The Potatoland Diaries - Chapter 2

DAY 1 — March 20, 2007 "Les Pommes de Terre de L'amour" *
Translated literally, it means, "The potatoes of love."

As I write this, my eyes are burning and I can hardly see the screen.

I awoke at 6:30 a.m. and selected long underwear that I considered to be the right weight for the day: the dark green ones with a fly. They had been a courting gift from a conservative-minded boyfriend who assumed that I wouldn't mind that they were lightly used. He was right. Under a two-dollar pair of jeans from the Salvation Army, they completed the ensemble for my first day as a potato sorter at a seed potato farm.

Between scrambling to piece together a hearty working woman's lunch and mixing my daughter a cup of instant cocoa before school, I snatched my day pack, the down vest my mom gave me for Christmas and a less-favored fleece jacket as an outer layer, incase the work was dirty.

I had stopped the night before to pick up a pair of gloves, at Jim's suggestion. He said the girls usually used those orange heavy duty playtex gloves, but I couldn't find them, so I bought a pair of black, latex-dipped fabric ones for $3.99. They looked like they would be good, and I bought them large enough that I could fit a thin liner inside if it got cold. I intentionally left them in the car so that I wouldn't forget them.

Twenty minutes after I dropped my kid at the high school, I was pulling up near the farm, wondering where to park my Honda where it wouldn't get bashed by a potato truck. I sheepishly wondered if anybody would notice my "Save the Trees, Remove the Bushes" bumper sticker, or my faux chrome Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem, and if they would think less of me as a potato sorter if they knew I was an atheist and a shameless, bleeding heart liberal. Heck, just because they're Christians doesn't mean they can't be liberals. Or does it?

Luckily, just as I was looking for someone to ask about the parking, a woman drove up and parked near the big red potato cellar. Her name was Maureen. She said she'd been sorting potatoes for 20 years, and where I was parked was fine.

I followed Maureen and some other people into a little red shack, where there were two space heaters, a coffee pot, a microwave and a small fridge. I sat down on one of the benches along the wall and got introduced around. My coworkers, AKA "the girls," included Maureen, Angela and Brandy. Then there were a bunch of Jim's sons, all recognizable by their blonde hair, pink complexions and giant hands and feet. A quiet college aged boy named Owen sat in the corner. And Doug and Clark, who by their dress and bearing appeared to be seasoned denizens of potatoland, rounded out the crew.

We went over the safety rules, visited the first aid kit, and dipped the bottoms of our shoes in some mysterious pink liquid. The moment had arrived! Without any fanfare, we crossed the gravel lot to climb to our stations on a big white conveyor system called a Spudnik.

It's a metal contraption rather like the Dr. Seuss machine that put the stars on the star bellied sneeches. Screen printed in red on the side of the machine was a wonderful cartoon depicting a long-lashed potato in a bassinet, rattle clutched in its little fist, with the words "potatoes handled like babies" inscribed below it.

The Spudnik moves potatoes from the cellar through several stages of sorting and loads them up a ramp onto a semi truck. We girls were stationed on either side of a split conveyor belt, and Owen was at a different conveyor, sorting rocks out of the smaller potatoes that fall through the rollers. (I'm not sure yet exactly what Doug and Clark do.) Jim gave us little black squares of foam to stand on to save our legs and told Brandy how to turn the conveyor on and off.

A loud buzzer rang when Brandy pushed the button and the spuds started coming. Jim gave us a quick lesson about what to keep and what to throw out.

I learned the enemies of the potato sorter. The dirt clod. The broken potato. Dry rot. Worm holes. Weird protuberances. Counter to my romantic instincts, I learned that the heart-shaped potato is among the most wanted seed potato outlaws. We were to dump the badly rotted, broken or misshapen potatoes onto a different belt that destined them for a processor. Vines, rocks and clods went off the truck.

After just a few minutes, Jim consigned our further training to Maureen and disappeared. I did my best to hide my initial "I'm a potato sorter!" grin as I faced my first wave of potatoes.

A stiff breeze blew my hair into my eyes, and I put on my red stocking cap. I tried to mimic what Maureen did, picking up a potato here and there and using a wringing motion to crack off a carapace of encrusted mud. Soon I had picked out my first dirt clods, and before long I was snagging heart-shaped potatoes off the belt and pitching them with authority into the metal chute to potato Valhalla.

It wasn't hard work, except for stooping over the belt and craning my neck to the right, to view the spuds ahead. Sometimes they would be so thick on the belt we had to dig through them, and if there were bad ones, we certainly missed some.

My gloves seemed to be working fine. As promised, coffee break and lunch time came. The wind picked up in the afternoon, and blew so much fine dirt into my eyes that I had to squint my lashes nearly shut. We did five truckloads. The rest of the crew went to fresh pack, but I had only agreed to work part time, so I left for the afternoon at 2 pm.

But before I took off, I summoned the courage to ask Jim if I could take home a few of the heart-shaped potatoes for dinner. He said, "Let me get you some good eating potatoes! You don't have to take those heart-shaped ones!" It took some convincing for him to realize that I actually wanted them.

On the drive home I tried to wipe some of the dirt off of my face and out of my eyes with Kleenex. Before I picked up my daughter from her piano lesson, I scrubbed the potato valentines and put them in the oven to bake. We ate them with broccoli, cheese sauce and crumbled bacon. They tasted even better than I imagined potatoes of love would taste.

*The names of the people in my diary are changed for the sake of anonymity.