A Late Night Adventure in a Tomato Field

I love the Central Valley in summer. I’ve had almost 30 summers in this hot, dusty and most bountiful region in the world and every year I love it more.

In all my summers and in all the trips I’ve taken to the country, nothing can top the experience I had late one night a few years. My day ended after midnight with the most wonderful and unusual and heartwarming adventure I can remember. For the first time, I saw a glimmer of the California that I’d read about as a child. The California that John Steinbeck had known and loved and romanticized in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

I’ve lived in lots of places and I can think of special things about each one of those places. I grew up in the state that has the biggest sky and went to high school in the state that produces the toughest cowboys. I lived for a time in the coffee capital of the country and I met my husband in the great potato state.

But now I live in California. Specifically, the Central Valley. And we have bragging rights to the mighty tomato. When it comes to that big, fat, juicy, red fruit, no one can touch us. When you go to the Piggly Wiggly in Franklin, Ky., or Stew Leonard’s in Danbury, Conn., or Albertsons in Casper, Wyo., for a can of stewed tomatoes, you have us to thank.

In late spring, my husband and I would take our kids to watch the workers plant the tomato fields surrounding our little town. And over the course of weeks and months, we’d go back to check on the progress, to see how a tiny seedling can become a wild tangle of vines, laden with plump red tomatoes.

Other than those little tomato plants turning into big tomato plants, though, not a lot goes on in those fields during the summer. But at the end of summer, just when those tomatoes are at their peak, the workers move in, ready to harvest. And harvesting tomatoes is fascinating stuff.

A tomato harvester is a huge, awkward contraption that rumbles and rocks its way through a field. It moves ever so slowly, ripping up every tomato plant in its path. Then, the entire plant — leaves, roots, bugs and all — is sucked up onto a metal track that tosses the tomatoes onto a conveyor belt manned, in some cases, by workers in perpetual motion as they pick out vines and dirt clods and debris from the bouncing tomatoes.

The workers are the last line of defense before the happy parade of tomatoes moves to a chute where they are sucked up and then launched through the air into the tractor-trailer that has been following alongside all the while.

This time of year, mid-July through September, as you travel from Davis to Woodland, Winters and Dixon, you’ll see fresh tomatoes scattered across the curves and corners of the country roads. It is, once again, harvest time, that time of year when these mobile factories appear in our fields. You’ll see them in the fields, lumbering up one row and down the next, shooting a constant stream of red tomatoes that fill trailer after trailer.

They operate around the clock, harvesting acre after acre after acre. And around the clock, those trailers full of ripe tomatoes are hauled up the road to Williams where they are dumped and washed and transformed into all sorts of canned tomato products.

Photo credit: California Tomato Machinery

One night I got into bed thinking about those harvesters. Not just the big, clumsy machines, but the people who were working on them. It was 10:45 p.m. and we were all safe in our beds. We’d had dinner, watched a movie with popcorn and were now settling down for sleep.

Meanwhile, out in a field very nearby, there were people standing for hours on end on a noisy, Rube Goldberg-like contraption, sorting tomatoes all night long.

What was that like? Where were they from? Were they cold? Or hot? Did they get to take breaks? Had they had their dinner?

So, at eleven o’clock, with my husband’s encouragement, I got out of bed and tossed a sweatshirt over my pajamas. Then I told our 8-year-old, Maev — the only kid who wasn’t asleep — to put on her sneakers and get in the van. We were going on an adventure.

Our first stop was McDonald’s, where we ordered 20 double cheeseburgers. By 11:15 p.m. we were officially out in the country with tomato fields on both sides of us as we traveled up County Road 102. Only five miles outside the city limits and we were about to enter a different world.

Maev and I both spotted a cluster of bright lights in the field to the east at the same time. I slowed the van as I approached Road 28 and turned right onto a dusty dirt road, taking us to the edge of the field being harvested. Ahead of us, parked on the side of the field, were two huge white trailers, filled to overflowing with tomatoes. We passed by them and pulled our van to the side of the road, just a foot or two from the tomato plants.

As we got out of our van, a white pickup truck approached, headlights shining on us. It slowed to a stop and a man got out. Uh-oh. Should we run? I’m sure Maev was wishing she was back at home in her bunk bed. Maybe this wasn’t my best idea. But here we were. Nowhere to hide in a tomato field.

The man was wearing a baseball cap, jeans and a long-sleeved work shirt with the name “Roberto” embroidered on it. He smiled at Maev and then looked at me. Before he could ask the question, I said, “We came to see the harvester. We brought cheeseburgers.” He looked at me and then at the big McDonald’s bag I was holding. Then he smiled at Maev again.

“Is it OK if we’re here?” I asked nervously.

“Of course,” he replied. And then, in his heavily accented English, “Would you like some tomatoes?”

I gave Roberto our heavy bag of cheeseburgers, found an empty Nugget shopping bag on the floor of the van, and together we picked tomatoes. As we filled the bag, waiting for those bright lights from the harvester out in the field to arrive at our end of the row, I asked Roberto all my questions.

“How long are these rows?”

“A mile.”

“How long before the harvester gets to us?”

“Probably 10 minutes.”

“How long to harvest this whole field?”

“About a week.”

“Where are the workers from? I mean, are they all from Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“Do they go back home when they’re done with the harvest?”

“Yes, most of them.”

“Do you get very many visitors out here at night?”

(Laughter) “No. Never.”

“Do they get to take a break?”

“Yes. Lunch is at midnight.”

Well, it was just about midnight. And, right on time, that big tomato harvester was arriving. I asked if we could walk out into the field to watch it working.

“Of course.”

And so we walked between the tomato rows through the dry dirt to the harvester. Roberto motioned for the drivers to stop. Then we followed him as he walked right between the harvester and the tractor pulling the trailer.

“Would you like to ride it?”

The engines and machinery were roaring in our ears. I must have heard wrong.

“What?”

“Would you like to ride on the harvester?”

Now, I feel like I’m a pretty lucky person, but realizing we were being offered a chance to ride on this huge hunk of metal as it spewed tomatoes and rumbled through a field in the middle of the night, I felt like I’d just won the lottery. At that moment, I’d never wanted anything more in my life than to ride on that machine.

C’mon, Maev. Let’s get on before they change their minds. Or think twice about “liability.” Or decide they’re not in the mood for cheeseburgers.

Within seconds, we’d pulled ourselves up onto the platform where the workers were systematically picking unwanted debris from the passing tomatoes, their arms and tomatoes flying simultaneously. We stood there and watched in awe, the workers smiling at us.

At one point, as we bounced through the night, Maev yelled above the noise, “This is so much fun.” I turned to the young man working next to me and asked, “Is it fun?” He replied, with a smile, “Too much standing. I wish I had a chair.”

We rode that tomato harvester until it reached the end of the row.

Maev and I thanked Roberto and his crew. Then we got back into our air-conditioned Honda Odyssey and drove home, knowing we would never have an experience quite like this again. Or ever forget this wonderful, adventurous night.

The smell of the dirt and the over-ripe tomatoes; the feel of the mosquitoes and the hot summer air; the hospitality and true graciousness of Roberto and his crew.

It was a magical night.