Harvesting to Hooking Pipeline

Panda Bears?

I worked on a farm as a seasonal worker right around the time I graduated from undergrad. I was burnt out of the fields (lol) that I had previously worked in. I had interned for a reproductive rights-centered org every year for the previous five years. And while I was grateful for the opportunities and learned a lot, the nonprofit world just stopped making sense to me. I didn’t want to climb a neoliberal career ladder. Though I highly respect some of those organizations to this day, the work just felt disingenuous. Plus, sitting at a desk all day hurt my back as humans are not built to be in an office chair for the majority of their day. I would sit at my desk and think, “wow the truly radical thing to do would just be to give all this money directly to the people we are claiming to serve. No need for a middle man.” I started to despise the nonprofit world so I decided to try my luck at yet another “nonprofit” my senior year at college. 

In April 2021, my friend told me that she was plant harvesting for our city’s zoo for $15 an hour. Pre-crushing inflation and economic decline, for the town I was living in, $15 an hour was a good wage that only a few institutions were paying. I was psyched. I immediately applied. I had also just come away from a spiritual journey with a 75 yr old man I met by the side of the road who exposed me to plant medicine and healing. I thought I could continue this plant exploration via this job. Following my interview later that week, I had gotten the job. My boss was an older midwestern man who had come out of retirement a few times. This was one of those times. At first, I really liked him. 

On my first day, I was given my thick collared tee shirt and told to buy the rest of my uniform. In order to qualify for employment, I was required to have a car and car insurance which was then all thanks to my family’s support. How else could someone afford these things on fifteen dollars an hour? The shifts started early so we could avoid the oncoming delta heat. After our six am clock in, my coworkers and I met with our boss to discuss what needed to be harvested. Thankfully, one of my coworkers was my friend who told me about the job. We were some of the only girls in the entire horticulture/harvest department. This fascinated the other male workers. Safe to say we stuck together. The man who we shadowed on the job was a burly, threatening looking man who could work faster than anyone. His name was Jake. When I talked to him though, Jake’s voice was actually soft and sweet. He was a true gentle giant. He had been with the department for the longest and it showed.

The next coworker I met was Dan. He stared at me strangely before we made our introductions. I had heard whispers of some workers that he was one of the many workers from the state’s prison diversion program. He had a thicker accent than I had ever heard and we are from the same state. He was a boy basically- maybe 20 or 21. On our first drive to a harvesting site, he told me that he had basically been in jail throughout his teenage life. He came from a holler in the eastern part of the state and got sent to the city on the account of the city’s prison diversion program that kept men like him out of jail cells in order to make their bodies workable to the city. There were 6-12 of men like him at all times at our workplace. These men cycled out- some running away or getting kicked out of the program. They were not paid, no, but were given year long contracts which dictated they were to work 6 days a week from 6-2 with only 2 holidays off in the year. No sick days. They were required to do the labor that no one else wanted to do. And they were looked at as second-class in a lot of ways. I was extremely upset with Dan’s working conditions to say the least. We stuck together when we worked and Dan and I got pretty close. Dan showed off a lot for me, helped me with my workload sometimes and defended off other guys’ attempts at flirting with me. My friend who had told me about the job quit soon after I started, so it was just me and Dan mostly.

On paper, our jobs were simple. We were to harvest orders that we had been assigned by the zoo keepers. The trees we harvested were sweet gum, willow, and pear trees- just to name a few. Usually standard orders were fifteen to twenty five pounds each. Along with our regular three bundles of fifteen pound bamboo. Each person was assigned six to eight orders each day to get from fields and farms we drove to. The animals that ate our vegetation were the red pandas, a picky capybara, gorillas, and giraffes. These animals, however, were secondary to our primary consumers- the giant pandas.

I guess my job was all thanks to a diplomatic deal in which twenty years earlier, China gifted our city’s zoo two panda bears. At the time of the deal, the zoo bought several acres of land outside of a land reserve and planted six types of bamboo. Twenty years later, the bamboo had grown too rampantly and much of our job was to work this land and harvest all that we could.

If you know anything about bamboo, you should know not to plant it. In fact, suburbanites who had originally planted them in their yards as decoration came to us after their yards were overgrown with green stalks. Bamboo can be almost impossible to get rid of because they root underground in a network. Unless you dig up the mother root, they will root all over. Some facts about bamboo (and I’m full of them)- the shoots can grow up to four feet a day during spring. However- if we got them too late and that was common- the pandas wouldn’t eat them. Extremely picky eaters these pandas were and this caused a lot of waste. A LOT. The first time I saw the majority of what we had stripped the land of the previous day end up in the dump made me extremely resentful.

Getting used to the job, my tolerance for heat and general discomfort had improved tremendously. My stomach hurt from standing so long but my legs grew stronger. On top of our required fifteen and twenty pound “bundles”, we had to fill three to seven barrels of bamboo shoots each day. These barrels at the end of the day each weighed around three hundred pounds. I tried my best to help my male coworkers move the full barrels off the box trucks we drove, but I contributed very little so I was only expected to dolly the barrels into the exhibit once they had been removed from the truck.

My second pang of environmental guilt hit when we started in on the willow trees. We basically would harvest the trees until they had no more new growth. Jake would saw off branches to make the quota while I tried to pick twigs that the trees maybe didn’t need. There were other species of trees that we harvested from but after completing a college ecology class, I knew the importance of willows to their ecosystems and felt horrible cutting them down to nothing day after day. 

Early on, I found out my pay was not to be fifteen dollars an hour but twelve. Complaints ran high from me to my coworkers but they attempted to pacify me by telling me that we were the highest paid hourly workers. That’s right. Twelve dollars was the highest wage bracket for an institution that employs hundreds of people. What’s worse, the employees below our pay grade were required to have at least a bachelor's degree and a rigorous science background. Those were the zoo keepers. They worked tirelessly and were in constant distress about the high expectations of their job in animal care. But of course, it is a genius plan to exploit compassionate people because if you love animals, you’ll probably go to any length to work with them. And if you get tired of making a poverty wage- well what are you going to do? Abandon the animals you take care of day after day- living in subpar and even detrimental living conditions? I was floored. But my resentments didn’t stop there.

Over time, I started to despise my boss. He kept a plastered smile on his face. His day always ended before ours- before it got too hot. He sat in an air-conditioned office and would say things like, “not too bad of a day, huh?” when we came in. Being the good employee that he was, Jake would always reply, “nope, not bad at all.” Resentfully, I would echo him. I didn’t want to be the one girl who couldn’t handle the work. Even though he could pull way more mass than me and was skilled at this craft, I didn't want to be the weak one that I knew myself to be. 

At the end of the day- I would speed home. As soon as I got into the door, I peeled the clothes off me right there in the doorway and ran to the shower. I was always disgusting. When tick season started, I would light fire to them outside the shower. They were always of course in the worst places. For the rest of the day, I would sit my ass down and watch adult swim, that is unless I needed to work on finals for my classes. 

At the job, manual labor was not the only form of labor required of me. Since there were few women workers, my gender performance needed to be smooth and seemingly effortless. I needed to be endearing and forgiving if I was to be liked at all. Though I loved Dan, he had been raised with a specific dynamic with women. He was taught to be chivalrous in a very classic way meaning that he saw me as weak and dependent. This of course benefited me in some ways because he would help me get my quotas filled but it was exhausting to play this role all the time. I didn’t have to do this but I was happy to have his friendship and trust so I played along. At the end of the day, I am a people pleaser. My boundaries have gotten a lot better since graduating but they were pretty porous back then.  

I was graduating soon and would be mostly cut off financially from my parents. At this time, my partner and I were in talks of moving to Brooklyn, NY so I needed money and fast. A previous coworker of mine in a reproductive justice internship had mentioned something about “sugaring”. Though I didn’t really know what that meant, I thought that sounded pretty good. I had already thought about going into dancing and that was in the same world as sugaring. So I created a Seeking Arrangements profile and was off to the races. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent circumventing time wasters on that site. That's a story for another time though. 

A few weeks into “sugaring”,  I met a man at a popular coffee shop in my town (not wise) and he told me I would be his sugar baby. He left me a 50 dollar bill at the table and told me to reserve a hotel room during the day and he would meet me there. This is what sugaring was I was told by him… Looking back on it now, that is not sugaring, that is prostitution. But, I did what he told me. I reserved a hotel room and dressed revealingly thinking the people working concierge would have no clue about what I planned to use the room for. Within an hour, he was out the door and I had made $285 which was a bigger paycheck than I made in a week of working my ass off in the fields. $285 is low by the way- don’t meet a man for under $300 for fs. It’s usually not worth it. I was relieved to come away from the hotel unscathed and I told my partner so. I quit the harvesting job soon after and shamefully wished Dan goodbye and good luck. I felt guilty that I was leaving him at this job that exploited him so deeply. I knew he loved me and I loved him too. But I couldn't take the job anymore now that I had a way of actually making real money. I couldn’t take watching his body get worn day after day. I couldn’t take seeing these majestic and intelligent animals progressively lose their minds in the enclosures. I couldn’t take ripping vegetation from keystone tree species that would just be thrown out at the end of the day. I had the choice to do something else and I did it. 

When that first client laid his cash on the hotel endtable, it felt right. Ever since that day,  I have never looked back. Sex work has transformed my life for the good and the bad. I can support myself in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I can pursue my artistic dreams- even ones that I have thought to be absolutely ridiculous. But what it has given me is time. I have time to be a person, a human. My life is not defined by a job like so many other peoples’. I have time to be a person- a human who experiences life in a fullness that most can’t. Of course sex work defines me in other ways but I am by no means spending at least forty hours a week at a place I can’t stand doing miserable busy work living from paycheck to paycheck. Through the good and bad, this is the life path I’ve chosen for now and I have immense gratitude for all that it has afforded me.