This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [64]
“That son of a gun!”
Papa’s voice was like the plane, too loud for the morning air. He strode out with hands on hips looking up, the silver in his hair catching the sunlight like the glint of the plane as it passed. Our heads all tilted to follow his.
“That SOB is spraying,” he said, waving his arms, save-our-ship style, in big crosses over his head. Papa marched out to the parking lot, and we could hear the sound of the jeep sputtering away as he went, as usual, to take it up with Herrick, who owned the blueberry fields. He’d once tried getting a group of people to stand in the field in protest, but the planes always returned. It was an ongoing fight that eventually saw some concessions, but Herrick, for the most part, kept spraying.
“Guthion,” Papa spat when he returned, “is a fancy name for a nerve gas used to kill people in wars.” People didn’t know much about it at the time, but Bayer, of the aspirin, a Nazi-owned company during World War II, had registered azinphos-methyl, a neurotoxin derived from nerve gas, as an insecticide for fruit and berries in 1959. Guthion became popular for management of the wild blueberry fruit fly, as it could be sprayed on the large, rocky barrens by plane. This also meant it was easily carried to nearby areas on the breeze, but manufacturers and advocates claimed the levels were too small to do any harm to humans. Papa trusted his gut—if pesticides killed bugs and were derived from nerve gas, they couldn’t be good for us.
The blueberry industry, as Papa saw it, had gone the way of big agriculture, stripping the nutrients from the soil and replacing them with chemicals. In the early 1900s, when True Cannery began canning blueberries in Hope, Maine, blueberry farmers developed the wild lowbush blueberry barrens for commercial harvest, fostering the plants with an age-old method learned from the Native Americans—burning. Every other spring, marsh hay was spread over the fields and set aflame. The seedless hay didn’t spread weeds and burned low, so as not to damage the humus layer of the earth, but killing diseases and weeds and replacing carbon in the soil. The plants recovered quickly and vigorously after a burn and produced higher yields the following year. However, when machine burning later gained popularity, marsh hay was no longer needed, and as the berries received less nourishment without the hay, they began to attract more diseases. Calcium arsenate was initially used to kill the fruit fly, but was highly toxic to the farmers who spread it manually, so airplane-sprayed Guthion became the potion of choice. Not until 2006 would the EPA finally begin phasing out Guthion due to its adverse affects in humans—including respiratory problems, abnormal heart rate, anxiety, and coma; but a full ban won’t take effect until 2012.
In those days, people were getting sick from pesticide drift but had little support for or acknowledgment of their complaints. A number of local miscarriages, including Mama’s, were thought to have been induced by commercial blueberry spraying, but such theories were dismissed by doctors and the chemical industry alike.
“Sons of bitches,” Papa swore about the sprayers, once out of earshot of the customers.
Come August, millions of dusky blueberries covered the field across from our driveway, and Heidi and I snuck over to the hollow above the gravel pit where no one could see us stealing them. We weren’t allowed to for two reasons, the spray plane and the seagull gun, which shot a loud report every few hours to scare the seagulls.
“If Herrick sees anyone picking blueberries he’ll shoot them with the seagull gun,” Papa said, to deter us from the spray-covered blueberries, but we just couldn’t resist the call of plentiful snacking material across the road.
“The seagull gun won’t kill us, will it?” I asked Papa, just in case.
“It might bust your eardrums,” he said.
Eardrum-nervous, we walked elflike on our toes across the crinkly carpet of stems with folded