Global Wandering

It’s harvest time in Idaho. The potatoes are ripe, the nights are cool and the cottonwoods along the Henry’s Fork have turned golden. School is out so the students can head for the fields to harvest spuds. Okay, only a handful of kids actually work. Most just stay home to play. Except my kids, who attend a private school where the philosophy is if you can’t harvest it during summer break then don’t plant it. I suspect this hiatus from school is more to let the teachers pick up some extra income driving potato trucks. Educators are underpaid in this state.

This is my fifth harvest in Idaho. Unlike LaPriel, who spent a number of years separating potatoes from rocks on a combine and still gets teary-eyed each October reminiscing about harvests past, I’m a potato novice. In fact, I don’t think they say potatoes are “ripe”. I believe the term is “ready”. Not ready in the sense of ready to be eaten, although they can be, but ready to be hauled to the potato cellars where they will sit for 6 to 8 months while the farmers pray the price of spuds goes high enough to cover the cost of production.

In the five years I’ve lived in Idaho, potato farmers have only made money one year. This is a risky business and it’s getting worse. People don’t eat potatoes like they used to. I, for example, can recall eating one and a half baked potatoes all year; a half of potato a week ago in honor of the harvest and one this past March when the farmers co-op decided to dump 20% of the 2004 potato crop in hopes that it would spur prices higher. We drove to the potato cellar where we filled six boxes full of spuds and promptly gave them away to family members, except for the five potatoes we baked for dinner.

You can tell by the photos I took of the field near our house that there are a lot of potatoes left after the combine comes through. Most are too small to be marketable, or they are mutants with little potato arms and legs. My kids like to glean these forgotten spuds. Last year, they hauled home two burlap sacks full. We stored the potatoes in our private cellar (down the basement next to the canned goods and deep freeze). They seemed to like it there, because they quickly sprouted tentacles and by spring we had thick-armed potato monsters devouring our canned green beans. I finally got rid of the soggy mess when I had to empty the basement for our recent move.

Our friends brought us some potato donuts the other night. Apparently, this is a harvest tradition. Very tasty. In fact, perhaps if they injected potatoes with Splenda or chocolate they would sell better. They could call them something catchy...... like "sweet potatoes".