This was in 1969, when I was twelve and shade grown tobacco was still a viable product of New England. At that time you would see acre upon acre of tobacco plants protected from the sun by off white netting some eight feet high. (Four years later under a luminous moon while drunk and stoned two friends and I attempted to run atop the netting. Every three or four feet we fell through and smashed to the ground. Bruised and delirious we laughed it off and climbed back up to try it again.)
On the ride to the field that morning I barely spoke. I was at that time in my life not given to carousing. Instead I stared out the window as the sun rose and gave shape to the world.
The bus pulled off the paved road and ambled down a dirt one between two different fields protected by nets. We came to a halt. The driver told us to leave our lunches on our seats. As we stepped off the bus a field hand asked our names and wrote them down on a sheet of paper affixed to a clipboard. Once we were all off the bus the field hand explained that we were to remove the small leaves called suckers from the tobacco plants and put them in the baskets that each one of us was going to be outfitted with. The baskets were canvas and metal affairs three feet long by two feet wide and two feet deep. We were to pull them behind us with a four feet long wire a quarter of an inch thick. It had a hoop handle at one end and a hook at the other.
We were then led by the field hand to the rows of plants. There was a gully between each row. I was instructed by the field hand to get down on my butt in the gully I'd been led to and scoot backwards while dragging my basket behind me. I was to fill it with the suckers I pulled off of the plants on either side of me. He told me to pick all the way down to the white pole. Then he walked off. I looked at the plants at either side of me and I realized at once that I was in trouble. Every leaf looked relatively the same size to me.
All around me my cohorts went at it, hooting and hollering at one another as they advanced dutifully backwards down the rows. I did not know what to do. I sat there stymied.
After a spell I reasoned I'd pull off the the lowest two leaves on each plant. I went at it slow and deliberate while fearing at any moment the field hand would return and berate me for screwing up. As I went at it the voices of my cohorts loss their volume and seemed further and further away. I'd been at it a good half hour when I turned around to see how much further I had to go. Some fifty yards away was a pole with a white stripe around it. A hundred yards beyond that was a pole painted entirely white. I hoped the white striped pole was where I was suppose to stop. I picked on.
By the time I reached the white striped pole I couldn't hear my fellow pickers at all. There was no one near to ask if this was as far as I should go. I sat there and poked at the earth. I just couldn't figure out what to do. I don't know how much time passed but suddenly the field hand barked, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Before I could say anything he said, "Sitting on your ass is what I see. And we ain't paying you to sit on your ass. Now get out of there and get back on the bus. You're fired."
I got on the bus and the old codger got behind the wheel and drove me back to the gas station. On the ride there I hung my head and wondered how I was going to explain to my father that on my first job outside of being a paperboy I'd gotten fired in under an hour.
When I got home my father reacted in a way that he would do so for some years to come by giving voice to an oft repeated lament. What are we going to do with you? My mother ever the comforter told me not to worry. There would be other jobs. History would prove that to be an understatement. For over the proceeding years I would quit or be fired from a seemingly unending succession of jobs. But none would end so quickly as my stint in the fields of tobacco.
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