Apple Picking: Not Your Usual 9 to 5 Job

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Most orchardists provide housing, though, especially if you get there early in the harvest. Even if you don't, the turn-over is fantastic (because the winos go on benders and split), so there's almost never a lack of jobs. PHOTO: FOTOLIA/ZIGZAGMTART

Reprinted with permission from  Spokane Natural. 

The average American adult seems to believe that laziness rates high on the list of musts for being a (cringe) hippie. Actually, though the majority of heads shun the typical nine-to-five mind-shrinking drudge, most members of the disestablishment not only find it necessary to search out some gainful employment . . . but can really dig working. Under the right conditions.

Unfortunately, the number of jobs available to young people even verging on freakiness is quite limited. Especially around Spokane. Those jobs that are open are often quite distasteful and short-lived.

Since many heads like to work hard for part of the year and reap the benefits the rest of the time, the ideal job for such people would be a seasonal occupation. One that pays proportionately to the amount of labor involved. A job open to anyone capable of handling the work—freaky or not.

We've found one occupation we'd like to recommend to those of you looking for this sort of deal: apple picking.

Last year, a couple we know decided to pick apples for the fall and were so monetarily successful and spoke so highly of the experience that this year, prompted by a fruit growing co-op's ad in the Spokane papers, we decided to try it ourselves.

We ended up driving from Wenatchee up the Okanogan Valley nearly into Canada, looking for the Right Place to work. After stopping several times, we landed four miles out of Tonasket at a place next door to the farm the fruit co-op sent us to.

Wildly enough, we really lucked out with our apple picking job. Because we were a couple, the fellow who hired us decided to let us live in a small house trailer that he and his wife use on weekends during the winter. Though we had only cold running water and an outhouse, we soon found that we were much better off than the pickers who end up in clapboard cabins, possibly wood–heated, often rather grungy.