The Last Bed of the Harvest

The marsh he dug

My grandfather is Arlan Pfeiffer. He was born in 1943 on a dairy farm outside Warrens, and when he was nineteen, he and his father decided cows were not the future and cranberries might be.

They bought seventy acres of wet, sandy, worthless ground that the neighbors laughed about. Peat and sand and tamarack swamp.

They dug the first beds by hand and with a borrowed dragline, and they built the dikes one load of sand at a time.

It took them three years to get the first vines established. Cranberries do not hurry for anybody. Grandpa likes to say that the marsh taught him patience, and that his father taught him everything else.

The first real crop came off in 1965. From that fall through last fall, Grandpa worked every single harvest on that marsh. Sixty-one of them.

He never missed one, not for weather, not for the flu, not even the October my grandmother was in the hospital in La Crosse.

If you have never seen a cranberry harvest, it goes like this. The beds are flooded from the reservoir, and a machine we call the eggbeater, a water reel, churns through the vines and knocks the berries loose.

The berries have little pockets of air inside them, so they float. In an hour the whole bed turns into a lake of red.

Then the crew wades in with booms and pushes the floating berries toward one corner, where a pump lifts them up through a cleaner and into the truck.

That pushing is called corralling, and it was Grandpa’s job for most of my life. He had an old wooden boom his father made out of a long, straight piece of ash.

The crew used floating booms for the big work, but Grandpa used the wooden one for the corners.

He was the best at it anybody had ever seen. He could read the wind on the water. He knew which corner the berries would want to drift to and which ones would get stuck along the dike, and he got them all.

In 2019, Grandpa turned the marsh over to my uncle Keith. Keith is his son, my mother’s younger brother. He was 49 then. He had worked on the marsh since he was old enough to hold one end of a boom.

Grandpa moved into a small house in Warrens so Keith and his family could have the farmhouse. Everybody said it was the right thing.

Grandpa said so too. My grandmother Marie had died two years before, and the farmhouse was too big for one man and a radio.

But Keith kept him on the crew at harvest. That was the deal, spoken or not. Grandpa came out every morning in his waders, worked the corners, walked the dikes, checked the flumes and told the young ones what the wind was doing.

The ditch

Last October, Grandpa was walking the dike along bed 6 in the late afternoon. It had rained the day before, and the grass on the dike was slick.

He went to step around a soft spot and his foot went out from under him.

He slid down the bank into the ditch that runs along the bed. The ditches are deeper than the beds, a lot deeper in places, and the water came up over his chest. His waders filled.

If you have never worn chest waders, you have to understand that when they fill with water, climbing a bank in them is like hauling a second man up with you. You can barely move your legs.

Keith was the one who found him. He was coming back from the pump and saw Grandpa’s cap floating. He ran the length of the dike and went in after him, and somehow he got his father up against the bank.

Rudy got there next, and between them they dragged him out. The waders tore on the edge of the culvert on the way up. Grandpa was soaked through and shaking so hard his teeth clacked, and his lips were going blue.