South Carolina Strawberries

South Carolina Strawberries

April 24, 2000

A tall sign along I-85 advertised diesel for $1.31 per gallon.  The last tank of diesel we got in Virginia cost $1.42.  In Delaware, diesel prices were as high as $1.70.  The next sign we saw said, “Welcome to South Carolina.”  As is our custom, we stopped at the South Carolina Visitor’s Center to query the receptionist for quick information about conditions, events, and places of interest to us while traveling through the state.  She asked where we were from, so I explained that we were from Texas.  I volunteered that if we found South Carolina to our liking, we might just move here.  Without hesitation, she replied, “You should.”  Then she suggested that we might wish to deviate from our trip down I-85 toward Atlanta and take Hwy. 11 – the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway – through the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.  “You will see lots of pine trees,” she said.  Deciding that a scenic highway would be defined by more than just pine trees, we determined that there would be plenty of time, we needed to slow down from the rapid pace of I-85, and the two-lane, Hwy. l1 would be suitable for navigating with a 35-foot motorhome.

It was a glorious Saturday morning on this day before Easter – blue skies and full sunshine.  No “road rage” here!  Traffic did not pile up behind us as we drove a steady but unhurried pace.   A recent coffee “fix” contributed to the feeling of euphoria that I experienced as we cruised through the rolling, green countryside of small towns and farms.  A hazy outline of the Smokey Mountains appeared in the background and some dogwood blossoms remained on the trees.  Sometimes the ground was carpeted with dogwood blossoms. 

We found a local PBS station on the radio and listened with great pleasure to “Car Talk.”  You know, where the two auto mechanics from somewhere in New England take phone calls from listeners.  One caller explained that he had been severely injured in an auto accident that left him in the hospital for several weeks.  His wife decided to divorce him while he was recovering and now he was trying to put his life back on track.  His question was, “What kind of car should I buy to help me find a kind, gentle woman who likes to camp?  

“You should really get a golden retriever,” was the reply.  “But if you want a younger woman, you should get a Volkswagen.  You will actually have to keep the car door locked as you drive through town or young girls may force themselves into your car when you stop.  But if you want a more mature woman – say maybe 35 to 40 -- you should get a Jeep Cherokee.  This car implies that you are not ostentatious, but a stable though slightly adventurous fellow.  Oh, and don’t forget to get a puppy.  Women love guys that like puppies.”  This advice was given in the same great humor that we have come to expect from these two lively and entertaining automobile mechanics.

A brown sign advertised the Cowpen National Battlefield, so we decided to pull in.  But at the entrance, we “chickened out.”  So often we have been tempted to enter such a park and then realize that the parking lot was designed to handle automobiles and not large motorhomes.  Under such conditions, it is sometimes necessary to uncouple the tow car in order to turn around.  It is not a difficult or time-consuming job but can become tedious if other visitors are blocked by the operation.  The narrow entry road suggested such a parking lot, so we decided to read about this battle of the Revolutionary War in our reference books and not walk those hallowed grounds. 

It soon became obvious that this was peach country.  More and more peach orchards sprouted up along the highway.  Then an odd sort of apparition appeared beside the highway – a large side-hill of strawberries.  Conditioned to seeing and eating California strawberries, we found the South Carolina strawberries a curiosity.  Finding a place to park the motorhome, we stopped to photograph the field.  It was decked out in a plethora of American flags in lines up the hillside through the strawberry field.  As if by a plan, a breeze caused them all to wave at us.  

A large flower garden between the highway and the strawberry field depicted another American flag with red, white and blue pansies.  A workforce of Latino migrant workers worked rapidly to harvest the red berries.  They reminded me of the “wetbacks” who picked my dad’s cotton when I was a kid.  Some of these families came every year from the mountains of Mexico to make enough money to support themselves back in Mexico.  They exhibited amazing feats of strength and endurance in the hot, South Texas sun.  Although not generally large in stature, they were lean and very strong.  While rapidly plucking the lint and seed from the cotton burrs, they could drag a heavy sack of cotton between breeze-blocking rows of cotton in the sometimes stultifying heat.  Then they would haul this heavy sack on their shoulders to the trailer where their harvest was weighed and dumped into the trailer.  Then they would return to pick another sack full, have it weighed and dumped – continuing this hard work throughout the working day.

When I tried to mimic their harvesting skills, I quickly found that my skills were deficient.  Since I was the boss’s son and a lousy cotton picker, I got the softer job of weighing cotton, keeping the tally books for each worker and tromping the cotton into the trailer.  I learned to add quickly and accurately because pickers were quick to find errors in my mathematics.  As the pickers dumped the cotton from their sacks, it was my job to see if they were adding a few clods of soil into their sack to add a few pounds to their harvest.  Although I could seldom find any clods as they dumped, when the cotton was sucked out of the trailer at the gin, we would often find a few clods on the trailer floor.  Somebody cheated!  Workers were paid maybe three cents per pound, so for a 100-lb. sack of cotton they might make $3.00. The faster they worked, the more money they could take back to Mexico to feed the family through the winter.

An ancillary part of my job was to watch for the Border Patrol who sought to find and return illegal immigrants to Mexico.  Upon sighting their green-colored vehicles from my vantage point high on the trailer, I would shout, “Migracion!” as loudly as I could.  The pickers would drop their bags and flush like a covey of quail to a canal bank or other such hiding place.  The patrolmen would dash out into the cotton field, capture a few pickers, but usually leave most to chase at some later date.  These Mexicans had invested greatly in finding transportation to the Texas border, crossing the Rio Grande River and hiking to Edinburg.  To be picked up by the Immigration Service constituted a considerable blow to this investment.  When they first arrived, they were often hungry and very tired.  My mom frequently fed these families by the back door when they knocked and asked for assistance.  I have since wondered if her criteria for deciding whether to feed them was based on the fact that if they were hungry enough to face the pack of snarling dogs that we kept around the house, to come knock on our door, then they must really be hungry enough to deserve a feed.

Now, if you will forgive the digressions to my childhood in the cotton field, back to today.  In the strawberry field, I watched workers harvest with amazing hand speed.  Surely, their pay is based on the amount of berries harvested, not hourly wages – just like the cotton pickers of my childhood.

After taking a few photos of this fascinating scene, we crossed the highway to a shed where a sign read, “Cooley Brothers Peach Farm.”  It was far too early for peaches, but the sales shed was loaded with white plastic, gallon buckets of large, luscious berries.  A sample bucket tempted us to a taste test.  In spite of a minor, but distinct, aroma of Malathion insecticide, we quickly spilled some of the strawberry juice onto our lips as we bit into those delicious fruits.  I silently gave tribute to the genius of artificial selection and some hard-working strawberry breeder.  We gave in to our temptation and parted with a gallon which cost $7.00.  A quick count of gallon buckets in the shed, which were each filled to overflowing with red berries, yielded about 400 for an approximate value of $2,800.  It would take a lot of these buckets to pay for the production, harvest, and sale of this crop, not to mention the cost of all those American flags that decorated that hillside strawberry field. 

In thinking back over the events of this particular morning, and to justify our decision to bypass the Cowpen Battlefield, we pondered the very deep, philosophical question: Were strawberries more fun than battlefields? 

As we entered the hillier and steeper portions of the highway, we passed signs reading, “Revival 10am” and “Ice Cream Churn – old-fashioned flavors” and “Share the road with bicycles.”  We also shared the road with a slow-moving tractor, which blocked the road in front of us.  We waved to the driver when we got a chance to pass.  He smiled and waved back – not with the one-fingered salute we often see on the freeways.

But there is a limit to how much fun we can have in one day and I was tired of driving.  So we decided to cut the scenic tour short and head east to Clemson University.  The Corp of Engineers maintains some outstanding RV parks on Lake Hartwell.  Although these popular park sites are usually completely reserved on Friday, sometimes a few campers check out early on Saturday.  We took a chance and sure enough, a couple of spaces were available.  Using our Golden Age Passport, we obtained a nice, large, flat RV site among the tall trees by Lake Hartwell for only $8/night.  We felt very fortunate to obtain such an excellent site that also had 50 amp electricity and water.  We uncoupled the tow car and toured the nearby Clemson University Campus – remembering that it was the Alma Mater of a couple of my old graduate students and more recently, my nephew, Myles Sterling.  The sign over the Frank Howard Memorial Stadium entry read: Death Valley, SC. Population 81,473 and 1981 National Football Champs.  We spent a couple of hours leisurely wandering across the handsome campus.  I chose to indulge in one of my weird (at least thought to be weird by some) propensity to visit a University Library. 

Later, as I reviewed the day from my pillow – in the thirty seconds before I would be sound asleep -- I concluded that it had not been a day filled with high adventure.  But it had been fun and very satisfying.  For us, happiness is having the freedom to take that unplanned turn in the road to find serendipity – our luck, or good fortune, in finding something as good as a fresh, ripe strawberry by accident.

South Carolina Azalias

 

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