Editor’s Note: Lynn MacKenzie, a big-city teacher smitten by the SweeTango apple, set out to discover the roots of her new favorite fruit. In this essay, she shares her journey from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to the scenic orchards of western New York.

A week before I leave Brooklyn for the apple country to the west, a visitor gives me a bushel of a new variety of apple: SweeTango.

They are beautiful: bright red with streaks of yellow and dotted with a constellation of pale freckles. They are so recently picked that barely-wilted leaves still festoon the stems. Fruit this fresh, mere hours from the tree, is a rare treat in Brooklyn, so I share the apples with several friends.

Over the next day or two, I’m peppered with emails, texts and calls commenting on the fruit.

“Amazing! So good! And I’m not an apple person.”

“The best apple I’ve ever eaten.”

“Incredible! Really sweet but with a little lemony note.”

“Those apples were delicious! Tart and yet sweet — but not too sweet!”

Now I’m traveling to the orchard where these remarkable apples were grown. I want to see how they are harvested and meet the people who cultivate and pick them.

Descending from Amtrak’s Empire Service train in Rochester, I feel like I have journeyed from Penn Station to the other side of the earth. It’s autumn here in the Lake Ontario Fruit Belt, a vast green country of fields, farmhouses, and forest.

It’s early September and I’m visiting an orchard run by Mark, who grows SweeTango and other apple varieties. He says the real bosses of the operation are the apple trees.

“My job? I take orders from plants,” he says. “We’re trying to make beautiful pieces of fruit, one apple at a time, one tree at a time, but by the thousands.”

Looking around the orchard, I see he has succeeded: I’m surrounded by walls of gorgeous fruit. Brooklyn is a world away.

I adopt the growers’ schedule, which means getting up before sunrise. As we drive out to the orchard, the sun crests the horizon behind us. We arrive at the orchard a little before 7 a.m.  Behind a big red barn, rows of fruit-laden trees sweep back to the lofty green rampart of a distant wood. The men have already begun work, picking the fruit from the tops of the SweeTango trees.

We duck into a grubby blue shed, which was once a milk house, to gulp coffee and grab tools and gloves. We then walk toward the SweeTango block through thick grass. We pass row after row of tall trees, their apple-crowded limbs shooting off in every direction: green apples, coral and yellow apples, candy-red apples, deep magenta apples.

The SweeTango trees, only three years old, are wiry adolescents next to the matronly bulk of older trees. Their tiny trunks are about as thick as the fat end of a carrot. Near the ground, the trunks are painted with an 18-inch band of white, like the tape-wrapped ankles of a thoroughbred. Despite their frail appearance, these spindly saplings bear clusters of huge, bright red apples on every limb.

The men have been there since just before 7 a.m., picking the apples from the tops of the trees. Each worker has a pointy, eight foot tripod ladder with curving legs splayed widely close to the ground. A single pole attached to their narrow tops supports these ladders; this pared-down design means the workers can snug them into the dense, crowded crowns of trees.

The pickers wear “picking buckets” slung over one shoulder. The plastic half-moon buckets are padded and lined with leather to cushion the fruit and prevent it from bruising. The bottom swings open to release the fruit into a bin. The pickers work with speedy delicacy, the apples lining up unbumped and unbruised, with no tumbling or rolling around.

I sling a bucket across my shoulder and grab a ladder. Mark instructs me to place it so that the steps are level to the ground and the apples directly in front of me: “You want to be reaching forward, not to the side.”

I climb several steps until my head pokes up over the wall of leaves and fruit and I can look out through the ranks of the trees’ topmost spires at the sun, staring back at me from just over the horizon. I reach forward and grab a big red fruit. I twist, and with a tiny pop, the apple comes off in my hand, round, firm, cool, and heavy.

I examine its stem: long, woody, and with a sharp-edged node on its end where the fruit was attached to the tree. This stem can puncture the skin of the apples sitting beside it in the carrier or the bins. So that the apples will arrive at the market crisp and perfect, the stem of every SweeTango is examined, and if it’s long like this one, clipped, the moment the fruit comes off the tree. I’m equipped with a clipper, like a tiny wire cutter; its blades curve to form a dimple. I snug the concave cutting blades of the nipper into the hollow of the apple around the stem and snip off the pointy protruding end. Then I set the apple gently on the padded bottom of the carrier and turn back to the tree.

At half full, the bucket drags me off balance, so I climb down the ladder and lurch over to the bin. I unhook the ropes securing the bucket’s skirt and let the apples slide down into the skirt as I have seen the men do. Then I place the strange contraption, nylon skirt bulging with apples, on the fruit already in the bin, drop the ropes, and try to ease the bucket off the apples. Well! Some tumbling and bumping, but the apples are in the bin at least.

A low gentle popping accompanies us through the morning: the sound of apples coming off the trees. When the men finish one row and move on to the next, I stay behind and look down the alley. The row looks strangely homogenous now that it is composed solely of green leaves, where before it was thickly studded with red fruit. The trees look empty.

I ask the growers: With the apples off, do the trees look bereft to them? Or relieved? Both respond without even pausing to think: “Oh, relieved, no question!” Mark thinks the trees, once their apples have been picked and toted away, are enjoying the tree equivalent of resting. Another grower says she thinks a tree after harvest is like a harried mom whose kids have finally gone back to school, who watches the bus pick them up and take them away, pours herself a cup of coffee, and sits back with a contented smile.

I ride to the packing house with ten tons of SweeTangos, feeling a certain first-day-of-school anxiety on their behalf. The quiet orchard recedes behind us as we drive along the Ridge Road, once an Iroquois footpath, toward the next stop in the apples’ journey into the wide world.

The packing house is a huge, grey, windowless building with a shallowly-pitched roof. At one end, an immense doorway reaches the eaves of the roof, with a curtain of plastic flaps strung across the opening. We pull up in front of the door, where two forklifts hover like wasps, waiting for us to park. The instant the truck has stopped, they dive at the load from both sides; from within the cab we feel a slight shake, and then they each buzz by our windows loaded with bins. Within a minute, the bins are all stacked near the huge doorway, and the busy forklifts scoop up two and three bins each and barrel though the plastic curtain at top speed, disappearing inside.

I walk around to the front door and the plant’s manager gives me a rather dashing grey lab coat – and, oh no, a hairnet. He checks to make sure I’m not wearing jewelry or artificial nails and asks me to wash my hands.

We walk down a stairway and step through a door into a huge room, and before us stretches THE PACKING LINE. It is like an amusement park ride for apples! It is action-packed! I have no idea what’s going on! It snakes around the room on two levels, while a carousel of dangling boxes circles rapidly on the ceiling. The people working on The Line seem unimpressed by the sprawling, rumbling mechanical monster under their hands. I don’t want to look like a naive city dweller who stares and goggles at an acre of apple-handling machines, so I try to act, you know, casual. The manager seems convinced by my nonchalance and begins talking as to a fellow-adept about the new line they’re building that will gaze within the fruit without puncturing its skin, eliminating even those apples with defects invisible to the eye. I leave him to the contemplation of this Calvinist scrutinizer of the souls of apples and go to look for the SweeTangos which were harvested yesterday and will be leaving tonight for New York City.

Back beyond the chilly storage areas, where bins of apples tower overhead, stacked all the way up to the forty five foot ceiling, and forklifts charge around busily, I find the SweeTangos in their boxes awaiting the truck that will take them south. A day ago they were anonymous apples, swaying on leafy boughs in the sunshine and birdsong of the orchard. Today they have an identity: each wears a sticker with a snazzy logo which is repeated on the sides of the boxes. It is touching to think of them in their stylish boxes, stems clipped, scrubbed clean, ready to go to the big city. I will miss their stage debut, when merchants put them out in produce departments around Manhattan. I wish I could be there to see it!

Now, I have to make some phone calls to tell my friends back in Brooklyn that they’ll be arriving in the city tomorrow; everyone who got a taste of them is clamoring for more.

About the author
Lynn MacKenzie grew up in the second-smallest town in Connecticut. She teaches Italian to undergraduates in New York City and writes about 13th century Italian culture and literature. She is spending the fall in Western New York, learning to pilot a tractor and admiring the Greek Revival farmhouses of Niagara County.

*SweeTango is a registered trademark of the University of Minnesota for fruit of the Minneiska cultivar