Changing Landscapes | Inside Yankee

In the last days of September 1978, I joined a potato harvest crew on Donald Gallagher’s farm in northern Aroostook County, Maine. I worked for 40 cents a barrel. To fill a barrel you bent over, put a basket between your legs, and picked potatoes with both hands. After only an hour my legs had stiffened, and my back and wrists hurt. We started shortly after daybreak, and I remember stopping once, certain it was lunchtime. It was only 9:30.

I picked alongside Aroostook County’s schoolchildren, who, as part of a long tradition, had three weeks’ break to work the harvest. One mother of two young pickers told me, “Our kids have learned there’s no easy money. Picking potatoes has put iron in their soup, and we’re proud of them. It will be a sorry time to see it disappear.”

The sights and sounds of that long-ago week came back to me when I read Erin Rhoda’s account of last year’s potato harvest and saw Tristan Spinski’s photos of the young workers on the McCrum farm in Mars Hill, about 20 miles south of the Gallagher farm [“Lessons of the Field,” p. 78]. I was struck by how much technology had changed things, with nearly all the harvesting now done by machines. But machines still need the human touch, and what survives today is that touch often belongs to someone too young for a driver’s license. And what also has not changed is that Aroostook’s students still consider the work an important part of their lives, with lessons they will carry with them forever.

The changes in Aroostook have been coming for decades, but along the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, more controversial changes are coming quickly for lobster fishermen whose trap lines can entangle and sometimes kill endangered North Atlantic right whales. Bill Donahue’s “Collision Course” [p. 86] is a story of our time, when the ground seems to be shifting beneath so many of us, often catching us unprepared. There are no quick and easy fixes for protecting these magnificent creatures without threatening a time-honored and iconic way of life. Emotions get heated when livelihoods are pitted against possible species extinction. But there remains hope that new inventions and technology may somehow find a way for both whales and the lobster industry to survive before it is too late for either.

Nature has something to say about change, too, as “The Magnificent 7” [p. 66] reminds us. Each fall, as the temperatures drop and the daylight wanes, New England is gifted the world’s most stunning foliage. There is a lesson there that is easy to forget when the noise gets too loud, the ground too shaky. I will do my best to remember.

Mel Alleneditor@yankeemagazine.com