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Peas, Man: Recollections of a Summer Job
by Matt Rasmussen
Orion
Excerpt:
This is the Skagit Valley. From its source in Canada the unruly Skagit River rushes south through precipitous mountain terrain, its progress stopped three times by dams that form long, skinny reservoirs tinted turquoise by glacial silt. The valley owes its fecundity to the time before dikes, weirs, floodgates, or dams, when the river braided across this landscape at its leisure. The hard rains of November and December swelled the river beyond its banks and year after year these floods sifted a flour of sediments across the plain, covering the land with bits of rocks and minerals ground to powder in the mountain heights.
The soil of the Skagit is fine and fawn. A freshly tilled field is a magical silk cloth, a weave so exquisite, so even and unmarred, it seems the work of elves. As it turns out, the soil laid down by the elements here is perfect for peas.
My job title was Pod Stripper Operator. (In fact, I soon learned, nobody called the combines "pod strippers"; they called them "pea viners," or just "viners.") I was assigned to the Set 7 night shift, my home range the flatlands outside the town of La Conner.
A pea viner seemed like a monster from a '50s sci-fi flick, an insect zapped with gamma rays and rendered a million times its original size. The body was boxy, ten feet tall with a sheet-metal exoskeleton. The mouth parts jutted forward ominously at ground level. Those mouth parts, or the "header," as they were known, ripped the pea vines from the ground, pods and all, and threw them into the body of the beast. The thing clanked and swayed, roared and hissed. The result of all this effort was a steady little stream of perfectly shelled peas that bounced optimistically down into a quarter-ton bin just behind the cab. What happened between those points of entry and exit was to me a mystery of religious opacity, a transubstantiation of ineffable utility.
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