Buca, the master tractor driver, sits helplessly at the helm of his Kubota, its huge wheels spinning themselves deeper and deeper into the damp earth. I've seen him behind the wheel of a Bobcat, twirling and swerving gracefully among perfect rows of valuable evergreens, like a ballet-dancing bull in a china shop. At the moment, though, Buca and this Kubota are no match for the force of gravity.
The tractor is towing a flatbed trailer stacked with a few dozen of North Carolina's finest Fraser fir Christmas trees, among nearly five million sold from this state every year. Buca, Gerónimo and their four-man crew spent all morning shouldering the trees up a 60-degree slope to a tractor path carved into the side of a mountain. Parallel to the New River far below, the path that cuts across the mountain is level for about 50 yards, but the last 20 climb at a 45-degree incline. Between the weight of the cargo and the pitch of the path, the tractor is stuck.
The last time I saw a tractor try to climb a slope like this, it was springtime and I was sitting in a tree-planting contraption rigged to the back of the vehicle. The driver that day, Buca's brother-in-law Lucio, smiled mischievously and asked if I knew how to pray. At the steepest part of the hill, I was practically lying on my back, my feet above my head, trying to stick Fraser fir seedlings in the freshly tilled soil at regular intervals. I imagined what the giant steel hoe beneath our feet would do to me if I were to fall out. The tractor couldn't make it up the hill on that spring day, and this tractor isn't making it up now.
At the head of the trail, 150 grown trees are waiting for baling and loading. A hundred more still need to ride the guys' shoulders up to the baling zone. Still another hundred need to be cut and carried from the top side, above the path and below Buca's neat, gray mobile home, which is perched atop a grassy ridge overlooking the river valley.
Buca and Gerónimo spent most of November cutting and loading Christmas trees for their respective employers for $10 or $12 an hour. Today, on this Saturday following Thanksgiving, after more than a decade working as field hands in the North Carolina Christmas-tree industry, Buca and Gerónimo are harvesting the first 400 of their own Fraser firs. They planted them together on Buca's one acre of land in the spring of 1998. They'll each clear about $3,000 from this crop, which may not sound like much, but it's 10 to 15 percent of their annual incomes and might be enough to get them through a workless winter without going into debt.
Thousands of immigrant workers energize the state's Christmas-tree industry, which generates $100 million in revenue every year. The typical worker makes $6 to $9 an hour and finds work elsewhere during the off season.
"Living here, I haven't made much from working," Gerónimo has told me. "After many years, when the trees grow and they sell, it's good money."
Between them, these guys have almost 30,000 trees in the ground, most through partnerships with landowners who let them use their fields in exchange for half the profits. As the trees mature over the next several years, they expect to net about $7 per tree for themselves, after they buy pesticides and fertilizer and pay some guys to help them carry the trees out of the mountain fields.
Easier said than done.
On this afternoon, it's already 2pm and the guys have been at it since 7am. The harvesting of Buca's field has been postponed multiple times in the past month because his boss, who is buying the trees wholesale for about $20 each, had too much work of his own (about 40,000 trees to cut this year) to let one of his best workers loose. On Thanksgiving (El Día de Gracias), Buca worked most of the day harvesting trees for his boss; then he and Gerónimo spent a couple of hours cutting 300 of their own trees with chainsaws in the lower field, letting the trees lie until the two could find some help.
Buca, a 35-year-old with a chubby baby face matured only by his moustache, had planned to hire some of his co-workers to help him harvest his trees, but his boss couldn't let them go today. Like many of the large-scale growers do, Buca and Gerónimo put out the word among the local Hispanic community -- 3,000 strong during the harvest season -- and found four construction workers who have today off because work is slowing down for the winter. Buca and Gerónimo haven't had a day off since early November. They intended to harvest their trees on Sunday but a rainy forecast moved it up a day.
Already, the mountains are crawling with tourists visiting the choose-n-cut farms. On my way here on NC 421, every 20th automobile descending into the flatlands was an SUV or minivan sporting a Christmas tree as a roof ornament. The window for selling Christmas trees is already open and it will close in a month. These trees need to get to a retail lot where some hospitable Southern family can invite them home -- and they need to get there fast. It's no time for Buca, Gerónimo and their crew to discover they might have to carry all the trees up the path by hand.
Gracias a Dios
I have just arrived in this remote northwest corner of North Carolina from my home in Chapel Hill. I met Buca at a Hispanic Baptist mission in Ashe County a year ago. I spent all spring and early summer learning about his life and work, and I promised to help with the harvest. But what can this desk-dwelling gringo do against the inertia of 250 Christmas trees that need to get from the bottom of a mountain to the top?Someone has an idea. They gather dry brush and sticks to give the Kubota's giant tire treads something to grab. The wheels spin just as smoothly over this pile. The result is the same with some pressure-treated lumber Gerónimo finds in the yard.
Defeated, Buca backs the tractor down to the flat part of the path, and we start to unload the trailer. Silvio, a 28-year-old with two small, gold hoops in his left ear and an Ashe County Lightning basketball T-shirt over his black sweatshirt, uses a spade to fill in the wheel ruts. When there are two dozen trees left on the trailer Buca tries again, picking up speed before he hits Silvio's freshly groomed slope. The tractor crests the hill, and the trailer follows behind. We're in business.
"Gracias a Dios," I say when I reach the top.
"Gracias a Dios," Buca agrees. Thank God.
We transfer the trees from the tractor-trailer to another flatbed hitched to Buca's white Ford Ranger. Our loading zone is a grassy knoll that overlooks his mobile home on one side and his retired neighbors' pre-fab dream home on the other. From here the only evidence of all the work left to do is the tips of the still-standing Fraser firs, barely visible over the edge of the ridge.
What we see is a landscape fit for a painting. Evergreens 200 feet tall line the riverbank. Vacation cottages lie silent for the winter. Tiny cattle graze on tumbling pastures that form the distant wall of the river valley. Unseen geese call each other into formation above the water, which glistens under a bright blue sky streaked with wispy cirrus clouds and trails of jet exhaust.
Buca's boss helped them buy this acre of land in December 1996 so the family could settle down. Buca's wife Amanda calls it paradise.
A Water Cooler Chat
We finish the load and the guys are ready for a water break. We head toward the mobile home, and Buca brings out some plastic tumblers, pitchers of water and juice and a bottle of lemon-lime soda. Martín, a 34-year-old with long, black sideburns, a thin moustache and a '70s-style mullet, goes to his car for a soda and a trendy, pale-yellowish iced tea in a fancy bottle that Silvio mistakes for tequila.
Martín can afford such luxuries; he's single and works for a good boss. He knows most of the guys come to the mountains to work and take money back to their families, but that's not for him. He doesn't want to live that life straddling the border. He's been here for three years, and he's not going back.
Emilio, 52, is not so sure about the United States. He was cheated out of $1,000 of pay in Florida, and now his boss in Ashe County owes him more than $700. He's working for $350 a week but is only getting about $200.
"He always says, 'I'll pay you the rest next week,'" says Emilio.
It's the same story I've heard from Hispanic immigrants all over North Carolina, from Christmas-tree workers in the mountains to day laborers in the bigger cities.
"There are bad people here," says Emilio.
Imitating some of the Americans he encounters, Emilio squints his eyes into a disdainful look and growls the word "Mexicans," flicking his hands away from his body as if shooing a pest.
"There are good people here, too," Emilio hastens to add. He hopes there is someone who might be able to help him get his money.
"You are working for free," says Martín, with the fatalistic laugh of someone who feels powerless to right a wrong.
Back to work
No boss is staring us down, but we don't procrastinate at the makeshift water cooler. We still have those 150 trees to bale and pull up from the path below us and another hundred in the field below those. We start with the ones that need baling.
Martín and I feed the trees into the baling machine (actually, Martín feeds them and my job is to hold the baling twine out of the way until the machine pulls it through and winds it around the tree); Buca cuts the twine and hands it through the machine to me; Emilio fastens a steel claw to the end of each trunk so a mechanized chain can pull the trees through the machine; Silvio and Icidro take the trees from the claw and load them onto the trailer. (Yes, real Christmas trees come from an assembly line, just like the fake ones).
After 15 years in the fields, 40-year-old Gerónimo has earned the leisurely job of counting the trees, but there is another side to this macho order of things: When real strength is required, the work is not for the young pups. After we finish a run of about 50 trees and need to move a bunch close to the baler, I trip over myself trying to drag two at once. Gerónimo tells me to take one at a time. Later, when the first set of trees is baled and we need to descend into the field to bring up more, Gerónimo says simply, "Too heavy," and sends me with Silvio and Icidro, the two younger guys, to unload the trailer. He, Emilio and Martín disappear into the trees, and we finish with the trailer. Buca backs the trailer down the trail with us on it. Now, there is nothing for me to do but carry trees up the hill.
Many of the trees are within 50 yards of the path, but the hike is much longer. The slope is too steep to climb straight up, especially with the weight of a 40-pound Christmas tree pulling you backward. To keep from sliding down the mountain, we have to traverse back and forth, like a slaloming skier in reverse. A skier leans forward to gain speed; a Christmas-tree hauler leans forward into the mountain to avoid falling on his backside. We stoop over, with the trees on our shoulders and upper backs, slaloming up the side of a mountain. My calves start to burn near the end of each run, and fir needles trickle down my neck and back until I remember to wear my jacket's hood. Still, I manage to get a few trees up to the baler.
"He's stronger than I thought," Gerónimo tells Buca in Spanish.
The guys get a good laugh out of this. They're not used to seeing a gringo work this hard. Eighty percent of North Carolina's Christmas-tree workers are Hispanic immigrants. In a survey by former North Carolina State University extension agent Jim Hamilton, growers said they'd have to scale back or go out of business without Hispanic labor.
"Americans don't do this work," Buca's friend Julián told me in the spring. "It's for the Mexican burros."
I am happy to subvert this system of ethnic inequity, but the truth is, I couldn't have lasted this long if I'd started at sunrise like they did. My back and neck are sore after just a couple of hours. I don't like that my comfort depends on such hard work by others, but I'm not about to start bussing my own tables, picking my own vegetables or slaughtering my own chickens or cows. I have choices, gracias a Dios. They don't. When your English is stammering, you didn't finish high school and you don't have permanent legal immigration status, you don't have many choices.
"We are not made for this work," Buca told me last spring. "We work because we need."
For Money or Freedom?
By the time we finish baling and loading the last trees, it's nearly 6pm. The sun has set and the sky is dark. Buca's wife Amanda returns from her seasonal job making wreaths at a choose-n-cut tree farm. As she waves to us from the top of the hill, I can't tell if it's her or her 11-year-old daughter Darby, named for a nurse at the Ashe County Health Department. The woman helped Amanda through a complicated pregnancy when she first arrived in North Carolina not knowing a word of English.
Amanda had a frantic day trying to keep up with the demand from customers wanting wreaths to go with their fresh-cut Christmas trees. Working alone, she made 58 wreaths in all. "I can't work very fast," she says in English. She has the "best bossman," she says, because he pays $2 to $4 per wreath, depending on the size. Other shops pay $1 to $3 for the same size wreath. She made about $130 working 9am to 5pm. today.
The money will help her survive the month of January, when Buca must return to Mexico to renew his H-2A temporary guest-worker visa, as he must do every year. Amanda hasn't been back to their hometown since 1993, when Buca lost his job at Pemex, the federal oil company, and the couple came north looking for work.
Buca writes the guys their paychecks, $10 an hour, much higher than the going rate for Hispanic farm-workers.
"Gracias, don," Silvio tells Gerónimo, who recruited Silvio and his brother to work.
"Don" is a Spanish word for "sir" that conveys respect and admiration. Gerónimo's fashionable Carhartt ballcap and metallic dental work are a study in contrasts, showing how far he's come from his impoverished childhood in Veracruz. To be in a position to issue paychecks, Gerónimo and Buca have accomplished something few Hispanic farm workers have: They've found a way to invest in the future. Buca didn't graduate high school; Gerónimo finished only the sixth grade. Now, both dream of sending their children to college.
Living on less than $30,000 a year, Buca and Amanda are somehow able to send Darby and her sister Daisy to dance classes, piano lessons and every school field trip that comes along. After he and Gerónimo planted their trees, Buca says he worked "to the death" -- some 80 hours a week for several years -- until his evangelical Christian mother in Mexico told him to read the book of Ecclesiastes, which says a man's life and labor are foolish because everything he makes fades away.
We don't want your money, Amanda told him, we want you.
Buca has tried to cut back on his hours at work, whether on the commercial farm, among his own trees or with the summer lawn-mowing business he started a few years ago. He prefers to spend his weekends with the girls, at backyard barbecues with his sister and brother-in-law, at church functions or rafting on the river.
At one point today, just after the trouble with the tractor, Buca shook his head: "I don't think we're going to plant anymore." For a man whose life has been dictated by a faltering Mexican economy, his family's uncertain immigration status and the financial pressure to work a back-bending job for pay that few Americans would be willing to live on, it's nice to have that choice.
Jesse James DeConto wrote CL's July 6 cover story "The New Latino South."
