Volume 2
Editor Jennifer Jopp
Assistant Professor of History
Willamette University
108 Smullin
900 State Street
Salem, Oregon 97301
(503) 375-5341
My Neighbors
Anya Ballinger, My Neighbors
Our neighbors are those people who live next to us whether we like it or not. The proximity of our lives gives us privileged information about each other, and it's up to us whether we use that knowledge to pass judgement or to gain the understanding that allows a community to grow.
Old Mr. Lloyd lived across the street and called each of us kids by our last name - that is, he did not differentiate between my three siblings and me when he heralded one of us to his porch.
"I got something for ya," he would grunt, disappearing behind his screen door, and returning with a plastic sack of zucchini from his garden. "I see your mom got a new car," he would ask, by way of nosing out information.
"No, that's just my aunt, visiting."
Although we didn't like his zucchini, or his nosy questions, Mr. Lloyd kept inside his fence, and was therefore harmless.
Dad liked zucchini, fried in butter, but none of us kids would touch the multitude of green appendages. Inevitably they would sit in the fridge and then get tossed in the compost, weeks after Mr. Lloyd's neighborly generosity.
To the west was Terry. Too tall for a woman, I could never see her face properly. All I remember of her appearance are her stringy cut off shorts, and one hand waving that cigarette like an extra finger. Dave lived there too, but for some reason we called it Terry's house. I don't recall which was bigger, his sunglasses or his moustache, but I never saw him without either. They spent their summers on lawn chairs in a sea of browning grass. I was afraid of them, the way I was afraid of all strangers as a child, and I did everything I could to avoid talking with them.
Summertime was the onset of glorious freedom in the backyard. Blessed with a double lot and a seventy-foot cedar tree, my siblings and I spent the whole day in the jungle of our imaginations. Being east of Mt. Hood meant that we were in a "rain shadow," as my dad had once explained. All I knew was that the yard turned brown mid-August. The hills across the river, named the Klikitats by native peoples, gave the appearance of knees, covered in yellow-gold velvet at this time of year. My parents, having four kids and both working outside the home, cherished the Saturdays when they could work in the yard. One such Saturday, Dad decided to put up a taller fence between our yard and Terry's.
Most of the yards in our neighborhood were fenced, for one reason or another. Many families had dogs to be contained. Mr. Lloyd put up a fence because, he grumbled, the damn postman always cut across his lawn. Granted, Mr. Lloyd had the nicest lawn in the neighborhood. He kept it green even when the Klikitat knees had turned to gold.
Dad worried about the effect of Terry's yard on ours. He never complained about the sight of Terry's yard until dandelions appeared in ours.
"Every dandelion in our yard is delivered air mail from Terry's yard." Dad resented that lawn, as tangled and unkempt as the fringe of her cut-off shorts. He gouged the roots of a dandelion with his pocket knife. "This is how you remove a weed. You have to cut it off at the root." The blade of his knife sank deep into the dirt. The vile plant gone, he wiped the blade on his thigh and stood up. Only a little dirt crater remained.
Dad spent several hours constructing the white lattice barrier at the edge of the garden. National Public Radio blared while he worked. "Do you hear that?" he called to my sister and me as we trailed our dress up clothes in the dust under the swing set. He was referring to something on the radio.
"There are Republicans in this country who want Congress to spend millions of dollars putting up a fence on the border of Mexico," Dad said, leaning on his shovel. "Of course, that isn't the solution, because a fence can be dug under, or climbed over. People are worried about illegal immigrants taking jobs. The truth is, not many American citizens want to do the hard labor that the Mexicans are willing to do."
Dad had grown up in The Dalles, and had seen the tide of migrant workers shift from the white trash "Oakies" to the Hispanics who now worked in the orchards surrounding our small town. His first job in high school was swamping buckets in a cherry orchard.
"How come the Mexicans want to do it?"
"Because they get paid ten times as much for the same job here as they would in their homeland."
We were too young to uphold our end of a political discussion with Dad. In third grade, my class was making pottery in the style of the Aztecs or the Mayans or one of those ancient cultures, I couldn't remember. Mexico was only a distant land pictured in my text book.
The summer I turned ten, and should have known better, my brother Ben secured access to our roof by leaning the giant utility ladder against the north wall of the house. My parents, believing in the merits of experiential education, gazed up the aluminum rise and said quite seriously, "Now I want you kids to be careful." The roof became the secret hideaway when relatives were coming to visit. If it was a particularly beloved uncle, a bucket of water could easily be transported up the ladder and poised over the front porch for a thoroughly drenching welcome.
Our neighborhood was filled with kids who had smaller backyards than ours. Bobby and Curtis lived three doors down the alley. They were still in elementary school, and their parents dressed them in characteristically boy clothes: t-shirts bearing sports logos, the newest skate shoes. When the boys saw us climbing on the roof, immediately they wanted to go up too. Arlan, whose yard was full of bent nails and plaster debris, who wore his dad's oversized, stained t-shirts and never washed his face, tagged along like he always did.
Curtis was only in kindergarten, so I had to guide him, step by step, till he was able to roll onto the gravelly flat part of the roof. The height was exhilarating. We jumped from the roof's peaks and cheered for our altitude. The cars on Tenth Street cruised past, the drivers oblivious to our eagle eyes. We were up among the tree tops.
"Hey!" A grown-up voice drifted into our cloud. Terry was waving at us from her side of the fence.
"Hide," my brother hissed, and some of the kids flopped onto their bellies so as to not be seen by the neighbor.
"You kids come down from there," Terry called up to us.
"But our parents said it's okay," retorted my brother.
"Get those little kids off there!" her anger was terrifying, even from this height. "Those little kids shouldn't be up there."
Sheepishly, we herded Bobby and Curtis and Arlan back down the ladder, but my brother refused to retreat. Terry waited until she saw the little boys' feet touch ground, and she went back inside her house.
From then on, we would be afraid of Terry, the Neighbor Who Yelled At Us. In our righteous little minds, she had no business telling us what to do. Terry, who was of no relation to us; neither aunt nor teacher nor parent nor any typical figure of authority, was just a lady who happened to live near us. Her neighborship to us was a default, and therefore, we felt, she had no jurisdiction over us.
Mom saved the Sunday comics each week, believing that store-bought wrapping paper was a waste of trees and money, and that colored newsprint was sufficiently cheerful for the holidays. On Christmas morning, the tree sprouted from a pile of Mom's recycled wrapping paper, with the occasional gift from Grandma sticking out like a jolly red thumb. This year, there were four tiny packages in blue tissue paper, floating among the recycled comics. Mom explained that Terry had brought these for us. Inside the blue tissue paper, I found a small green soap with the picture of a mouse pressed to its surface through some unknown craft, and beneath that, a delicate butterfly crocheted from blue yarn. Presumably my siblings received similar gifts, though now I can't remember what.
"Oh, isn't that sweet?" Mom cooed. She insisted that we take a loaf of banana bread to our neighbor now to thank her. We moaned.
Taking Christmas goodies to the neighbors was a particularly uncomfortable task, and none of us wanted to do it. Through the whole year, we lived like typical American neighbors, rarely going past the neighbor's front stoop, sometimes never past the front gate. And then, come Christmastime, the rules changed to something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and we were expected to bring cheerful tidings to each house. Ringing the doorbell on Mr. Lloyd's narrow porch made me nervous, ever since he had come to the door in his underwear and refused to buy any Girl Scout cookies.
Mom had started making the cookie dough a few weeks earlier, which had been a delightful discovery in the basement freezer, though I wasn't the only culprit to leave finger prints in the dough. The baking took place a few days before Christmas, and then the cookies were arranged tastefully on a paper plate, wrapped in plastic and bedecked with a red or green bow on top. Then the rounds began, most of the responsibility falling on the little shoulders of my sister, Micaela, who never complained until she became a teenager, but that was years later and I had moved out of the house. By Christmas morning, we had done our duties to all of the neighbors, and Terry had received her allotted plate of cookies. Surely she didn't need a loaf of banana bread too. After none of us volunteered to venture alone in to the uncharted territory of Terry's backyard, my mom had the great idea that all four of us should take the loaf to Terry. So we could all thank her for the presents. The four of us never did anything together anymore. Not since Ben started middle school and became cool.
So it was with some hesitation that we traipsed down the alley and entered Terry's yard. Ben finally rang the doorbell, because none of us would, and it seemed to take forever for the door to open. Terry was in her pajamas, scruffy black hair mopping her shoulders. The interior was dingy, we could see Dave on the sofa behind her, holding a beer. It was a strange feeling to finally see inside the house. In the world of my neighborhood, I had never considered the interior workings of the houses. They had seemed like impenetrable facades, defining my world like the lines in a coloring book.
Terry's delight was apparent when we presented the banana bread.
"Thanks, kids," she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. We mumbled our thanks and backed down off the porch, too eager to return to the secure center of our universe.
Back home, Micaela announced, "My butterfly smells funny," holding it up for my mother to sniff-test. I sniffed mine too. It did have an acrid tinge to it.
"That's because Terry is a Smoker," Mom pronounced with sorrowful disapproval, handing the butterfly back to Micaela. "Yep, that's what a Smoker's house smells like. I bet all her furniture and clothes smell like that too. Wouldn't it be awful to be surrounded by that smell all day?"
In the privacy of my room, I poured a little perfume onto the woven wings, but this really made the odor worse.
A neighbor is someone who is close to you, whether you like it or not, and Terry took her role very seriously. I came home from school one day to find Terry and Dave sitting on the edge of our sofa. Mom was perched on the piano bench, holding a bright yellow sign in her hands, obviously in the middle of a discussion. My siblings tumbled in the door behind me.
"Hi kids, there's a snack in the kitchen. We're just going to finish talking, okay?"
Terry smiled at us in such a warm way, I felt like she wanted to follow us into the kitchen and be part of our youth. But she stayed, one hand on Dave's knee, and we traipsed out to the kitchen and flung our backpacks on the floor.
It turned out that Terry was presenting a Safe House program to my mom and several other neighbors that day.
"We'll put this sign in our window," my mom showed us, after Terry and Dave left, "and if one of our neighbors needs assistance, they know that they can come here and we'll call the police." I imagined the drama that might ensue from such a sign as this. I hoped lots of poor mothers and children would knock on our door, seeking shelter, and we would take them in, soothe their worries and call the police.
No one ever came. In later years I would look at that sign, which grew cobwebs in our front window, and remember Terry, the trashy neighbor who smoked and had too many cats, whose yard was full of weeds. She was the one who wanted to preserve the peace, to offer an olive branch to every one around her. She was the neighbor who reached out to create a safe-space in all of our lives. Terry, whose lifestyle we knew so much about, yet never really understood.
As we got older, we spent less time in the yard playing make-believe. As an enticement "to go outside and play," my dad put up a basketball hoop and paved a strip of the alley. Soon our backyard was the Disneyland of the block. Kids came from the other side of Pentland Street just to play in our yard. My parents thought it was great community building, but my brothers had different opinions.
Coming home from middle school one day, I found Ben terrorizing Bobby and Curtis on the basketball court. "You guys can't be here! This is our property!" he informed them. The boys let the ball drop, and it rolled against the chain link fence. Ben strutted off to meet up with his high school friends.
"You just have to ask first," I explained gently, before the kids disappeared down the alley. "It's okay if you want to play here, but only when one of us is home. Just say, can I come over?"
Bobby nodded silently and they all disappeared. I felt my diplomacy skills were a success with our young neighbors.
Later that same afternoon, our yard, inevitably, began to fill with other people's children. My little brother and his friends were skateboarding in the driveway, and Arlan was sitting on the curb, annoying everyone with his constant chatter and desire to be included. The alley was noisy with kid racket, as other neighbor kids rode their bikes past. Then I noticed Bobby sitting against the fence.
"Hey, don't you want to come play?" I asked.
He gave a pained expression and looked away.
"What's the matter? You don't have to sit over there."
He took a deep breath and mumbled, "Can I come over?" Oh the humility. The poor kid was afraid of me. He thought I was making fun of him, making him play by the rules I had previously dictated.
"Look, I only meant when there's nobody here, you should ask." I threw him the basketball. I didn't even like basketball, anyway.
The cherry season opened officially in The Dalles with the Cherry Festival parade in April. All the downtown streets were closed and a long display of local businesses threw candy from decorated truck beds. Sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, it was a festival of freebies - veterinarians and optometrists gave out free pencils and back scratchers in a labyrinth of white fair tents. Artisans sold cherry-themed mugs and sun visors. In high school, at this time of year, my best friend actually stopped gossiping about who's on Prom Court, and switched to who's going to win Cherry Princess crown? It turned out that she was a finalist, and got to ride on the Cherry Court float on the big day.
At the age of sixteen, I was hired by Pullen Orchards to be a checker. It was my job to record the buckets of cherries that were harvested in the orchard. My little brother Martin was a swamper, like our dad before him, pouring the buckets into the tractor bins. I always wondered why it was called swamping, when there was no water involved.
Together Martin and I went to the training where we were shown videos of tractors rolling over and crushing the test dummies. I was given instructions on how to use the electronic scanner I would wear on my belt when counting buckets. He was shown the proper method of lifting and pouring cherries to avoid bruising as much as possible.
Julio, our formidable orchard boss, had the charm of a Hollywood cowboy in jeans and a shiny belt buckle. He carried a two-way radio on his hip instead of a six shooter, and used it to control the complex workings of the orchard. Julio spoke only in commands, although his English was fluent. He was at the top of the chain in the orchard, and let no one forget it.
Arriving for work in the morning, I was entering another world. Us white kids on the swamp crew were the minority in the orchard, our native language not the primary mode of communicating. I knew enough Spanish to get my job done, but I quickly learned the basic swear words from Julio. My little brother got a kick out of cussing furiously in Spanish at each heavy bucket that he lifted.
Julio got mad when he saw the swampers dropping cherries, or dumping the buckets roughly into the bins.
"You got to lay them in the bins like this," he would show the high schoolers, as they rolled their eyes behind his back.
"Now I don't want to see any more careless dumping, you got it?"
I was spared the brunt of Julio's wrath because I was a checker, and because I was older than most of the swampers. In the orchard, I was given special privileges, such as free tacos from the taco wagon. Free for the checkers, Julio told me with his charming smile, and then I knew it was because I was a girl. But the tacos were something else! Chunks of beef and real goat cheese, cilantro and fresh onions on a corn tortilla. Not anything you'll find at Taco Bell.
I had been to Mexico once; I had seen our southern neighbors. The mysteries of third grade social studies, it turned out, were not so far away. Just 20 hours of no leg room in a youth group van. Mexico was hot and dry. There was no grass; soccer fields were just blank dirt patches inside the tattered chain-link fences. The schools and churches were built from cinderblock, grey and cheap. The infrequent palm tree, while a novelty to a girl from Oregon, did not provide much shade nor scent, like the pine and fir forests I knew. The streets were dirty and the music was fast and the public transportation was unreliable buses decorated in Our Lady of Guadalupe icons. The trip leaders gave us a lecture the first night, after we had unrolled our sleeping bags in the host church's parish center, never to go out alone. Tijuana was portrayed as a dangerous place full of criminals.
It was no wonder, then, that many Mexicans wanted to get jobs in the USA.
Julio divided the swampers and the checkers into crews every morning. I was glad to be on Sammy's crew because he was nicer than the other tractor drivers. Sammy gave us breaks, and he never shouted; in fact he barely spoke at all. He drove the tractor up and down the rows of cherry trees, watching our work without bossing us.
We stopped at the end of one row, and the crew was permitted to recline in the shade. Sammy hopped down out of the tractor seat. He was shorter standing on the ground. He probably didn't reach my chin.
"What are we waiting for?" I asked him, and he pointed to the pickers several rows down.
"Do you want me to go check their buckets?" Sammy chewed a piece of grass and smiled shyly at me from under his red baseball cap. He gestured to the tractor. I sat down, wishing I knew more Spanish. The swampers cursed the heat and threw cherries at each other.
"He's in love with you," my little brother teased.
I threw a rotten cherry squarely at his shoulder.
In a small town, you're sure to meet someone you know when you leave your house. Just opening the door to put the cat out, you're bound to see your ex-boyfriend drive by. Trust me, it has happened in The Dalles.
That was my first summer with a driver's license, but I had no where to go. The library, the pool, and the park were all within walking distance, and my best friends were on vacation. So it was always a thrill when Mom needed ingredients from the store in a hurry and asked me to drive and pick something up.
There was a time in our nation's history when it would be common practice to ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar or an egg in a pinch. However, that distance from back porch to back porch is now riddled with the fear of obligation. The obligations of gratitude, of returning the favor, of getting to know a neighbor well enough to feel some responsibility for their welfare - all of these obstacles keep backdoors closed. Mom found it just as easy to send one of her newly-licensed offspring to the grocery store.
And off I went, grabbing my wallet with that newly minted piece of plastic. I swung the mini-van onto Tenth Street, driving past Terry's house, empty now. I don't remember when she left. The weeds were especially tall in the yard and the bed sheets hung limply in the windows. Gazing at the houses sliding by, I wondered what Terry thought of us. Did we welcome her into our life, or was it more of an awkward tolerance?
Author and poet Tich Naht Hahn says, "You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her." My mom, being the paragon of Catholic motherhood in our early years, prevented us from knowing that Terry and Dave were not, in fact, married. She worried what effect the immoral lifestyle on the other side of the fence might have on her innocent children. She knew the intimate facts of Terry's life, but she did not really understand the woman.
At the grocery store, more than a few "picker vans" were parked in the lot, while the dark-skinned men lounged in the shade of the building by the coke machines. They squinted at me, their Spanish words sliding over my head as I walked in the front doors.
I had just found the ingredients for Mom when, there in the bread aisle, I saw Sammy perusing the shelves. Oh, no, I should have gone to Fred Meyer - the migrants never shop at Fred Meyer, because that store won't cash their checks. Annoyed at my oversight, I walked the other way, hoping Sammy didn't see me. For many years, the migrant workers were invisible to me. I never noticed the change in demographics around town in the summer. It was only when I started working in the orchard that I began to recognize the characters behind the faces, to learn Spanish, to learn their stories.
I rounded the beauty products display, and found myself in the condiments aisle, passing Sammy on the left. He acknowledged me with his usual silent grin, and I sort of smiled and cruised toward the check out stand. What if he does like me as much as my brother and the other swampers tease? What if he wants to marry an American so that he can become a citizen? These ignorant thoughts were on my mind then, propelling me out the door in a hurry.
As a checker, the tractor followed me through trees, while the swampers dumped bucket after bucket. A skilled picker can fill 4 or 5 twenty-pound buckets in an hour. Don't let anyone tell you that migrant farm workers are doing unskilled labor. To remove a cherry from the branch requires a deft twist at the base of the stem. Keeping the fruit attached to the stem is essential for preserving freshness. To watch an experienced cherry picker harvest a tree is an impressive sight, their fingers moving nimbly through the leaves, grooming the branch like it's a pampered pet. The tips of the branches produce the blossoms in the spring which turn to fruit in the summer. A broken branch can mean hundreds of dollars lost in the future of the orchard. Julio scolded the more careless pickers when he found the generative branch tips on the ground.
A picker ascends a three-legged ladder as high as twenty feet while balancing a smaller bucket strapped to their chest, leaving their hands free for picking.
Orchardists pay attention to their most nimble-fingered pickers and reserve the best trees for them. The Rainier cherry variety is the most delicate fruit, bruising easily, and orchardists take a financial risk in growing this yellow-pink beauty. Only the most skilled pickers are allowed to work on those trees. The pickers are paid almost twice as much per bucket for Raniers, which allows them to pick slowly and avoid bruising the fruit.
A cherry picker's day begins before sunrise. The fruit must be picked in the cool of the day. The swamp crew starts at 7 am, after the pickers have been at it for a while. Often the first tractor run is the largest, with some trees shading more than twenty buckets. I was responsible for counting the buckets, which I was able to do in Spanish. I learned to confirm the number with the picker to avoid a disagreement later.
"Son cinco botas!"
"Cinco, si," the picker called down from his height on the ladder, as the cherries plunked rhythmically into the bucket on his chest. I scanned the barcode on his ID card, which he left for me on one of the full buckets.
The tractor rumbled twenty feet ahead to the next tree, where a weathered woman was waiting for me, ID card in hand.
"Son diez botas." I counted, and she nodded, handing me her card. She must be more desperate than some of these pickers, or maybe she's been cheated before. There are many things that can go wrong in an orchard. Already I had been hassled by disgruntled pickers who claimed to have had more buckets, that I counted wrong, or that the swampers picked up before I counted them. Julio sometimes sided with the pickers and ordered me to add a new count to their ID card. I resented his authority.
One afternoon, Julio told Sammy to drive me to an outlying field. Most of the pickers had already gone home, and the swamp crews too. I would get overtime for this, and Martin would be waiting for a ride home. At the top of the hill, just a handful of pickers watched us approach, waiting by their trees like bus stops.
For reasons that were not fully communicated to me, I was left in the shade of one of the trees while Sammy drove away with a load full of cherries. I smiled at the pickers in the shade beside me - a young man with his wife or girl friend. Other pickers leaned against cherry trees nearby. I practiced my simple questions, how are you? what's your name? do you like cherries? And then because the tractor still did not come back, I found myself asking, do you like Oregon? The young man smiled, sucking on a cherry between his work-stained fingers. His response was something like, Yes, it's beautiful here, but I miss my home. He described his home in Mexico with words I could not understand, but with a tone that I felt. Were there parts of Mexico that were so beautiful to inspire such longing in a person? Could there be mountains and rivers like in Oregon? My glimpse of the neighboring country had been so brief and so dirty in the crowded city of Tijuana.
It is easy for us to make judgements about our neighbors when we have just barely come inside the fence.
After I got my first paycheck, I began to pay attention to the little receipts that my scanner was printing for the pickers. The pickers were paid a piece rate of 2.72 per bucket. If a picker could harvest five buckets in an hour, they were making more money than me!
I asked one of the gringo tractor drivers what happens to a picker who isn't fast enough.
"If a picker don't make minimum wage, the boss has to fire them. Cause it's against the law to employ someone and not pay them minimum wage."
In general, the pickers were friendly to me, wanting to practice their English and learn my name. Sometimes they were too friendly. Occasionally a man would slide his fingers along mine when handing me the ID card, in such a suggestive way that I'd glare and rush through the transaction. Martin caught on to this culture and joked with the pickers about me.
"Hey sis, today we traded you for porn," he informed me on one tractor ride back to the packing house. The other swampers laughed but I rolled my eyes, knowing that nothing would come of it.
One young man stood out to me because of his reddish hair in the midst of all the dark-haired migrants. I knew his name was Juan because of his ID card, so I assumed that he was at least part Mexican. He worked everyday in a white undershirt, his broad shoulders freckled and burned. And this was strange too, because the other pickers wore long sleeves and brimmed hats to keep off the sun and the pesticides. He spoke perfect English, so I asked him lots of questions, and once even tried to help him fill a bucket. My fingers were slow, and I had only a handful to show after several minutes. I learned that he was an American from California, which shocked me, somehow, since I had assumed that all of the migrants were Mexicans, here on temporary worker visas. He told me about the drinking parties in the labor camp after dark, and how much he hated some of the rowdier pickers. Thievery was a problem, he said bitterly. His best shoes were missing. His brother travelled with him, was in fact picking in a tree nearby.
I had seen the picker cabins on occasion when the tractor drove to that corner of the orchard. The cabins were all attached to each other, a long line of white-washed doors. A woman had been standing outside, cleaning dishes in an outdoor sink. It reminded me of camping.
Some cabins are well equipped and spacious, but some are quite run-down, depending on the priorities of the employer. It serves an orchardist well to attract the same pickers back each year. A returning picker already knows the routine of the field. While a migrant may boast years experience in agriculture, harvesting strawberries is an entirely different operation than harvesting cherries. Retaining employees experienced in the particular crop keeps an orchard running smoothly.
About the time I got my first job in the orchard, my friends were being hired as classroom assistants for the Migrant Head Start program. Oregon Child Development Coalition had opened a multi-million-dollar building, the classrooms complete with tricycles and air conditioning. This sounded infinitely more appealing than checking buckets in the hot sun of the orchard, so, the next summer, I applied there, instead. Boy was I wrong! While Julio's outbursts were at least logical, the tantrums of a three-year old crying in Spanish are heartbreakingly incomprehensible. And then there were the hitters, the biters, and the block-throwers.
The worst part of my OCDC experience was knowing that in three weeks, I would loose contact with these children. They would move to a new town with new teachers who would have to learn their personalities all over again. Their migratory lifestyle made it difficult to attend school regularly, and many children fell behind. What would happen to Veronica's tendency to bite toys and other children? Three weeks was not enough time to break that habit. And what about Jesus, who cussed freely and fluently in both languages? My attempts to teach him manners went unheeded.
While I ran in circles around the classroom, practicing the vocabulary for ‘don't hit', and ‘don't cry', several of the kids, the good, quiet ones, were left to play on their own. I hoped that the educational merits of the toys would do their magic for these little minds, because I was too busy preventing Jesus from throwing chairs. The classrooms of OCDC were full of books and play areas, hands-on activities like a water table and a magnetic board. The children who came there were accustomed to second-hand goods - their parents could be seen shopping at thrift stores on the weekends. Giving these kids the best learning materials that money can buy was a contribution to their self-esteem as well as their cognitive development. In the summers, the preschool was open from five in the morning when most parents began picking, to as late as five in the evening.
My assistant was a lazy guy, younger than me, who got the job because he professed to be fluent in Spanish. Granted, he had grown up in a bilingual household, but his Spanish was more comprehension and less expression. When I needed him to write a note for the nurse, who only spoke Spanish, he couldn't do it. Mostly, he got distracted and got in the way. I was actually relieved one day, when I found him dead-asleep in the rocking chair, his little charge still blinking her eyes on his lap, naptime half over. One down, fifteen to go, I sighed, and started the lullaby CD over again.
The Dalles was a pretty welcoming place to land, if you were a migrant worker in need. Between the health clinic, the Catholic Church, and OCDC, most of your basic living needs were met. The next job I held was at the local St. Vincent De Paul Society, working in the food pantry, and even we had a special food box designed for the migrants who needed it.
Emily had volunteered there since lord-knows-when, her 1976 Cadillac SeVille rolling up at 3:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday. When she met me, she shook my hand fiercely in her bent fingers, saying, "You know, your daddy used to deliver the paper to me."
Emily was born with a bad hip eighty years ago, and so she limped around the food pantry, helping clients fill their carts. "There but for the grace of God go I," she would proselytize to me after they left. She lived through the great depression, she liked to remind me, and she knew what it meant to be in need.
Her benevolent manner changed, though, when the clients couldn't speak English. "Did you see how many kids that one had? And they expect us to feed them," she would grumble to me.
Emily's resentful sentiments were shared by a number of citizens in The Dalles, who felt that too much money was spent on welcoming our visiting neighbors from the south. The local paper was filled with letters to the editor declaiming the injustice of spending tax-dollars on non-citizens. As such sentiments spread across the states, ICE officials began raiding work-sites as near as Portland, hunting down the undocumented workers.
Dad's career was in appliance repair. He knew the inner workings of every appliance in town, from McDonald's fryers, to Mrs. Klindt's ancient refrigerator. In addition to the free produce and pizza his grateful customers gave him, Dad brought home an earful of uncensored opinions, spilled forth to the captive audience of the repair man behind the fridge. If anyone could gauge the temperature of the town, it was Dad.
Coming home from his service calls, he would muse over what he'd heard. Rumors of a smaller migrant work force concerned the orchardists who depended on their labor.
"I got a call on Mrs. Bailey's new dishwasher. She says John's real worried about this immigration business. She says he's seeing about half of what he normally sees this time of year, in terms of worker applications. They don't know what they're going to do. If no one shows up, who's gonna pick the cherries?"
On May 1, 2005, there was a march planned in our small town to support the immigrant rights of the local Hispanic community. On the day of the rally, the head honchos from the biggest cherry orchards joined the ranks downtown, walking alongside the Hispanic protesters. By this time, I had started a new job, and I didn't have time to march with the rest of them. When I came home on my lunch break, I could hear the distant chanting as the marchers passed, a few blocks from my window. I realized that I had forgotten to wear white that day. Wearing white was supposed to symbolize solidarity with the migrant workers as they marched.
In mid-July, the cherry harvest ended in The Dalles. The migrants left without fanfare, headed west for the pear and apple harvests. The ICE agents with their guns and deportation threats never came, or at least I never heard of it. Martin spent his last few days on the swamping crew tapping the tractor drivers on the shoulder and shouting, "La Migra, la Migra!" They, of course, told him to fuck off.
I never saw them go. The same way I missed Terry's disappearance from the little slat house beyond our yard. They are our neighbors, nothing more.
Like Emily in the food pantry, or Ben on the basketball court, it's easy to think that the most important thing is to keep enough resources for ourselves. We guard our national fences, and lock our front doors, and we forget that the real reason to live is the kinship we may experience in sharing life with others. That is what Terry was promoting with her Safe House sign and her blue tissue paper gifts. Her invitation to community was in direct violation of the individualistic attitudes of those around her.
A few years ago, I came home from college on a short break. Mr Lloyd's immaculate lawn looked the same as ever, but there were unfamiliar kids sauntering down the alley in low-slung jeans. Arlan still played on the basketball court, Mom informed me, but Bobby and Curtis never came around. I couldn't imagine those little boys in high school, though that's where they would have been. I wondered if they still wore footballs on their t-shirts, or if perhaps the goth or punk crowd had claimed them. Mom asked me if I remembered Terry. Her tone was careful as she revealed to me that Terry's name had come up in the obituaries. Somewhere in a small town in southern Oregon, she had killed herself with a shotgun.
This revelation provoked more emotion in my mom than in me, for I was just a child when I knew Terry, and couldn't be held responsible for my treatment of her. As with any suicide, my mom was haunted by the question of whether she could have done something to prevent it.
The finality of death makes such questions obsolete, yet simultaneously opens the heart's gate for future hope. It is not too late to take down the fence, and meet your neighbor. I believe we owe each other that much, for the simple fact that we live so closely. In living near other humans, we have the privilege of knowing them, and witnessing something of their life. With that privilege comes responsibility. We owe each other the understanding that fosters a peaceful neighborhood, a lifegiving community, whether that neighbor is across a picket fence or a national border.
References
Sources Consulted
- Causa Oregon. June 2007. http://causaoregon.blogspot.com/
- Department of Homeland Security - Preserving Our Freedoms, Protecting America http://www.dhs.gov/index.shtm
- Hahn, Thich Nhat. Peace is Every Step. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.
- Oregon Housing and Community Services Farmworker Information Center, http://www.oregon.gov/OHCS/PPR_FarmworkerInformationCenter.shtml
- Oregon Child Development Coalition Homepage, http://www.ocdc.net/
- US Department of Labor, The National Agricultural Workers Survey, Employment and Training Administration, http://www.doleta.gov/agworker/report9/toc.cfm