Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 5, 1995 TAG: 9510050003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ORCHARD GAP LENGTH: Long
- Sociologist James Stockinger, quoted in ``The Good Society'' (Alfred A Knopf, 1991)
Men are picking apples for your table every day right now.
In groves from Winchester to Chilhowie, they lean their long wooden ladders onto the cushion of boughs loaded with fruit. They position and re-position the ladders around the trees in a near-silent, circling waltz, slipping your Yorks and your Granny Smiths into shoulder-slung buckets.
Most people in Virginia's apple belt snubbed this back-breaking work decades ago, leaving it to fast-fisted migrants from Florida or Haiti or Jamaica.
But in a cove on the southern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Garnet Dawson, homegrown to these Carroll County hills, is still hard at it.
He has been picking apples for 73 years - since he was 10 - and he's not about to quit now. Even prostate cancer hasn't been able to drive him from the orchard.
"I told Garnet he was the Cal Ripken of the apple business," says an awed Frank Levering, 43, Dawson's boss but more like a son.
The lean, muscular Dawson has picked roughly 73,000 bushels of apples in his life. That translates into 5.3 million individual apples, enough to fill Roanoke's Victory Stadium.
Garnet Dawson might have done other things, but he's been happy staying put.
He's one of those rarest of Americans - one who parked himself in the same place and in the same line of work for a lifetime.
"I liked it here," he says, "and I just kept staying at it.
"I always wanted to be outdoors. I never wanted to be closed up somewhere."
Every weekday morning and sometimes on Saturdays, Garnet - pronounced GAR-nit - laces up his high-top workboots and slaps on a baseball cap.
He knows what a yellowjacket up your pants leg can mean when you're up a tree. So he turns up the legs of his bibbed overalls and ties fraying strings around the makeshift cuffs to keep the bees out.
In the 1950s, he killed 20 copperheads one day and 22 the next. And he's never been bitten once.
Every day after breakfast, he leaves his wife of 56 years, Esther, and hops onto the gray 1954 Ferguson tractor parked outside. Sally, a long-haired beagle, and Drum, an old black and tan hound, trot behind him up the rutted lanes. They climb deep into the Levering Orchard.
Garnet Dawson doesn't own this orchard, but he's invested more sweat in it than anybody.
The orchard got its start in 1907 when Tennessee strawberry and sweet-potato farmer Ralph Levering decided to quit stooping for a living. The Quaker man walked 200 miles along the Blue Ridge of Virginia, searching for the perfect spot to grow apples. He found a cove here with deep black loam, ridges that offer shelter from the wind and a thermal belt that draws the cold night air away to the lowlands.
Ralph Levering hired Arthur Dawson as foreman and Arthur's boy Garnet started picking in 1922. To this day, he cleans his scythe, mattock and pruning saw just the way Ralph Levering taught him.
Public school lasted only from November to March. Ralph's wife Clara taught Garnet and other mountain children in her home. Garnet pruned and picked half a day and went to class half a day. He quit school early to work full time.
Years later, Sam Levering, Ralph's son and heir to the orchard, planted more trees. He made Garnet his foreman in 1939. In a little Ford coupe, Garnet and his new bride, Esther Hiatt Dawson, moved into the house near the orchard where they still live.
The five Dawson children spent their childhoods watching their daddy prune the fruit trees and their mama grade apples in the packhouse.
The orchard produced 75,000 bushels a year by the time Garnet was middle-aged. He would lead as many as 22 pickers at a time into these hills. Real whizzes, they were. Some could pick 250 bushels a day.
Then and now, Garnet means business when he's in the orchard.
"When Frank was a teen-ager," Frank Levering and his wife Wanda Urbanska wrote in their book, "Simple Living: One Couple's Search for a Better Life," "a day with Garnet in the orchard seemed like toiling on a chain gang.
"A ferocious worker, Garnet showed no mercy for youthful frailty or for the boss's son, driving furiously until dark if necessary to finish a job. Any activity other than work Garnet viewed with suspicion. Playing ball or reading a book were signs of sloth."
Apples from the Pacific Northwest were crowding the market by the 1960s, but the Leverings refused to lay off mountain men who desperately needed work, even men Garnet says were sorry workers. The Leverings loaned money they never saw again. They paid bonuses they couldn't afford.
"He was a short fella, but he was a good fella," Garnet says of Sam Levering, who died in 1993. "He never did nothing for himself. For other people, he was always ready to help them all he could."
The Leverings and the Dawsons were entwined for life. Dawson was the partner back at the orchard, enabling internationally known Quaker peace activists Sam and Miriam Levering to spend months pushing political causes in Washington and overseas. Gradually, peace work became their life, the orchard less their ambition.
The Dawsons go to Mount Bethel Moravian Church nearby. Garnet Dawson never missed a Sunday at church for 50 years.
Nine years ago, Frank Levering, a Hollywood screenwriter, and Urbanska, a Los Angeles newspaper reporter, fled the big city. They came here to help pull the orchard out of debt and now it's their home.
Dawson is the young couple's guide to the whole 260 acres. "Garnet knows every inch of land, every tree," says Urbanska. "He's incredibly smart."
He tutored Frank Levering in the orchard business and helped bring about the orchard's revival. It is bustling again with harvests of apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, pears, cherries - and apples.
Until recently, the athletic Levering couldn't keep up with Dawson's steady, sweeping stroke at the scythe as they cut brush by hand from around the apple trees.
"Commitment is Garnet's middle name," says Urbanska. "He's committed to his marriage, to his church, to his work, to his family, and to his community. He's led an attentive life - attentive to the world around him."
The frugal Dawson saved his money. He owns his spacious brick home and 73 acres. He and Esther, a former teacher, welcome home their far-flung children - two teachers, a machinist, a doctor's wife and a Washington, D.C., real-estate developer with a Harvard MBA.
Things are different now at the Levering Orchard. Pick-your-own cherries are the biggest crop.
It's just Garnet and Frank and two other men picking apples. They might harvest 3,000 bushels this year, 4 percent of what the orchard once produced.
By the time it's matured on a tree for five or six months, drinking in rain, air, and sunlight, an apple is no longer merely an apple. Like ourselves, an apple is a living thing. The freckles are called lenticels, and they are breathing pores by which the apple inhales. Until the time of consumption, an apple is alive and breathing. As our teeth bite into it, we hear the sharp report of thousands of living, breathing cells, their membranes crunched in a sound that conjures up the pure joy of partaking.|
- from ``Simple Living: One Couple's Search for a Better Life'' (Viking, 1992)
Near the age of 80, Garnet Dawson packed away his picking bucket. "I thought I'd retire. What was it? A year ago?" he asked his wife during an interview. (It was really about four years ago.)
Problem was, it was late fall. There was no grass for this hard-working man to mow. His big garden had been put to bed for the winter. His home was so tidy and well-maintained, there was nothing to do.
"He doesn't have a hobby," Esther Dawson explained.
"After a month," he said, "it grew old on me."
"His nerves were just shot," she added.
"I just went back to work."
Garnet Dawson has prostate cancer.
A few weeks ago, his doctor turned him loose to do "a little light work."
For Dawson, 83, that can mean laboring all day in the Levering Orchard, then picking apples in his son Bill's orchard after supper.
"I think Daddy is the embodiment of a good man," said another son, Porter. "I think he really feels that he's had a good life."
One drizzling morning last month, Garnet was up a tree as usual, gingerly guiding a stream of Golden Delicious into his bucket. "You get a hold of it and give it a little twist." His hands are tan, strong, the skin smooth as a Winesap.
The air smelled of ripe apples and dry grass.
Garnet eats plenty of apples. "I like a Golden Delicious pretty good, or a Stayman."
Minutes later, he dropped to his knees on the ground, to judge the fallen fruit. In a blink, he knew which were good enough for produce sale, which for cider and which had the tiniest rotten spot. They were left behind: Food for the deer.
He dumped bucketful upon bucketful into old wooden apple crates marked with the names of H.F. Byrd, Virginia's former senator, and other orchardists across the mid-Atlantic.
Soon, it was lunch time. Frank Levering drove a tractorload to the packhouse. Garnet eased in behind him on the '54 Ferguson, heading home to Esther.
Sally ran alongside. Drum, older and arthritic, hobbled far behind on the three-quarters of a mile road to the Dawsons' porch.
Garnet and Drum used to hunt raccoons together. "I'd work all day and hunt all night," he said, "and get up the next day and go to work and hunt that night."
He quit hunting, he said, "when me and the dog both got too old. He's a pretty good dog."
by CNB