Snow
It has been snowing, wind driven, bone chilling, whitening the grass, but not yet the streets. It will be down in the 20s for the next 5-6 nights.
It is not clear from the phone update, but it sounds as though the beet “campaign” is nearly over. Although the goal is to eventually freeze the piles of beets, the ones in the ground now can’t be harvested if they are already frozen. Everyone watches the temperature and the weather forecast with religious fervor, hoping that a window of above freezing temperatures will let us accept yet more beets.
A day of heavy rain and snow has turned the fields into a sea of mud, slowing the beets to a trickle when it does warm up a bit, and a lot of the piling station is a truck trap. Even walking is treacherous.
We left work early and drove to Grand Forks to go to a UND ice hockey game. Where did all the leaves go? Suddenly, while we were slogging through the beet harvest, winter came in: trees bare, grasses and weeds gone to soft pale gold, and the now empty fields harrowed to show raw dirt so dark brown that it looks scorched. Here and there we see plots of beets that will not be harvested, because the crop this year is much too big for the piling stations to handle. The co-op has a system of reserving a portion of each farmer’s crop so that no one suffers from this glut, and eventually the unharvested beets will be disked under.
The piler yard where we work is pretty full, and the beets stand in 1000 foot long hills. Since it is utterly flat here, these huge piles are a dominant feature, a sort of Christo-like environmental sculpture. The even higher piles of coal and limestone, and the smoke stacks and tanks of the sugar processing plant can be seen for miles away. The steam from the stacks changes with the light, the wind direction and speed, so we use it as a sort of weather vane. It takes on the colors of the sunrise and sunset and at night, the whole yard is lit up and the steam clouds assume the peach color of the lights. The beet piles have been rain washed, and are a khaki color without the black mud on them. As we begin to add new muddy beets, it looks like a chocolate sauce over a monstrous vanilla cake
Between the piles and the river are vast settling ponds. We can’t see them because the containment berms are too high, but we can see huge shovels and pit mine sized dump trucks against the horizon, busy moving stuff around. When the wind comes from the East, the smell is pretty bad. The dirt from under the pilers is carried up there, we can see hillocks of it, and higher piles of grey material. I think that the river of processing water that goes through the plant must end out here to settle particles out before being cleaned. (one hopes, probably they used to just dump it into the Red River of the North.)
It is a very strange place; a huge investment in time, money and hard work, fueled by our insatiable need for sugar in and on everything. There is the equivalent of 13 teaspoons of sugar in every can of soda, there is sugar in catsup, barbecue sauce, and many canned foods, and in the mountain of candy that our children will gorge themselves on next weekend. Sugar was once a scarce treat, it does have uses in preserving foods, but it has taken on a grossly huge place in our food culture. Like white bread, once the food of the elite, sugar has become a symbol for the American dream. Our parents remember rationing and the scarcities of the Great Depression. Our grandparents remember a variety of famines, wars or poverty that made sugar an impossible luxury. What more powerful symbol of prosperity is there than lots and lots of sugar?
I think these gloomy thoughts as I stand exhausted hour after hour in the cold. It’s true I need the money, but it seems a hollow as well as chilly endeavor. There will be a form of bonus for those of us who stick it out until they say it’s over, and true to form I still can’t bring myself to just quit. Yesterday, they called us all in but so few trucks came in with beets that I spent 8 hours sitting in the truck. Since it is a diesel, it is not good to let it idle constantly, and I was pretty cold. And bored. But will she quit? Nope, not yet. Dumb and dumber. I am noticing that my feet are less and less able to stay warm unless I am moving around. Poor circulation, no doubt. Don is still working a full day, lubricating pilers and doing other mechanical maintenance chores (and getting paid much more than me, alas) and so if I quit, I am still here on the chilly border line, in the northcountry far, where the wind hits heavy.
The fifth wheel is bigger and less weatherproof than the Airstream and even using the free electricity it isn’t very warm in here: too much interior cubic footage, a lot of lightly insulated wall space, and rather leaky single pane windows. Although there are brands of RV’s that are designed for winter camping, the idea is to go away from the cold, not to stay up here in the north. I wonder if the Canada geese that no longer migrate feel this way. Many of the Hispanic workers live in TX for the winter and the colder it gets, the louder we all say “vamanos a Texas!”. Especially when a snow flurry blows in on a brisk north wind.
It is not clear from the phone update, but it sounds as though the beet “campaign” is nearly over. Although the goal is to eventually freeze the piles of beets, the ones in the ground now can’t be harvested if they are already frozen. Everyone watches the temperature and the weather forecast with religious fervor, hoping that a window of above freezing temperatures will let us accept yet more beets.
A day of heavy rain and snow has turned the fields into a sea of mud, slowing the beets to a trickle when it does warm up a bit, and a lot of the piling station is a truck trap. Even walking is treacherous.
We left work early and drove to Grand Forks to go to a UND ice hockey game. Where did all the leaves go? Suddenly, while we were slogging through the beet harvest, winter came in: trees bare, grasses and weeds gone to soft pale gold, and the now empty fields harrowed to show raw dirt so dark brown that it looks scorched. Here and there we see plots of beets that will not be harvested, because the crop this year is much too big for the piling stations to handle. The co-op has a system of reserving a portion of each farmer’s crop so that no one suffers from this glut, and eventually the unharvested beets will be disked under.
The piler yard where we work is pretty full, and the beets stand in 1000 foot long hills. Since it is utterly flat here, these huge piles are a dominant feature, a sort of Christo-like environmental sculpture. The even higher piles of coal and limestone, and the smoke stacks and tanks of the sugar processing plant can be seen for miles away. The steam from the stacks changes with the light, the wind direction and speed, so we use it as a sort of weather vane. It takes on the colors of the sunrise and sunset and at night, the whole yard is lit up and the steam clouds assume the peach color of the lights. The beet piles have been rain washed, and are a khaki color without the black mud on them. As we begin to add new muddy beets, it looks like a chocolate sauce over a monstrous vanilla cake
Between the piles and the river are vast settling ponds. We can’t see them because the containment berms are too high, but we can see huge shovels and pit mine sized dump trucks against the horizon, busy moving stuff around. When the wind comes from the East, the smell is pretty bad. The dirt from under the pilers is carried up there, we can see hillocks of it, and higher piles of grey material. I think that the river of processing water that goes through the plant must end out here to settle particles out before being cleaned. (one hopes, probably they used to just dump it into the Red River of the North.)
It is a very strange place; a huge investment in time, money and hard work, fueled by our insatiable need for sugar in and on everything. There is the equivalent of 13 teaspoons of sugar in every can of soda, there is sugar in catsup, barbecue sauce, and many canned foods, and in the mountain of candy that our children will gorge themselves on next weekend. Sugar was once a scarce treat, it does have uses in preserving foods, but it has taken on a grossly huge place in our food culture. Like white bread, once the food of the elite, sugar has become a symbol for the American dream. Our parents remember rationing and the scarcities of the Great Depression. Our grandparents remember a variety of famines, wars or poverty that made sugar an impossible luxury. What more powerful symbol of prosperity is there than lots and lots of sugar?
I think these gloomy thoughts as I stand exhausted hour after hour in the cold. It’s true I need the money, but it seems a hollow as well as chilly endeavor. There will be a form of bonus for those of us who stick it out until they say it’s over, and true to form I still can’t bring myself to just quit. Yesterday, they called us all in but so few trucks came in with beets that I spent 8 hours sitting in the truck. Since it is a diesel, it is not good to let it idle constantly, and I was pretty cold. And bored. But will she quit? Nope, not yet. Dumb and dumber. I am noticing that my feet are less and less able to stay warm unless I am moving around. Poor circulation, no doubt. Don is still working a full day, lubricating pilers and doing other mechanical maintenance chores (and getting paid much more than me, alas) and so if I quit, I am still here on the chilly border line, in the northcountry far, where the wind hits heavy.
The fifth wheel is bigger and less weatherproof than the Airstream and even using the free electricity it isn’t very warm in here: too much interior cubic footage, a lot of lightly insulated wall space, and rather leaky single pane windows. Although there are brands of RV’s that are designed for winter camping, the idea is to go away from the cold, not to stay up here in the north. I wonder if the Canada geese that no longer migrate feel this way. Many of the Hispanic workers live in TX for the winter and the colder it gets, the louder we all say “vamanos a Texas!”. Especially when a snow flurry blows in on a brisk north wind.
posted by Thistledown24 at 8:21 AM
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