simon, 65, said recently, facing the setting sun as he and his wife sat on short stacks of overturned harvest trays in blueberry barrens adjacent to an old military radar site north of Columbia Falls.
A retired early childhood schoolteacher, Sarah Simon, 64, said raking blueberries is hard work but for her and her husband it also functions as a kind of reunion.
“It’s like a different environment, a different community, meeting and getting together with our summertime family,” she said.
Donna Augustine, 64, of Elsipogtog also started raking blueberries with her family at a young age, but she since has held a variety of advocacy positions during harvests, helping fellow Micmac workers get access to medical care and other services while in Maine.
Augustine said there is a strong tradition in Micmac culture of traveling for seasonal work, whether it is to fish, hunt or harvest crops. Equally strong is a tradition of doing so in large family groups that work and camp together, she added.
“Socializing is a very important part of our culture,” Augustine said, sitting at a table at the Harrington Elementary School, where she works as a community liaison for a federally funded summer program for the children of migrant workers. “When we come [to Maine], it’s a time to socialize because we see everyone. It’s not easy. We leave our homes, and it’s a long drive, and so you can’t bring everything with you, the comforts of home.”
Migrant families
The Simons are a seasonal institution on the blueberry barrens north of Columbia Falls, so much so that the hamletlike campground they oversee in the middle of vast fields owned by the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Co. is named Simon Camp — a reflection of their roles for the past 26 years as harvest supervisors. They recalled that they started raking on the Blue Hill Peninsula with their parents when they were 7 and 8 years old, before the adoption of federal laws requiring children to be at least 12 years old to rake blueberries in the summer with their parents.
The Simons both lived in Big Cove, they said, but got to know each other during blueberry seasons in Maine.
“That’s where we met,” Vincent Simon said, referring to the fields in Sedgwick where they raked. “We fell in love and we started a family.”
The Simons have five children, only one of whom still rakes with them each summer, but they have other relatives who join their 100-person raking crew each year, including two of their grandsons, three of Vincent Simon’s sisters and two of his nephews.
Vincent Simon, who is retired from his former job as executive director of a treatment center, said the ability of entire migrant families to live in the camps, with young children attending the summer school program in Harrington, is part of what helps knit the migrant camps together as communities.
“It’s very important. It’s so valuable,” he said of Micmac rakers bringing their families with them. “Without kids, there’s no family. Without kids there’s no future for them to continue what we’re doing.”
Mary Noella Marshall, 48, is a Micmac from Eskasoni who first came to Maine in the 1970s when her family raked in the fields of eastern Maine. She and her eight brothers and sisters would pile into the back of her father’s truck and drive all night, waking up when they arrived at the blueberry fields in the morning.
“My parents were rakers for so many years,” Marshall said. “My dad would leave from Eskasoni in the evenings so he wouldn’t have to stop anywhere. He would line us up in the back [of the truck]. There were no seat belt [laws] back then.”
The annual trips to Maine were the only times she left home for any period of time, she said.
“That’s the only vacation I remember having, all my life,” Marshall said. “Six solid weeks they would rake. My dad would drive us back home, and then he’d come back for potato picking in Aroostook County.”
Marshall raked when she became old enough, as did her eight siblings. Her sons and daughter raked for a few years, and she has two brothers, a sister and a granddaughter who still do.
Like Augustine, Marshall now works as a community liaison for the migrant worker children school program. The four-week session is administered by the Maine Department of Education and functions much like a day camp, involving field trips and creative classroom activities more than proficiency-based instruction.
Marshall helps watch over the Micmac and other children in the program — 92 total this summer, all between the ages of 3 and 13 — who get bused to the Harrington school each morning while their parents and older siblings rake blueberries.
Marshall said she herself was a child in the school program 40-plus years ago. Without it, her parents would not have been able to come to Maine each summer, and neither would many current families, all of whom depend on their blueberry income to help make ends meet.
“They come here to earn money, right? This money is going to [buy] school clothes, Christmas [presents],” Marshall said. “It’s very important for them, and they bring their families.”
Camp life
Despite being short-lived, the community atmosphere fostered at the rakers’ camps is evident in the evenings, after the rakers have returned from the surrounding fields and the children have been bused back from Harrington.
One particular evening last week, many rakers sat in folding chairs or on the front stoops of their tarpaper shacks, relaxing with each other in conversation over cool beverages. A group of boys threw a football and a baseball back and forth in the Simons’ campground while the sounds of electronic gunfire generated by a video game were heard coming through a screen window of a nearby cabin. At the John Goo Goo campground, nearly a mile away across the fields, one younger boy hanging out with other children tried his hand at singing and doing the dance to Silento’s hit tune “ Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae).”
On Aug. 12, Eskasoni residents Chuck Gould, 40, and his wife, Lydia Gould, 36, together raked 171 trays, or boxes, of blueberries, netting more than $400 for a day’s pay for their family. After they finished raking for the day and arrived back at the Simons’ camp, Lydia Gould started cooking supper in their cabin while Chuck Gould talked to reporters at a table and their two youngest children, Charlize, 6, and Chandler, 12, played with other children outside. Two of their older children, Ronald, 16, and Jennilee, 15, also had finished raking for the day and were at another cabin making plans with friends to go to Machias for the evening.
Chuck Gould said he has raked blueberries in Maine since he was 12 years old, the last of his 11 siblings to carry on the tradition. He first came with his father, Sid Gould, who started raking with his parents when he was 14 or 15 years old. Sid Gould, who last raked in Maine in 2002, passed away last year at the age of 71.
Chuck Gould said Micmacs from Eskasoni started coming to Maine to rake blueberries decades ago because steady work was hard to come by on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.
“Either you had to work at a mill or on a big cargo ship carrying lumber, or getting pulp,” he said. “It always had to do with nature [and natural resources]. One of the reasons [we came to] Maine was we love nature. Micmac love nature, we’re part of nature. We believe that. To be with nature and to find employment was hand-in-hand together.”
He said he fishes for snow crab in late winter and spring, with the length of the crabbing season dependent on what kind of quota gets set each year. Aside from fishing and raking blueberries, he said, he relies on intermittent temporary work and government assistance to get by the rest of the year.
Chuck Gould said he enjoys coming to Maine because he comes across friends that he doesn’t get the chance to socialize with back home.
“I might see a buddy [here] I might not see until next year,” he said. “If I go down to the grocery store [in Columbia or Milbridge], I might see somebody I haven’t seen in two years. It’s always the same group of people, the same big families that always merge either at one point or another around Down East Maine.”
Being able to bring his family with him, with Charlize going to the school program in Harrington, makes a big difference, he added, and may prove beneficial to his children when they grow up and need employment.
“If I leave them [back home], I’ll be homesick,” Chuck Gould said. “It’s bad enough I miss home, my mother and siblings, but with my family with me, it’s a lot easier. And they love it. I’d be lost if I were here all alone. [My children] learn what I pass on to them. I’m hoping they’ll pass it on to their children.”
Tradition
According to the Simons, the Micmac tradition of raking blueberries in Maine each summer is not as strong as it used to be.
Many blueberry growers have replaced migrant workers with mechanized harvesters, they said, but in recognition of the importance of tribal customs, the Passamaquoddy Tribe has promised not to eliminate its migrant worker camps in favor of machinery. The fact that many blueberry barrens have areas of steep or boulder-strewn terrain, they said, has helped keep the migrant raker program alive.
Vincent Simon said his worker campground has fewer people from Big Cove than it used to, but more Micmacs from Eskasoni than it did when he first became a harvest supervisor. He said each year he tries to recruit younger Micmacs to his site to preserve the tribal tradition.
Though they are grandparents now, the Simons said they cannot imagine not coming to Maine during blueberry season.
“We ask ourselves that, and sometimes we say, ‘this is going to be our last year,’ but we can’t get away,” Vincent Simon said.
“We can’t stay away, even though it’s hard work what we’re doing but we enjoy it so much,” Sarah Simon chimed in, laughing. “We enjoy the company, the people.”
