Sometimes you are the bug. Sometimes you are the windshield.
My Uncle Daniel taught me that.
Pear growers, like Uncle Daniel, understand the bug-windshield metaphor better than most.
For the first time in twenty-five years, Pear farmers were the Windshield for a change.
Short peach crop, freeze in the Northwest and mass acreage removals were all contributing factors to this inversion. But Supply and Demand is not the most interesting issue facing the Pear Business.
It’s Pressure.
By pressure I mean, the amount of force (measured in lbs) that it takes to break the skin of a Pear. The less force, the lower the pressure. The lower the pressure, the closer the fruit is too harvest.
E.G….A Pear that punches 16lbs is closer to harvest than a pear that punches 20lbs.
Determining pressure is a big deal. Pick too soon, you lose tonnage. Pick too late and the fruit becomes too mature to market.
Pressure is gauged by machines called “Pressure guns.” The guns puncture the skin of pears like the captive bolt stunner Javier Bardem used in ‘No Country for Old Men’ to kill his victims.
Pressure Guns vary in shape and size. They range from hand held guns to full blown high-tech, digital versions that look like Scientific Microscopes. Most of the time, the guns are accurate only to themselves and can be manipulated by “user error,” making them about as reliable as voting in a third world country.
We try and calibrate the guns as best we can, but growers are often skeptical of the readings I give them. Rightfully so.
There is definite irony that multi-million-dollar decisions are made using these flimsy contraptions. It wouldn’t surprise me if Elizabeth Holmes started peddling her own ‘Theranos Pressure Gun’ once sprung from the pokey.
Many farmers think they can determine the pressure of a Pear by biting into one. This sounds like a good idea, in principle, but poses an interesting challenge for certain Lake County growers because of the whole lack of teeth dilemma…
Other growers have grown so desperate to accurately determine pressure that they are resorting to a dangerous method of pressure testing, known as “Truffling”
It’s muy peligroso.
Now, I’d never advocate throwing fruit against street signs from a moving vehicle at high rates of speed, but the thwack and it’s ensuing decibels give growers a reliable gauge for pressure. Using immaturity to gauge maturity, as it were, even Stevie Wonder can tell if a Pear is ready for market based on the octave, tonality and register of the impact.
I know what you are thinking. There are starving people in Africa and these farmers throw perfectly good fruit against street signs? How entitled! How dangerous!
You are right.
From Lodi to Mendocino County, countless “Mile Per Hour”, “Population” and “Welcome to” signs have been altered by the menace that is the Pear grower.
Though these projectile Pears have put the structural integrity of many signs into serious question, they are but small sacrifices made in the interest of “Science” and the continuity of the Pear Business.
Every time I see a bend, subtle crook or slight indentation in one of these signs, I smile.
I smile because when the bug meets the windshield, when a terminal velocity Pear meets a Yield sign, if you listen closely enough, with the right set of ears, you can hear it
It’s the sound of progress.