Twain's Feast (34 page)

There were also pickles, preserves, plum pudding, custards, cakes, sweetmeats, and more pies—pumpkin occupied “the most distinguished niche”—as well as cider, currant wine, and ginger beer. By 1827 the grand Thanksgiving dinner was coming into shape. The only thing missing was the Pilgrims.

Because, amazingly, there’s no evidence that
anyone
called the Plymouth harvest celebration the first Thanksgiving until 1841, when the Unitarian reverend Alexander Young published
Chronicles of the Pilgrim Forefathers.
Winslow’s description of the celebration had been left out of previous editions of
Mourt’s Relation;
after it was rediscovered in an old pamphlet in Philadelphia, Young reprinted it, adding the footnote that “this was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.” It was terrific timing—as the holiday changed from a religious observance to an annual family feast, calling the Plymouth celebration the first Thanksgiving made intuitive sense. But it was many years before most people assumed the connection; the first image Baker has found connecting Plymouth to Thanksgiving is an 1870
Harper’s
woodcut. Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t the continuation of an old Pilgrim tradition, or even modeled after it; instead the Pilgrim story was used to explain a holiday dinner that more and more people were eating anyway.

Hale, who was also the editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book,
had a lot to do with making the meal a national, rather than regional New England, custom. Starting in 1837, she wrote a letter to every governor, every member of Congress, and the president; she editorialized tirelessly in her magazine. In 1863 her campaign finally succeeded; Lincoln, having decided that a national Thanksgiving could be a unifying event, declared it the last Thursday in November.
¹⁶

It was, it turned out, only partially unifying; in 1863 a New England holiday established by Lincoln wasn’t likely to be universally beloved south of Washington, D.C. (after the Civil War, many white Southerners scheduled their own Thanksgivings or ignored the holiday altogether, while images of African-American families preparing their holiday dinners became magazine mainstays). And the usual connection between Thanksgiving and early colonial history was, and remains, loaded: in 1970 the censorship of a speech by a Wampanoag teacher named Frank James prompted American Indian activists to declare Thanksgiving Day in Plymouth to be their National Day of Mourning, a protest that continues every year.

Celebrated or challenged, Thanksgiving and the (largely invented) story of its origins were finally totally ingrained in the American consciousness. At least partially as a result, cranberries changed from being an occasionally foraged fruit into one of the major crops of both Massachusetts and New Jersey. More than a traditional New England food, cranberries were local to Plymouth itself—by 1915, Plymouth County produced 61 percent of the state’s crop, which was often sold with images of Native Americans on the label. The berries were set on the holiday table as reflexively as salt and pepper, harvested as systematically as maize.

Still, like any agriculture, cranberry cultivation can be contentious. And for a good reason: debates about how best to grow cranberries are really about how best to treat the land.

When I arrive at Cranberry Hill Farm in Plymouth, Kristine Keese greets me in a soft Polish accent: “I’m afraid you’ve arrived at a small crisis.” Just last night someone vandalized equipment and set a fire beside the bogs she farms with her husband, Robert. On top of being the kind of thing that makes you despair at humanity—vandalizing an
organic cranberry bog
?
—
this strikes me as severely ill considered. Robert’s eyes are friendly above his crazed, salt-and-pepper beard; still, you can sense how quickly they might go cold and flat. Between tasks he smokes the stub of a foul-smelling cigar that leaves him in a permanent fog; he has anchors tattooed on his shoulders. There are
scorpions
on his
fists.
If I were breaking the windows out of an excavator, stealing the gas can, and spilling the gas beside a cranberry bog and setting it afire, Robert ranks high on the list of people I wouldn’t want to see coming down the forested dirt road.

The cranberry wet harvest, when workers flood the bogs and use water-reel harvesters to flail berries from the vines, is one of the most beautiful harvests in the world. On a cloudless New England October day, the floating cranberries—swept by floating booms into a dense mat—make a study in color, standing out against the blue water as clearly as a clutch of eggs on sunlit grass. In aerial shots they seem solid enough to tiptoe across. What’s more, protecting a cranberry bog’s watershed requires three or four acres of forest for every one cultivated; at harvest time the pines are stubbornly green, the elms and maples orange and yellow and a vibrant red that mirrors the fruit gathered on the flood.

But that isn’t how they harvest at Cranberry Hill. Which is, of course, one reason that I’m there: Twain never ate a wet-harvested cranberry. Neither have you, at least in the literal sense of cooking or eating whole berries; cranberries have to be thoroughly dry to be packed and shipped, which wet harvesting obviously doesn’t permit. Berries scooped up during wet harvest—over 90 percent of the crop—are all destined for quick processing into sauce, chutney, and of course into juice. But in 1879, when Twain wrote “cranberry sauce” on his menu, canned sauce was still nine years away from being invented in Maine; all his cranberry sauce came from berries picked with fingers or scoops.

The other (and, it turns out, related) reason for my visit is that Cranberry Hill is entirely organic. Kristine and Robert aren’t altogether happy about the fact that their fruit is dry-harvested, then sold fresh and direct to the customer—wet harvesting is easier, more economical, and recovers a higher percentage of the berries. But the major distribution chains (especially the giant Ocean Spray and Northland cooperatives) are set up to handle conventionally grown fruit: typically, conventional growers turn to middleman handlers to process the crop, which is then sold through the co-ops. A handler who processes conventional berries has to clean off all his equipment before working with organic fruit—an impossibly slow process, given how fast wet-harvested berries will rot. So, though there’s undoubtedly demand for organic sauce and juice, the distribution chain just isn’t there. Growing organic means that the Keeses have to sell the berries themselves, as whole fruit, and selling whole fruit means dry harvesting.

Even if the Keeses didn’t dry-harvest, I’d be curious about how they’ve managed to succeed. Cranberry cultivation has become incredibly productive; in 2002 the Wisconsin growers averaged over two hundred hundred-pound barrels per acre of bog, as opposed to fifteen per acre a century before. But it’s also, historically, been hugely dependent on chemical pesticides and herbicides (they are, after all, growing in bogs). I’m not always reflexively opposed to the use of conventional farming methods, and I take the views of conventional growers—several of whom outright rejected the notion of abandoning herbicides—seriously. Still, cranberries often grow on land sensitive enough that it reverts into protected wetland if left fallow for even five years; this seems like a case where you’d want to limit chemicals as much as possible. What, I wonder, stops people from making the transition to organic? And what’s at stake when they try?

When cranberry farming began in the 1820s, the bogs of south-eastern Massachusetts were valued mostly for their iron. Bog iron is formed by bacteria that cause the natural iron in water to settle out; decades of dredging for the deposits (used, among other things, to make cannonballs) left the area with hundreds of shallow, irregular quadrangles cut into the marshes. When the market for cranberries began expanding in the 1830s, a sea captain who had a regular crew and some extra capital was in a perfect position to buy bog land on the cheap; many of the first cranberry growers were sailors. The connection was so strong that after the Civil War, when the advent of railroads and steel-hulled steamers left captains of the old wooden schooners casting about for new careers, cranberries “may have provided the economic salvation” of heavily nautical Cape Cod. Some older bogs are still divided into one-sixty-fourth ownership shares, mirroring the division of nineteenth-century ships.

Robert and Kristine fit comfortably into the tradition. When they bought the property in 1988, Robert worked as a scalloper; cranberry farming was a hobby that let the couple maintain the bogs on their beautiful Plymouth land. Just a few years later, the Massachusetts scallop fishery collapsed—scallops scarce, fishing grounds closed—which seemed to put an end to the Keeses’ cranberrying entirely. They loaded their boat on a trailer and hauled it all the way to Alaska, hoping for better fishing. But the Alaskan seas were too high for their boat; from then on, Kristine and Robert were cranberry farmers.

Now Robert is happy to talk about how the language of sailors survives in the bogs—coming out of a bog is called “going ashore”—and how whaling vessels once carried cranberries against the scurvy.
¹⁷
But even if the bogs are talked about as bodies of water, even if hundreds of postcards show cranberries bobbing merrily during harvest, cranberry vines have to be dry for a good portion of the year. Too much water, like this year’s heavy spring rains, can hurt the all-important pollinators—the Keeses just lost two of their three beehives. And, even worse, too much water makes weeds go wild.

“People always think the big problems with growing organically are going to be pests,” Kristine says. “But pests aren’t so bad. I saw a presentation once where an entomologist wrote the names of four major pests up on a board, then crossed three of them out. She said we wouldn’t have to worry about those, since without spraying we have enough natural predators to take care of them for us.”
Sparganothis
fruitworm, for example, attracts birds and other predators, which is why the Cranberry Hill bogs are surrounded by birdhouses for nesting swallows (as well as bug zappers the size of bedsprings). They’ll also flood the bogs in spring, “holding early water” for longer than conventional growers to limit the spread of cranberry fruitworm larvae.

But the main problem, Kristine says, is “weeds—weeds and yields.” Even in a good year, weeding by hand is a long, laborious, exhausting job. It’s also an expensive one; the labor costs would be prohibitive if it weren’t for what Kristine calls the “woofers.” World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (or WWOOF—“woof”) is an organization that matches young travelers interested in organic farming with local producers who need cheap labor. Cranberry Hill provides room and board and experience; the woofers weed. It’s a huge savings of labor costs and helps the Keeses to continue growing without herbicides, maintaining the bog as a vibrant ecosystem.

“We bought the bog from a conventional grower, and he was saying, ‘Oh, you gotta spray, you gotta spray,’” Kristine says. “Robert asked him, ‘But what about all the crayfish in the ditches?’ He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, it’ll kill ’em all!’” She laughs. “When we started, we thought organic was the wave of the future. And it’s true, people are willing to pay a premium for healthy food, grown without chemicals. But that’s not why we do it. People are always finding clever ways of killing each other—we mostly wanted to maintain the land and keep it healthy.” Of course, healthy land and productive cranberry land aren’t always the same thing. “A few years ago, we had an entomologist come out—when she lifted up some of the vines, she jumped back and said, ‘This is
alive—
I’m not used to that!’”

Down on the bogs, Robert runs a picker over the vines (the fire, fortunately, remained on the far side of the watery ditch, which is intended in part to protect against forest fires). Dry pickers are built like push lawn mowers, but instead of a hidden, spinning blade, the teeth of a steel comb sweeps berries up and into a series of trays, which empty into a wooden box under the handle. Robert leans backward, restraining the picker as though holding back an ox, slowing the machine’s progress to allow the teeth more rotations. A cool breeze blows through the pine trees and yellowing elms; the bog has a warm, reddish tint, as if the grass had begun to blush.

In the steep, inaccessible ditches, a worker named Amanda harvests with a scoop (Robert buys them for about $250 in antique shops; a new one is twice as much). “If it’s hard, you’re doing it wrong,” he coaches her. When I try scooping berries, I realize at once that I must be doing it wrong—it’s hard. The scoop is rounded on the bottom, and getting the lower berries takes a particular rocking motion, working the teeth through the vines inch by gradual inch, letting the berries tip back into the pocket. I never succeed in doing more than “scalping,” taking off the top layers of fruit, leaving those closer to the ground. In the old days, a line of harvesters (many from Finland or Cape Verde) would work their way across the field, scooping from right to left, always training the vines.