“I guess you’re a couple of years further along than I am,” he said.
I counted up the time in my head. “Yeah. Two years further past it, I guess.” “So … what’s it like out there?” A sad smile. “Get any better?”
I turned toward him on my stool and put my hands up, resting one on each cheek so he’d know I meant it, and kissed him on his forehead: “Much better,” I assured him.
After he left, I thought about our conversation. I decided that Will had after all noted my attempt to deflect his question, had recognized as camouflage my clichés about not being “ready,” and had concluded that the answer was probably no.
Chapter 56
I wish I could say that the hops harvesting went well and we got rich and lived happily ever after. But it didn’t, and we didn’t. The weather held through most of it, but we didn’t have enough experience and we didn’t have the right equipment and the seasonal clock ran the seconds down until it was too late.
The upper yard matured first—which was good because it allowed some time for processing the cones before the lower yard had to get cut. When Erik gave the signal, it was all hands on deck. Even Brassard came for the fun.
We fanned out in the upper yard and walked up and down the rows with machetes, cutting the bines off at about three feet above the ground. Now they hung straight down, like curtains, creating more room for Brassard to drive along the lanes in his Deere, towing a low-sided wooden trailer. Up front was Earnest, lifted high in the Deere’s bucket, wielding a hedge-trimmer to cut the bines and training strings just below the trellis wire. Perry walked alongside to catch each bine as it fell, and as the trailer rolled by he flipped it up to James, who laid it on the bed. When the trailer became too full to manage anymore, I drove up on the Ford. I left an empty trailer for Brassard and then drove the full one back to the barn.
The men had turned the upstairs of the old barn, the spacious hayloft, into a hops-processing plant. They had set up the cone separator just inside the door at the gable end, at the top of the ramp from the road. Farther back were rows upon rows of chicken-wire bins that the cones would sit in as they dried. Erik fed the bines into the flail rollers as the Vermont Tech kids dealt with debris and cones.
It took the cutting team only two hours to harvest that first acre. But at the barn, the bines backed up in front of the feed end of the separator, mounded into toppling heaps, until we had to stop cutting new ones.
Earnest and Erik had done a brilliant job designing their contraption. It worked perfectly. Nothing broke. The cones bounced down the conveyor at a tempo that allowed Jennifer to pick out bad ones and any leaf pieces that happened to go with them. Jason and Bailey worked in excellent synchrony, handing fresh bines up to Erik, raking leaves out of the chicken-wire barrel, removing the stripped bines, and carting away the heaps of leaf debris that fell continuously off the top of the conveyor.
An air of optimism filled the place—for about an hour.
It isn’t my desire to inflict vicarious misery on you, so I will simply say that it took thirty-two hours to strip cones off one acre’s worth of bines. Thirty-two nearly-continuous hours of racketing drive chains and gears and belts and the relentless thrashing of the stripper flails. The upper three acres took five eighteen-hour days with Erik and Earnest and me, and anyone else who could find the time, working in shifts all day and through half the night. We also needed an extra day just to rearrange the mountains of debris, tune up the separator, and generally regroup.
So by the time the upper acres got processed, the lower acres were going by—the cones losing their lupulin yellow, going brown, losing their bitter odor. Eight days into the project, two successive days of downpour compelled us to abandon further harvesting. In the end, we managed to get in only four acres.
Later that fall, we fed everything on the last two acres into the chipper along with the other hop yard leftovers. It made some great compost.
On the bright side, the drying arrangement worked pretty well. And Erik had been courting buyers all summer, so when the cones were about dry enough, a couple of brewers came by to crumble and slice and sniff them. They made a pretty good offer. We bagged the cones by hand and then did our best to shrink-wrap them using a vacuum setup the men had cobbled together. We delivered them in Earnest’s big stake-side truck: Earnest, me, and Erik sitting like limp hay-stuffed scarecrows, speechless blank numb with exhaustion, side by side on the wide bench seat, rumbling up to Waterbury to drop them off.
I insisted on buying the men a steak dinner, honoring the ritual Earnest had established. This time it was Erik who drank some beers and who was asleep, leaning heavily on my shoulder, by the time we made it back to the farm. He toppled out of the truck, lurched through his door, and slept for two days straight.
For a variety of reasons, I had fallen into the role of managing the bank account. By the time the dust settled, I calculated that Erik had lost almost fourteen thousand dollars on that first crop. And the only way he’d managed to keep the loss that small was by getting so much pro bono work from, mainly, Earnest and me. And Earnest’s skipping some tree jobs—and losing a few grand in income—to make time to help. And the time Will put in.
But a loss of fourteen thousand wasn’t too bad, actually. It meant that he had recouped enough of the money he’d
