Indian Ladder

When I moved to Albany 33 years ago in 1980, I wrote to my friends back in the City that I could drive ten minutes and see a cow, many cows; a horse farm run by our nutritionist was 3 miles from our Albany city row house. There were vegetable farms not far, too. A farm called Kleinke's was nestled in a suburb called Delmar; maybe Mr. Kleinke's farming ancestors owned all the land of Delmar, and smartly parceled it off and watched smart houses nestle together and grow warm and green in manicured, self-contained mini-yards. The ancestors must have gotten comfortably rich, because their children and grandchildren don't really remember how to grow lush produce; it looks like a farm, they have a llama, and a rooster, and mean goats for children to feed. But the tomatoes in August are fair, the MacIntosh apples in September not quite crisp, roughly picked and mean looking, a bit tastier than the grocery store's, and the modern family members are glum and resentful.

But drive twenty minutes from home and you find Altamont in the shadow of the Helderberg Escarpment where lovers go to hike and desperate locals leap to their deaths. Indian Ladder Farm I understand will celebrate its 100 anniversary in two years, and every year in September  it celebrates its importance as an apple-picking festival center. The main building sells truly tasty farm produce, as well as fruit accoutrement, jellies and cider donuts and cider, and country gift items, household items and odd country jewelry, candles and lotions. There's a modest barn with rabbits and hens and penned in farm animals; in the woods out of sight are converted chicken coops where the migrant workers stay.

Apple picking is fun with small children, in small segments of time. But twenty years ago I came upon the July raspberry harvest, and then later, the September harvest. I was selling something, a traveling seller of something, and I found a traveling excuse to be in Altamont, dressed in a salesman's suit and a wrinkled shirt and a good tie, and scuffed black shoes. It was July and the wooden sign outside Indian Ladder's parking lot said "Raspberries," with an arrow. Raspberry picking is sublime, not fun with small children, a time when you lose all sense of time. It's over only when you've filled two soft quart pails with ripe berries. For many years working, selling, I would manage to find myself in Altamont in July, and drive alone up a dirt road hundreds of yards from the main road, loosening my tie and removing my suit jacket in the car.

Today, retired from selling anything but my odd drawings now and then, I head with a purpose to Altamont. 

I know, after years of focused harvesting, that some raspberries don't want to be picked; they'd rather fall to the ground than allow capturing in your soft pail. On a Wednesday, or a Thursday during September harvest, you find yourself alone, away from the July precious mother teaching her out-of-school preteens the perfect technique in her loud voice, the teens wishing they were instead at the Elm Avenue pool. Alone in September, today, the only noises are the bees who work near me, seeking the flowers and leaving me the fruit. Far off you can hear a tractor, I'm vaguely aware of it; when I look up to the sky I see the cliff, the Helderberg, high up and away. Some days, but not today, I hear crows, or even geese, confused by an early cool day.

But mostly I'm looking down or crouching and seeking perfection; often the best berries are clumped together under brambles near to the ground, and when I find a group of four or five hanging together, each perfectly berry-colored, less red than crimson, I look at them with love, and I thank them, truly, for sliding so smoothly into my fingers, one by one. Under the wide sky, they are my only friends.