During August, a haze of blue drifts over the bushes on our organic blueberry farm; branches droop, weighted down by the long clusters of berries. The rows of high bush blueberries stretch for almost a mile across our peat bog. Normally, the shriek of the red tail hawk or the chattering of goldfinches floats above the bushes, but this month, our blueberry shaker vibrates the humid air.
The size of a one-car garage and shaped like a small version of the letter "n", the steel monster whines. Perched at the bow, twelve feet off the ground, my husband John steers the machine and listens for different sounds. His musician's ear recognizes the correct level of r.p.m. necessary to operate this piece of equipment, and also the exact notes of the jiggling fiberglass rods as they tickle off berries.
The rods bristle along tall columns dangling inside the machine's belly. As the machine lumbers over the rows, the rods wiggle the branches and the berries fall onto a conveyor belt composed of linked plastic cups. The belt rattles as it rises, carrying the berries up to the deck where they fall onto a second belt before cascading into a plastic container. Holes riddle the yellow or red box that farmers refer to as a lug. Our intern Levi slides the lug off its platform and stacks it at the front of the machine near a cluster of other filled lugs.
Surrounded by throbbing engines, no one talks much. During the peak of harvest, John shakes berries twelve hours a day, six days a week. About every two hours, when the lugs are filled, John and Levi transfer them to a flatbed truck and rumble up to the packing shed where the berries are stored in a room-size cooler.
On packing day, we gather inside the metal pole building where motors growl. Levi lifts a lug and pours berries onto a conveyor belt. The berries roll by a fan that blows out leaves before they tumble through the hundreds of spinning rods into a de-stemming machine and then splash into a tank filled with water. They fall onto another conveyor belt that rises from the tank and slides beneath a hooded blower.
Motors throb. Fans roar. Plastic belts chatter. The fragrance of blueberries permeates the building. A gaggle of young women, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, stand beside the last conveyor belt, plucking out soft fruit before the belt angles upward to the stainless steel hopper.
Berries ping against the metal. Fruit cascades onto a vibrating platform where the berries dance towards me before they leap into a waiting box. When an automatic scale registers thirty pounds, the vibration ceases. With one hand, I press down the two cardboard flaps. With the other I shove the box into a taping machine that shrieks. I grab another box, set it on the scale, and punch a button.
When I tell people that I am an organic blueberry farmer, they smile and imagine me dropping berries into my bucket, like in Blueberries for Sal when she heard "plink, plank, plunk". But during the hot days of August, we work midst the roar of machinery that brings the harvest home. I'm Joan Donaldson.