Sleep Picker Sleep

Here is some documentation of the last time I will ever cherry pick. Cherry pickers are really next level up from tree planters on the disgusting scale.

It reads "This site may have been treated with pesticides that could be harmful to human health. People are prohibited from entering unless permission has been granted from those within the company.'' Pretty sure we were in there the 7th.

  

PASSED OUT PICKERS
Anthropological studies on cherry picker sleeping and living quarters as well as insight on diet.
Please note the poor tree planting picker, that has lost so much hope, he doesn't even care that his blue flagging tape is out in the open. 

Canadian Hitch Hiking Adventures

I did some solo hitch hiking this August in South Eastern BC, so I decided to take photos of all my rides. Not an original idea, but who cares. Life was crazy and uprooted at the time so I didn't post this right away, and unfortunately, I forget most of the details by now.

NELSON TO CRESTON

After Shambhala I packed myself up in the back of my new friend's station wagon (literally, stuff got packed around me) and we took off to Nelson all haggard in the dark. I spent a last night amongst friends in the parking lot of a church/community centre (?) outside of Nelson (we got kicked out of a city parking lot). One last breakfast and fancy Nelson coffee later, I was tossed on the side of the highway to fend for myself. My goal: make it to Creston to cherry pick. Right away I met this guy:

That's my sign. The back said Salmo. He was also going to Creston to cherry pick. I mostly let him hitch hike with me because I wanted to use him to get a job. But it turned out that he reaped all the benefits of hitch hiking with a girl because I ended up getting both of us a job on my own.

Nelson to Ymir:

This lady was a nice safe ride. She basically told us about how she's had a pretty crappy, boring life. She seemed full of a lot of regret. She likes to pick up hitch hikers even though her husband disproves and she does it with her kids in the car sometimes. One time she gave a guy a ride who pretty much threatened her to give him all her money, so it's pretty cool she still picks people up.

Ymir - Salmo

This guy was a friendly super hick who was, surprise surprise, going to the beer store. He pretty much talked about how he likes to party and said he had some friends that went to Shambhlala. Weird. It was a really short ride.

Salmo to Creston

This is all you ever really want for a safe, fun ride: female, young, not weirdos. All there was to worry about was their driving abilities and how hung over they were from Shambhala. Two of them were from Quebec and the third one was French. They were a good time. Listened to some beats and relived the wild weekend. They dropped us off at the 7-11 and then night picking happened.

The sign are true. Watch out for mountain goats!

NELSON TO VANCOUVER

I escaped Creston to visit a friend in Nelson who just had a baby. I was going to hitch hike there but she magically passed me on the highway just as I was about to pack up and stick out my thumb; so I was saved from another afternoon of risky adventure and talking to strangers.
I found myself back on the road after a weekend in Nelson for the longest Canadian hitch hike trip I've ever attempted.

Nelson to ''The Junction''

Man, I wish this guy could have taken me all the way to Vancouver. He embodies everything that is Nelson and BC. He used to tree plant for 17 years or something, and he knew a supervisor from Rhino, a tree planting company I worked at for 5 days a couple of summers ago. He saved me from my shitty hitch hiking spot and took me to ''the juntion'' where he had hitched many a times himself.

''The Junction'' to Trail

I fucked up on this one. I didn't look at a map before hitting the road so I didn't actually know the route, and this idiot took me the wrong way, and I was even more of an idiot for not knowing it. He's from Ontario and moved to Trail about over a year ago. He hadn't been anywhere else in BC other than Trail and Nelson. He was pretty depressing and liked to do copious amounts of mushrooms recreationally and have shitty trips - which seems like the wrong way of going about it. He didn't really know much about anything, especially not the way to Vancouver.

Trail to Castlegar

I stood on the wrong side of the highway for 20 min with my Vancouver sign looking like a total moron until someone felt sorry for me, stopped and told me. Very quickly afterwards these fun, easy going, Trail red necks picked me up. They were going for an afternoon of tubing and drinking down the river. They were so stoked. Also, more beer clothing.

Castlegar to Nancy Green Lake

I was not outside of Castlegar for more than 5 seconds before this total creep picked me up. Yes, he was as creepy as he looks. What was I thinking? That this was my 4th ride of the day, it was getting late and I just killed over an hour back tracking. There were red flags popping up everywhere which I promptly ignored: he told me to put my stuff in the back before even talking to me at all, he hesitated and made up a destination on the spot, and he was rushing me. As soon as I got in, my adrenalin started pumping. It just got worse talking to him. He said he was ''just going for a drive'' and his response to why he picked me up was ''why not?''. After a few kilometers he sensed my nervousness (at least he wasn't unperceptive) and asked me if he was making me uncomfortable. I said yes. Then he said he could drop me off. So I said, please do. Then commenced like 20 minutes of me trying to convince him to just drop me off before Christina Lake, the destination of his ''drive''. It was the worst. Somehow I managed to get him to let me off at a pull of for Nancy Green Lake. When I finally was out of the car I summoned up the nerve to ask him for a picture which he initially refused. He then backed up and said he'd let me take one if it made me ''feel better''. And then pressed that he really wanted to take me to Christina Lake. Yuck. Lesson learned.

Christina Lake to Vancouver

I was so relieved when this guy picked me up. He gave off good vibes right away, and seemed eccentric-normal, which turned out to be the case. His name is Ash, and he's in an ad-hock brass band where no experience is required. He had just come back from a show in Nelson and still had sparkles on his face from the night before. Sparkles just exude comfort. He was going back to Vancouver to pick up his stuff and start a new life farming in Osoyoos. Ash was as good a ride as you can get without it being perfect. We stopped at East Indian fruit stands for samosas, blueberries and giant zucchinis, went to a yard sale, stopped for coffee, and had endless confusing conversation with no music for 8 hours. It got unbelievably tedious after a while. He would string together the most absurd chain of nonsensical words completely losing me, and forcing me to reply with ''yeah'', ''uhuh'' and head nods until I could change the topic. For example: ''the budgetary progressivity of the market allows the apparatus of society ....'' He had originally planned to drop me off in Osoyoos so he could get in some introspective meditation and listen to his 70s Portuguese lessons on tape, but he revealed to me he was actually going all the way to Vancouver, and that I was entertaining enough to stay for the rest of the ride. Turns out he just had a crush on me, which got a little weird, but he was mostly just a lonely, nice guy who hadn't had much success in life and was still trying to figure it all out. He dropped me off pretty much at my doorstep just as I was about to snap from listening to the shittiest, fuzziest recordings of his brass band.

So I made it! And I didn't get raped or murdered. Success! North America is still the best place on earth to hitch hike.

Cherry Slave

After tree planting and getting $400 cash jacked practically right out of my bare hands with every other piece of plastic I owned, I found myself in Creston BC with $10 in my pocket and an irreparably, non-functioning bank card. I did go with the purpose of cherry picking but I by no means intended on getting sucked into hard core, no fun cherry picking- night picking happened entirely by mistake. The first Quebecois skid I saw when my hitch hiking ride dropped me off at the 7-11 ushered me hurriedly into his car with claims of work. That left me not sleeping in the park that night so I went apparently to work all night instead. Cherry picking is supposed to be a bunch of lazy hippies and skids barely working and taking most of the day to drink wine by the river. Night picking completely ruins all this. Cherry slave hours are midnight till 10am or often noon. The rest of the day, if you are normal, is spent eating, maybe doing something in town, and then getting some sleep in there before you have to wake up at the most unnatural hour. Graveyard shifts should really stick to jobs like nursing where lives are at stake, cuz I really don't think it's worth it otherwise. I, on the other hand, not giving a shit and refusing to give up my paid vacation, would work all night and then still play all day like I was a regular day picker. I'd only sleep 2-4 hours most days. Lucky for me I slept through my alarm one night and there was a day off due to rain another day (that's right, day off due to rain) or else I never would have made it. But the fact that I could keep up with most average pickers on that little sleep is testament to how easy this job is for a tree planter. I actually surprised myself and made decent money due to the inhumane number of working hours. As a disclaimer, there were some really hard core cherry pickers on this orchard who were not fucking around, and they were actually making quite a killing. The high baller made $570 one night.
I ran around the orchard a couple of nights taking pictures instead of working to capture this weird job. I decided to only use the natural light of the headlamps and the moon to exemplify the true atmosphere. I'm not particularly proud of most of these pictures because they were technically really hard to take without a tripod and so little light. But here you can get a feel for the life of a night picker:

Before work meeting. This is the boss' house. She looks like a big, tough no-bull shit lady at first but she's actually very nice, and rides around in that golf cart.

My row for the night.

The full moon through the cherry branches.

Jerome picking away with my flash light on him.

I put this one in for the bucket.

Katia picking illumination only by her headlamp.

Serg. A Quebecer living the life the rest of the year in Mexico.

Jerome's full bin (300-350 lbs of cherries).

Dana, my favorite swamper. He's 16 years old, from Creston, has a motorcyle, doesn't do drugs, and is going to be a helicopter pilot when he grows up. Swampers move cherry bins down the rows with a tractor, move pickers when they are done their row, pick out the rotten cherries from bins etc.

Coffee break at 5am.

Then the sun comes up and you keep picking but now you can actually see.

Hands look like this after a night of picking. I hear it's just from the ladders but it looks fucked up.

Katia was the only person on the orchard actually protecting herself with gloves and a mask against the many sprays they use for all sorts of fucked up shit. Cherries it turns out are the most delicate fruit and are showered with an assortment of chemicals so that you end up with those big, shiny, red, round things in the grocery store. The most important spray seems to be a ripening retardant. It allows the cherries to stay longer in the trees without further ripening and rotting. They must be harvested 7 days after spraying in order to still be marketable. The farmer has to time the spraying according to the size and speed of his picking crew to maximize his harvestable crop. A big problem with cherries is that they split easily when overheated - which is why they are picked at cooler temperatures - and when wet due to rain. Farmers lose their shit when it rains. A calcium spray gives them a sort of waxy protective coating so rain beads off them and they split less and helicopter is hired sometimes to dry the cherries. Then there are fungicides to prevent all sorts of rotting, herbicides are sprayed on the ground, insecticides for things like ants, fruit flies and earwigs (earwigs love cherries).

Apparently this residue is just calcium. Cherries are pretty damn white most of the time when picking which is slightly disconcerting.

This is the spray booth. The farmer caught me taking pictures and got really nervous. He started telling me that the cherries are taken to a lab and tested to make sure they meet the maximum allowed toxicity levels for consummation on the market. He assured me that his cherries meet BC standards...
but what is comes down to is that it's pretty fucked up when words like toxicity are used in conjunction with food.

See You in Hell

Here's a little article and interview I did on this crazy conspiracy theorist, zealot 58 year old man I met cherry picking in the Okanagan this summer.

Open publication - Free publishing - More twelve tribes

Here are some of my favorite photos from my rolls of colour film from the summer.

Evan's dogs: Roxanne and Bumpy. Vancouver, BC.

Roby, Roxanne, and Bumpy.Vancouver, BC.

Darryl. Vancouver, BC.

A house destroyed by a mud slide. Oliver, BC.

Self portrait. Oliver, BC.

My Quebecois friends in their 1974 Ford truck. Oliver, BC.

The cherry orchard. Road 17, between Oliver and Osoyoos, BC.

Paul. I cherry picked with this guy. Oliver, BC.

Black and white rolls are coming. Working on it.