Mobile
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Already, the mountains are crawling with tourists visiting the choose-n-cut farms. On my way here on NC 421, every 20th automobile descending into the flatlands was an SUV or minivan sporting a Christmas tree as a roof ornament. The window for selling Christmas trees is already open and it will close in a month. These trees need to get to a retail lot where some hospitable Southern family can invite them home -- and they need to get there fast. It's no time for Buca, Gerónimo and their crew to discover they might have to carry all the trees up the path by hand.
Gracias a Dios
I have just arrived in this remote northwest corner of North Carolina from my home in Chapel Hill. I met Buca at a Hispanic Baptist mission in Ashe County a year ago. I spent all spring and early summer learning about his life and work, and I promised to help with the harvest. But what can this desk-dwelling gringo do against the inertia of 250 Christmas trees that need to get from the bottom of a mountain to the top?Someone has an idea. They gather dry brush and sticks to give the Kubota's giant tire treads something to grab. The wheels spin just as smoothly over this pile. The result is the same with some pressure-treated lumber Gerónimo finds in the yard.
Defeated, Buca backs the tractor down to the flat part of the path, and we start to unload the trailer. Silvio, a 28-year-old with two small, gold hoops in his left ear and an Ashe County Lightning basketball T-shirt over his black sweatshirt, uses a spade to fill in the wheel ruts. When there are two dozen trees left on the trailer Buca tries again, picking up speed before he hits Silvio's freshly groomed slope. The tractor crests the hill, and the trailer follows behind. We're in business.
"Gracias a Dios," I say when I reach the top.
"Gracias a Dios," Buca agrees. Thank God.
We transfer the trees from the tractor-trailer to another flatbed hitched to Buca's white Ford Ranger. Our loading zone is a grassy knoll that overlooks his mobile home on one side and his retired neighbors' pre-fab dream home on the other. From here the only evidence of all the work left to do is the tips of the still-standing Fraser firs, barely visible over the edge of the ridge.
What we see is a landscape fit for a painting. Evergreens 200 feet tall line the riverbank. Vacation cottages lie silent for the winter. Tiny cattle graze on tumbling pastures that form the distant wall of the river valley. Unseen geese call each other into formation above the water, which glistens under a bright blue sky streaked with wispy cirrus clouds and trails of jet exhaust.
Buca's boss helped them buy this acre of land in December 1996 so the family could settle down. Buca's wife Amanda calls it paradise.
A Water Cooler Chat
We finish the load and the guys are ready for a water break. We head toward the mobile home, and Buca brings out some plastic tumblers, pitchers of water and juice and a bottle of lemon-lime soda. Martín, a 34-year-old with long, black sideburns, a thin moustache and a '70s-style mullet, goes to his car for a soda and a trendy, pale-yellowish iced tea in a fancy bottle that Silvio mistakes for tequila.
Martín can afford such luxuries; he's single and works for a good boss. He knows most of the guys come to the mountains to work and take money back to their families, but that's not for him. He doesn't want to live that life straddling the border. He's been here for three years, and he's not going back.
Emilio, 52, is not so sure about the United States. He was cheated out of $1,000 of pay in Florida, and now his boss in Ashe County owes him more than $700. He's working for $350 a week but is only getting about $200.
"He always says, 'I'll pay you the rest next week,'" says Emilio.
It's the same story I've heard from Hispanic immigrants all over North Carolina, from Christmas-tree workers in the mountains to day laborers in the bigger cities.
"There are bad people here," says Emilio.
Imitating some of the Americans he encounters, Emilio squints his eyes into a disdainful look and growls the word "Mexicans," flicking his hands away from his body as if shooing a pest.
"There are good people here, too," Emilio hastens to add. He hopes there is someone who might be able to help him get his money.
"You are working for free," says Martín, with the fatalistic laugh of someone who feels powerless to right a wrong.
Eighty percent of North Carolina's Christmas-tree workers are Hispanic immigrants. In an NC State University Survey, growers said they'd have to scale back or go out of business without Hispanic labor.
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