Chapter 55
Again, Erik’s biggest problem was simply a matter of math. How long would it take to pick thousands of fourteen-foot tangles of bine and cones? He had a plan for it, but he couldn’t predict how long it would take. As harvest approached, he hired the Vermont Tech students on a standby basis, arranged for Perry and James to come down when they could take time from their own crops. I warned Lynn and Robin that they would have to do the milking themselves some afternoons so I could work with the hops. We all watched the weather anxiously.
Erik and Earnest invited me to the maiden voyage of the bizarre-looking contraption they’d been working on in the repair shop—their secret project. It was a cone separator they had designed based on Erik’s glimpse of his former partners’ equipment and on YouTube videos of commercial hop growers processing their cut bines. Many of the parts came from an old baler that had been gathering dust in the hayloft for the past decade. Its conveyor was designed to take bales from the tractor’s hay compactor and carry them back onto the wagon trailing behind. Earnest had been adapting it for hops.
It was a complex machine. As Earnest explained it, one person was to introduce the end of the bine into a feed hopper, which dragged the bine between a series of whirling flails that more or less separated leaves and cones from the bines. The green stuff that was battered and yanked off the bine strand was then supposed to pass through a rotating chicken-wire barrel and fall onto the conveyor. The conveyor was set at an angle with the belt rolling upward. The cones, being heavier, would bounce down the sloped belt and into a bin, while the leaves and other lighter stuff followed the belt up and fell off the end. Once the bine was stripped, the person at the hopper flail end pulled it back out and threw it onto a waste pile.
That was the theory, anyway.
To test it, Erik came in on the Bobcat with a half-dozen bines, each about ten feet long, in the bucket—they were light but too bulky to carry by hand. Earnest turned on the electric motor that moved the clattering gears and chains, and I stayed well out of the way.
Erik climbed up onto the wooden platform and fed in the first bine—I worried about his hands being drawn in with it—which immediately snarled and wrapped itself around the rollers and axles of the spinning flails.
Earnest hit the switch to shut down the rig. Three or four cones bounced down the conveyor belt.
Earnest dusted his palms together, miming satisfaction. “That went well!” he said.
Erik’s sense of humor had been sweated out of him long before. He began yanking the string and bine out in broken lengths a couple of feet long and pitching them away as hard as he could. There was little satisfaction in it, though, since they were too light to fly far.
“Erik. We’ll get it right,” Earnest told him. “There’ll always be a few kinks to work out.”
“Yeah, they had a few kinks to work out of the Titanic, too.”
“That was human error, actually,” Earnest retorted primly. “Which we are not going to make here.”
He unplugged the motor, got his toolbox, and climbed up onto the thing. First he clipped the rest of the tangled bine off the rollers and then began poking around the top of the flail compartment. Erik stomped off to cool his jets with some fresh air before coming back to help.
“Your brother will survive,” Earnest assured me. “I have a good feeling about this.”
“Yuh-huh,” I said skeptically.
“No, seriously. I can tell.” He picked up a wrench and began ratcheting bolts out of the roller assembly. Without humor, as if levity were a demand imposed on him, he said, “Prophetic intuition. Quite common among aboriginal peoples.”
I threw a hop cone at him and left. I didn’t know how to comfort Erik, or make the machine work, and my Caucasian, colonialist intuition didn’t tell me much of anything except that it was a very anxious time and that somebody’s hands could get drawn into the flailing rollers and that my brother was falling apart and that I wasn’t doing a whole lot better. And that Earnest was doing a great job of being the steady one but a lot of it was pretense and something had come between us and I hated it.
Later, Erik found me as I was loading hay onto a feed wagon. He said his mood was much improved. Trying to reassure me, he told me something he remembered from business classes: “If you want to be a market leader, you need to be willing push your risk tolerance. Sixty percent of all millionaires have gone bankrupt at least once.”
That evening, I was just about to hike up the hill when Will drove in, parked, and flagged me down.
“What’s the rumpus?” I asked as he got out.
“I was going to ask you to ask me over to your place for dinner.” He gestured back at my chicken-coop apartment.
“That’s very generous of you,” I said. We both laughed.
“I have a video I thought you’d like to see. One I made. It’s not about cow diseases.”
“If you cook,” I said. He readily agreed.
I told him my larder was empty—I almost never spent time in my “downhill place” if the weather was anything short of nasty, and didn’t keep any edibles there but my emergency ramen—so he went to the house to scavenge foodstuffs. I showered, then realized that my closet was as empty as my refrigerator, leaving me with no choice but to put on my dirty working jeans and shirt again. I set my computer on the counter and booted it up, wondering what he had in mind.
Will came in with a paper grocery bag
