Let's Go...Fruit-Picking?

            I’ll admit, I was skeptical starting out working in an office for the summer. I have always held the months of June, July, and August absolutely sacrosanct – reserved exclusively for feeling my skin bake brown in the sun and squidgying my toes in the grass. The past two summers, I worked on a vegetable and flower farm; I had calluses on my hands and dirt under my fingers from shucking countless ears of corn and picking basket after basket of tomatoes. It will be no surprise to find that for my first few weeks in the Let’s Go office, I found life in front of a computer, smelling stale coffee and leftover Indian takeout, to be so sterile, so unnatural, so jarring after gathering bouquets of basil and shoving my nose in them just because they smelled so good, after feeling, with eminent satisfaction, the earth give way as a big, fat red onion gets pulled up. I didn’t want to be in an air-conditioned building, staring down at the hazy brick sidewalks of Harvard Square; there are few things I could think of that I wanted to be doing less than vainly searching Google for postage rates of aerogrammes to Australia.

            Yet somewhere in my rotation of stewing, raging, and feeling sorry for myself, a magical thing happened. I was assigned to research employment opportunities for backpackers in Oz. This may not sound particularly miraculous, but I assure you it was. For in my perusal of the world wide web, I found something that piqued my interest greatly: there is a kind of backpacking subculture Down Under revolving around short-term harvesting jobs. Because of the wide range of climates represented in the huge, Scottie-dog-shaped continent half a world away from where I sat in Cambridge, harvest times are staggered throughout the year, ensuring that, regardless of the month, there are always picking opportunities for backpackers with a willing set of hands and a strong back. This constant demand across the country for temporary labor provides backpackers with an unbelievable opportunity: if you have the itch to travel, but lack the funds to finance a pan-Australian tour, you can work your way from Indian Ocean to Coral Sea picking everything from mangoes to avocadoes to grapes to apples. Work for a couple of weeks until you accumulate enough cash to move on to the next destination on your itinerary, do it, and repeat. Oh, and did I mention that there are other sweet ways to earn your daily stipend? Like living on a boat for a month off the coast of Broome and collecting some of the finest pearls in the world? Or learning the basics of ranching and working as a farm hand on one of the massive cattle stations in the interior for a few months? It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad (cool) world down there.

            And to think, all the time I was lamenting not spending June, July, and August in the same way as past summers, I didn’t realize that there is an entire world out there, full of things I am interested in, things I want to spend my time doing. I may not be outside this summer, and I may not even be traveling, but a somewhat unexpected way, working inside, in this office, reading about Australia, has expanded the size of my “outside.” Sure, I can go back and pick vegetables in central Massachusetts, but…why not do it in Australia instead? Why not work my way across a continent that I have decided, over the course of just these past few months, I need to explore for myself. I want to feel the dust in my teeth as I drive through the Outback; I want to want feel the water lap at my ankles on the beaches of Fraser Island; I want to see the Sydney Opera House for myself and decide whether it’s as beautiful in real life as it is in all the pictures I have seen. I have it all planned out – I’m going to do it. Want to come? Let’s go.