Tree-climbing

I’ve been climbing trees lately … with our 70-year-old neighbour, Maria. She’s pretty deft at it, and fearless too, peering and reaching over the topmost branches.

But let me explain – while this was at least part-recreation for me, and conjured up memories of my clamberings in the avocado tree in our back garden in Durban, it was pure business for Maria. Not that she sees it as business, though, it’s actually simpler than that – it’s her life.

That’s of course not to say that she’s a professional tree-climber – although I’m sure she would be a contender in the senior categories, along with innumerable other head-scarved marchigiani – but it’s just that those olives need picking.

Our mutual picking sessions were the result of an offer we made to help her family at olive-picking time, in return for her son, Giuliano’s, help in tractoring our household belongings down the steep hill – our driveway – that the moving truck couldn’t negotiate. I won’t deny that there was some selfishness in my offer – the opportunity to get to know our farmer neighbours, and participate in one of the most timeless traditions of the Mediterranean countries.

The family’s picking team consists of Maria, a diminutive, energetic, cherub-faced, salt-of-the-earth marchiagiani; Umberto, her equally diminutive 70-something husband with his glass eye (not sure about this, but it does “glaze” over quite a bit) and inane smile (pure deception); and her two sons, Giuliano and Giuseppe.

I ended up helping for 3 full days, and another two half-days; Maria helped for a day-and-a-half, and Julius, one Sunday afternoon. We probably covered 100 trees in the time I helped – they had maybe 150-175 to pick all told.

Let me make one thing clear – I/we have no prior history in olive picking. Consequently, everything we did was a new experience for us (as in “wow, isn’t this cool?”). And so, in spite of the confidence and apparent knowledge with which our experience is related, remind yourself that it’s the voice of a pure novice (a babe in the olive woods, so to speak) …

Now olive picking, in its purest form, is a hand job. That’s right, manual. The day before the older Maria came and summonsed me to the field, Julius and I had stripped the couple of trees on the property of our rental home. Pick, put in bag, pick, put in bag, pick, put in … you get the picture. Took all @#$@#%$ day, it did – two trees.

So I was glad to see netting spread below the trees to catch the olives, and olive rakes to expedite the stripping. The rakes are more like big combs, which you pull along the length of a branch, separating the olive from its perch, and sending it plummeting … yes, into the spread-out net below. On picking day #2, Giuliano arrived with a machine, powered by an air compressor attached to the tractor, that is a bigger, mechanical version of the olive rake, snapping open and closed on the end of a long pole, just like Pacman’s open-and-close munching action. This machine made a huge difference in productivity, and, I suspect, has revolutionized the olive-picking industry.

The goal – almost always accomplished – is to get every olive on the tree, whether black, red, multi-coloured, green, or shriveled. The machine can’t get all of them, particularly those on the “inside” of the tree, so we take to the ladders and climb.

To get to some of them, you have to get up into the topmost branches. Ladders help with this … to start with. But for those out-on-a-limb rascals, you have to s-t-r-e-t-c-h. Precarious? At times, yes. Particularly for those of us that are not regular tree-climbers, which – notwithstanding my aspirations in this field – is a category I fit comfortably into.

But it’s a thrill, nonetheless. The weather was glorious – blue sky, temperatures in the springtime ranges, the kind of day that you’d describe if you had to be outside the whole time. And climbing trees – how can it get better than this? Not earning a penny doing it, but the feel of the olive branch, the olive itself, the teetering ladder below … heaven.

Watching the family at work was a treat too, particularly the elders. Most amazing to me was Maria, climbing trees, carrying ladders, falling over under the weight of what she was carrying and just getting right on back up again, leaving to go and make lunch, returning after cleaning up and carrying on until dark. And Umberto – patriarch in his white coat (!) and black woolly-cotton cap, always out there first, silently pulling the effort forward, expecting and getting.

The big bonus of the experience was the daily pranzo with the family. Lunch being the sacred event that it is in traditional Italy, it was just assumed that we would join them. I felt simultaneously like a guest and a member of the family … special and yet one of the crew. It was wonderful. Pasta every day, of course, with a variety of meats. Wine from last year’s grapes, and a smorgasbord of last year’s olives – green, black, dried. And the focus of everyone’s attention – Leonardo, 18-month-old son/nephew/grandson, blue-eyed imp and pure charmer.

The picking seems to be all over now. It was interrupted by a bout of wet weather – olives can’t be picked when they’re wet, they rot – and then continued in a couple of locations in the vicinity until yesterday. Senior Maria stopped by the other day to ask us for glass containers to give us some olive oil. From last year’s batch, since this year’s is still “più tòrbido” (use your imagination). Our wages.

We gave her two five-liter jugs – she asked if that was all.

It’s enough – we have our reward. Perhaps best captured by a single moment – Maria (wife) and I were both on ladders, stripping the tree using our olive rakes under glorious skies, and I turned to her with a smile and said: “Can you believe this? We’re picking olives in Italy.” “And we don’t have the internet,” she replied.

Amen.