I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend at my mother’s house, far from civilization and a mile down a gravel trail from the nearest road, deep in the heart of Christmas tree country.  In fact, her house is in the middle of one of the many fields belonging to my uncle’s Christmas tree farm.

My mother works for the farm, in the payroll office, as she has since moving to Oregon twelve years ago.  The end of November is the height of the Christmas tree harvest, and so while my brother and sister and I loafed around the house on Friday morning, helping ourselves to leftover stuffing and pumpkin pie for breakfast, my mother was back at work.  She called me in the middle of the day to let me know that some of the crews were working one of the fields across the road, if I felt like walking down the driveway to watch.  “Okay,” I told her, and then: “Are there any hookers out in the field?”

“Oh, of course,” she said, “you know you can’t get any work done in the field without hookers!”  And then we both may have giggled.  Slightly.

Allow me to explain:  Christmas tree harvest season is a whirl of activity, with most of the year’s harvest of trees chopped down and bundled up and shipped out all in the space of a month.  To meet the demand for so many trees in such a short time, the work crews chop down the trees that they’ve spent months grading and tagging, feed them through a baler out in the field so the trees can be packaged into a bundle, and then a helicopter swoops in to pick up the bundles of trees and sling them into waiting trucks, like so:

incoming

The helicopter pilots are able to release the trees into the truck on their own, but they need someone on the ground to grab the swinging cable and attach it to the bale, and since that person’s entire job consists of hooking the trees I suppose it makes a certain sense that they should be referred to as ‘hookers’.  And so they are called hookers by the simple country people who run the farm, without a trace of irony or any hint that this word might already be in widespread use to refer to another type of worker entirely.  It leads to some hilarious radio calls, when one crew or another will call into dispatch to say that they could really use a hooker out in the field, or to ask if the next shift is coming on soon because their hookers are getting worn out and they could use some fresh ones.

I was downstairs throwing more wood into the fire when my mom came home on Friday.  I walked into the kitchen to say hi, and asked, “How’s the harvest going?”

“Oh, pretty good,” she said, “but there was a hold-up in the afternoon in one of the fields.  A crew showed up but all the hookers had left!”

“Oh no!” I said, laughing.  “No hookers!  Do you suppose they just got tired and needed to go sleep it off?  I mean, I’m sure they’ve put a lot of hooking in this week.”  And then we might have snickered.  Slightly.

Oh, simple country cousins, I don’t think you have any idea how much amusement we’ve derived over the years from your simple country ways, and the country words you use.  It just about balances out the fact that I’m sure you all voted for McCain.

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