October 10, 2009
Apples, ho!
Fruits of a water crossing.
A few days ago, we got a last minute call from a pal to join him with a few other island friends on his 46′ sailing ketch…
… to go apple picking.
Now, most folks don’t take a sailboat to an orchard, but this ain’t most places. By noon we were underway the very short distance to Shaw Island, a place of serenity, fruit, and remarkably clear water.
After anchoring in a little bay, we loaded the rowboat with empty bins and, thinking ahead, a large hand truck (not standard equipment on either a sailboat nor a dinghy), and oared to shore over lovely clear jellies floating atop the eel grass.
The Shaw Invasion had begun (the jellyfish were shaking in fear, I’m certain). Climbing up from the beach, we walked down a rural path about a hundred yards until we found ourselves in the middle of an apple orchard, and wasted no time determining which of the bright red orbs were worth plundering.
The answer turned out to be, “quite a lot of them.”
Hauling our winnings back to shore, we realized that we could add more than enough fiber to the diet of a small nation with the number of apples we had in tow.
It took a few strong shoves to get the overladen rowing dingy out to sea again, there were so many pounds of fruit.
At this point in the story I should be showing you a beautiful photo from my kitchen of the incredible delicacies I created from this windfall. Instead, I admit that since returning to shore that afternoon, life was too busy for me to learn how to cook or bake (someday, someday!), and instead I’ve enjoyed the apples one raw bite at a time. This was my very first time apple picking, in fact: growing up in Manhattan, I used to think that they came prepackaged under a cellophane window on styrofoam in polite groups of six. I had never before seen apples in their natural habitat. The whole Newton/gravity thing finally came alive for this aged school girl when she saw what happens when you shake a ripe tree. Apple-ied physics!
Mike Wills said,
October 12, 2009 @ 10:00 am
Thank you, Alex, for this virtual excursion. I never contemplated that my walk out the front door to harvest our apples could be improved upon….thanks for sharing this marvelous experience.
Glenn Buttkus said,
October 13, 2009 @ 5:38 am
Incredible “Water Voyage”, although only taking 2:03minutes to cross the water from SJ to Shaw seemed like pushing it a bit. It appears from the pics that the ketch motored and did not sail over, right? One assumes that even the orchards on Shaw Island had owners. Did they mind the poetic pilfering? Were the trees very tall. Sometimes that will fool you, and the ripest sweetest apples are way up there on the top. So was there a stepladder in the mix? What a nice mixture of olfactory sensations though, apples and kelp.
Glenn
Alex Shapiro said,
October 20, 2009 @ 1:00 am
Glenn’s inquiring mind deserves answers:
We motored over, but the wind picked up beautifully and after we left Shaw we went out of our way for another couple of hours and sailed north up the coast of San Juan Island and back down again. Glorious!
The University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories happens to be the owner of a great many acres on Shaw Island. Our friend and cap’n, Dennis Willows, is a gifted marine scientist and was the Labs’ Executive Director for 30 years, and both Charles and I are delighted to sit on the Board.
No step ladder. A couple of tall men, and one agile one: Cap’n Dennis, who climbed twice all the way up a tree to do the big shake down and change the meteorological forecast to “raining apples.”