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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.