A ‘Harvest in Hell’

RAISIN CITY, Calif. — This flat little town named after the shriveled, sunbaked grape is in the throes of delirium, the same dusty madness that has seized every other town in a 300-mile-long sweep of the Central Valley.

It is harvest season in the most intensively farmed region in the country--a wild dance of hubris and foul temper, labor and water shortages, fortunes won and lost under eight weeks of brutal sun.

Only this August, the sun has turned it up a notch. Nine straight days of 104, 108, 112 degrees and higher. No one--neither farmer nor farm worker--can remember it being so hot and humid or the air so smutty.

“It’s the harvest in hell,” said Tim Parichan, a grape and almond grower.

Under this heat, the vineyards--wine grapes, table grapes, raisin grapes--are ripening all at once. Farmers leave their suburban homes at 4 in the morning clutching antacids and bronchial inhalers for another day in the powdery fields. Surly voices crackle over car phones: “We need to pick and we need to pick now.”

But the migrants from Mexico, the only workers who seem able to handle such a chore, cannot keep up. After a morning of picking and packing under colorful beach umbrellas that could not seem more out of place, the crews wilt and head back to whatever housing they have scraped together.

“It’s a crazy time,” said Randy Weber, a fourth-generation grape grower who like so many other small farmers must work a second job. His is scouter of wine grapes for a marketing cooperative.

“Everything is coming on top of everything else because of the heat. Garlic, onions, tomatoes, peaches, plums, nectarines, grapes, cantaloupes. It’s like pushing a two-inch egg through a one-inch hole. . . . Something has got to give, and it’s the workers.”

*

City folk don’t understand the magnitude or the miracle. Over the next six weeks, some 4.2 million tons of fresh fruit and vegetables will be stripped from these fields, packed into boxes or dumped into the beds of huge trucks for a trip to cold storage and then sent to markets across the United States, Canada and Asia.

No place does it bigger or better.

Don’t come over the mountain from Los Angeles or San Francisco, though, and expect to find a Napa Valley here. This is the industrial farm, nothing bucolic about it. There has been no attempt to please the eye. At farm’s edge is a strip of hot ashen earth strewn with rusty equipment from harvests past and weeds that tumble and grow as tall as telephone poles. Every step kicks up a fine, nostril-plugging powder.

Driving through the heart and heat of his 640-acre farm in Laton, the Grateful Dead gently rocking the cab of his Jeep Cherokee, Parichan doesn’t mind the dust. He says he can’t breathe anyway. He is allergic to grapes and the blooms of almonds and peaches.

Even so, August has been known to make him giddy.

Last harvest, a group of farm workers spotted Parichan, the 40-year-old son of a prominent corporate lawyer, alone in the middle of his vineyard in a tie-dyed shirt and bandanna. His eyes were closed and a headset was plugged into his ears, blasting “It’s All Over Now.” What spooked the workers wasn’t his froggy, disc jockey’s baritone but his arms, slithering like snakes.

“When everything’s going well and I’m feeling good and got a good jam going, I snake-dance,” said Parichan, who stopped counting at 150 the Deadhead concerts he attended over 20 years. “What can I say? So much in farming is drudgery. So when you pull off the crop and you can actually see the results of your work, it’s a great feeling.”

Because of the mild spring and the tortuous summer, he figures to close the harvest two to three weeks earlier this year than last. “This one is crazier and more frenetic, not to mention the heat. Everything’s coming so fast. I’m looking forward to this one being over.”

*

Lazarus Medina, 44, begins his work when the sun rises. He has been picking Thompson seedless table grapes half his life. When the season is over, he hangs up his clippers and works as a reporter and photographer for a Spanish-language newspaper in Fresno.

It may seem like an odd back-and-forth, but he says the piecework pay in these fields can be as high as $10.50 an hour on a good day. This summer, however, too many eight-hour days have been cut short by the heat wave. In past years, when a farmer called in the crew early, workers would protest, he said. Not this year.

“This is the hottest summer I have ever worked. The Spanish radio stations tell us to drink lots of water and take lots of breaks. I drink the water but the only break I take is at the end of the day.”

Like many others, he wears a cap with a sports logo and a heavy cotton long-sleeve shirt over a thick undershirt. It is the kind of dress one might see in 40-degree weather. He makes his sweat work for him, trapped beneath his shirt, the only coolness to be had in these fields.

He motions to the friend picking grapes next to him, 33-year-old Daniel Ontiveros, who is wearing a thick rubber belt around his waist in an attempt to lose 25 pounds off his paunch this summer.

“My friend is loco, don’t you think?” Medina laughs.

Demetria Morales, 25, fills plastic tubs with nearly 100 pounds of grapes and wheels them to where her husband, Eusebio Garcia, separates them into three grades. She is six months pregnant.

“This is our 10th year doing this together and this is the hottest one I can remember,” she says.

She plans to work in the fields until her eighth month, as she did with her other two pregnancies. After work, she cooks and does laundry. Even with the heat at night, she has no trouble sleeping.