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I am back on the Pacific coast, but I don’t smell the salt water anymore. I don’t even smell the pine or cedar. I smell mostly moss and cold air. My clothes smell like the fire burning next to me. This quarter I am in Friday Harbor, WA. Not that you know where that is. Take a map. Find Victoria, BC, then draw a line directly east. The first island you hit is me. The north Puget Sound bordering the Georgia Basin in the Salish Sea. How many names can a single place have? Just one more for you. I am in the San Juan Islands. Sorry, not Mexico. If I were in Mexico, I would be smelling sand. A smell that I miss.
It had never occurred to me that apples could generate a cult. An apple a day to be sure, but not a weekend full of activities. Washington is famous for its apples, but that was a fact I was slow to recognize. Perhaps it is because I grew up in a desert, but I have been picked or pressed apples. (My mother would be hurt by this statement, but no one can say they have done something if it was completed before the age of two.) I entered this and last weekend an apple virgin of sorts.
Last weekend, I attended an apple pressing party at a farm on the island. It was oh, so hippielicious. It was advertised as a ho-down, so we all dressed in plaid and baked an apple pie. The pie was the collective effort of three or four people trying to remember as much as possible about how to bake a pie coupled with a limited baking supplies. It thankfully turned out delicious.
The party was in yurt and the first thing said to us was: “You are all wearing plaid.” That pretty much sums up the whole evening. We pressed apples to make cider until it was time for the small children to leave and then the music selection began. We danced to dying 80s classics and Bollywood music. Let me save you the trouble, those two types of music do not go together unless it is dying Bollywood classics from the 80s. I would say I was too up tight for the affair, but it was nonetheless a worthwhile experience.
This weekend was more my style. I woke up extra early on Saturday to catch the ferry to Shaw Island with others from my program. On Shaw, we picked apples and filled an entire bed of a standard pickup truck and there were still more apples to be picked. Then we went on a walking tour of the island. Each island I have been to in the San Juans is more beautiful than the last. We filled my rain jacket full of apples so that we could make an apple crisp later. We eat while we worked.
The next day, after brunch, we went out to the dock and pressed the apples to make cider. We made over 100 gallons of cider. Mostly it was stored in milk gallons, but some people filled carboys to make hard apple cider. It took nearly all day to empty the truck. There were more apples than you would have thought possible. We drank the cider cold and fresh and warmed as the drizzle continued and I lost feeling in my hands.
It is a tradition or so I am told. People from Washington are crazy about apples. From now on whenever I hear Washington apples, I will have a very textual memory. I can never look at an apple again without remembering my time in the San Juans.
I think it is safe to say that I am appled out.
