“Kibbutz Life 2: Work in the Fields”

  Field work is tedious. Aside from fixing the irrigation leaks in the fields of the kibbutz, I also picked potatoes and watermelons. The watermelons were rather small and round and except for bending and gathering no more than two at a time, it was no big deal. Well, bending and gathering was a big deal but at the end of the day we would sit under the truck that brought us there, cut open a few watermelons and dig in. To say they were sweet is an understatement.

  I’ll tell you about potato picking in a subsequent paragraph but my days in the fields ended a few weeks after we arrived. One day, my watermelon “boss” was a twenty-something woman who had just finished her army training. That was obvious inasmuch as she was a drill sergeant to me and the others. Anyway, as we’re sitting under the truck, she asks in her endearing Israeli accent (which I would love to be able to replicate in writing. I’ll try though), “Petaaaaiiir, how old you are?” I told her 42. She said, “Forrrrty-two!! We neverrrrr have such old people work in the fields.” I didn’t need any further prompts. When we came back to the kibbutz I went to the person-in-charge and said, “So-and-so said….” and I proceeded to get myself an inside job. But that’s for another article.

    Potato picking was a sitcom in the making!

    As we were told, it would become cheaper for the kibbutz to import vegetables and fruits than it would be to fix the machinery. I came to appreciate that, especially when it came to picking potatoes.

   This was not a “get on your knees, shovel a bit and take the potatoes out of the ground” process. Oh, no, this was mechanized!! HAHAHAHAHAHA (oh, pardon me). The old-fashioned way may very well have been a more pleasant alternative.

   Picture this: a tractor hauled a wagon-like “container,” more like a round b basket holding about four of us. In the middle of this basket was a long metal tube that went into the ground to suck up the potatoes. Over us was a large umbrella-like canopy. Yes, it could have protected us from the heat but that wasn’t its job when potato picking. Anyway, the tractor slowly went over the potato field. Had it gone slower it would have stopped, but had it gone quicker it would have been all over for me and the others. The potato field is, as you can imagine, the bumpiest of all!

    So, this tube is hollow. As the tractor moves along it moves up and down with a lot of pull. It sucks up the potato that comes flying out the top. The potato hits the umbrella and we’re to catch them and put them in a basket (all I could think of was Lucy’s chocolate candy assembly-line in one of the funniest I Love Lucy episodes). However, more often than not it was impossible to catch the potato. They would hit the umbrella and fall onto our heads. Do you know that potatoes that shoot through a tube, hit an umbrella and drop are HEAVY??? But once that happened, we were able to catch them as they fell from our heads to our hands. If it didn’t hurt so much it would have been hysterical. Ok, despite the pain we had to laugh!