July 24, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

An apple a day keeps common sense (and money) away
by MIKE TODD

There may come a time in your life when your significant other decides that you need to buy a wheelbarrow’s worth of apples, and that you should spend a weekend afternoon picking these apples yourself. Never mind that, ordinarily, you eat about an apple a month, and that the grocery store very nearby tends to stock plenty of exotic fruits, often including the rare and elusive apple itself.

If you have any sense at all, you will agree to this plan enthusiastically, because you learned long ago that maintaining marital harmony regularly involves the subjugation of logic and common sense. 

This is how my wife Kara and I ended up heading out to the country last weekend on an apple-picking expedition, from which only one of us returned. Okay, that’s not entirely true. We both returned, but our cash didn’t.

Apple picking sounded like such a peaceful thing to do. I pictured a quiet country orchard with birds chirping overhead as a farmer in a straw hat greeted us with a friendly wave from his rocking chair, with music by Hank Williams playing in the background. The countryside would be bucolic, also, because that’s how countrysides have to be described, even though bucolic to me sounds more like a breed of plow animal or something babies catch.

As we pulled into the dusty driveway, instead of a farmer, we were greeted by a parking lot attendant in an orange reflector vest waving at us with air-traffic-controller glowsticks. This place was like Six Flags Apple Adventure, not Mayberry. As we made our way around the cars and wandered up to the front gate, we saw a huge snaking line stretching back from a multi-windowed ticket booth. Before entering the orchard, you had to buy a general admission ticket. 

“Dude, there’s a cover charge?” I asked.

Cover charges give me hives. I can think of lots of things I’d rather do with my money than pay a cover charge, like running it through a food processor or donating it to pediatric Botox research.

One Saturday night at Penn State many years back, my buddy Derek and I waited in line for half an hour to get into a crowded bar. When we finally got to the front of the line, the bouncer announced that there was a five-dollar cover. In the Land of the Poor College Student, cover charges were rarely more than a couple of bucks.

Derek looked at the bouncer incredulously.

“Who’s playing in there, the Beatles?” he asked.

The Beatles were not playing at the orchard that day, but it did have a band, a corn maze, a petting zoo, a theme park, a haunted house and, as an afterthought, apples. After forking over the cover charge, we proceeded with the throngs to the bag-purchasing hut, where we paid 12 bucks for an empty bag. That felt kind of strange.  Usually, when you pay 12 dollars for a plastic bag, it has 12 dollars worth of stuff in it.

Once we got away from the crowds and strolled among the apple trees, though, I began to understand why apple picking attracts so many people. It’s just pleasant to wander through the orchard, tasting the different kinds of apples and trying not to think about the fact that you had, just moments ago, been petting a donkey with the same hands that you were now eating out of.  

On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some ingredients to make apple crisp.  As we walked through the produce aisle, it didn’t escape my notice that the store had a giant display of pre-bagged apples for 99 cents a bag. Sure, apples may have been a tenth of the cost at the grocery store, but you didn’t have to earn those apples.  You only truly appreciate your produce when you’ve paid for the privilege of picking it.