Woodworking again: In a pickle

By Dave Wood
Posted 3/16/23

I'm sad to report that we've run out of the home canned pickles we've been gnawing on since canning season. For a sandwich hound like me, that's bad news, because there's nothing like a kosher dill …

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Woodworking again: In a pickle

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I'm sad to report that we've run out of the home canned pickles we've been gnawing on since canning season. For a sandwich hound like me, that's bad news, because there's nothing like a kosher dill or a bevy of sliced sweet pickles to follow a bite of corned beef on rye. So, until the cukes pop out of their blossoms this summer, I'll have to be content to just think about pickles and the stories they can tell. 

These days, Jerry Apps, the great farm boy reminiscer who wrote all those books about growing up in Badgerland, no longer appears regularly in the country weeklies to which I subscribe. Fortunately, I still own a copy of his fictional story “In A Pickle,” in which Apps recounts the adventures of a county agent, based on his early career as such an agent and the manager of a pickle drop-off station.

I resonated to his tale of a holier-than-thou evangelical preacher who gets drowned in an old-time pickle vat while making love to one of his parishioners. Said story truly rung a bell with me because as a kid I grew up near such a pickle collecting station right around the corner from my grandma and grandpa’s house in Whitehall, Wis. No, no, not because I made any love in a pickle vat, but because my pals and I used to walk through the factory on our way to grade school all fall and actually used the vats for our pre- and post-school entertainment.

When we were kids, the pickle station was one of our town's smaller agricultural processors, just down the railroad tracks from the big Land O'Lakes milk drying plant and its neighboring barrel factory. This little business provided a market for cucumbers, but definitely left something to be desired when it came to the Pure Food and Drug Act. Upton Sinclair, who made a living writing about unsanitary food processors in these United States, would have busted a gut. An open-air structure of one-and-one-half stories, its 4-by-4 unpainted pillars supported a tar-paper roof which protected the huge open vats from too little rain, too much snow, and not much else. The west end of the building had a wall designed to keep the stored pickling salt dry. The salt room was bordered on the north by an unpainted outdoor three-holer privy at ground level. Even a food inspector in 18th century Afghanistan wouldn't have failed to censure that particular arrangement.

In late July and early August cuke raisers queued up on Dodge Street, waiting for the pickle agent to grade, weigh and pay for the prickly green spheroids which found their way to Whitehall only after long weeks of being planted, hoed, and, worst of all, picked. Once purchased, the cukes were dumped into huge 7-foot-deep wooden vats, then covered with brine salty enough to float a crowbar. When a vat was full, an ill-fitting plank cover was fixed across the salty brine, and the pickles then floated there for months until rail tankers arrived to transport them to a city which shall go unnamed for processing and packing. As weeks passed lazily by, 57 varieties of our feathered friends flew in, left calling cards, then flew out. Not to be outdone, we grade-schoolers, on our way to and from, never failed to walk through the unattended station, stopping to expectorate and micturate in the morning and then again in the afternoon, a transgression tantamount to cheating at cards at the University of Virginia in 1840.

And on Saturdays, if Chuck Pederson wouldn't let us use his football to play touch on the asphalt of Dodge Street, we'd gather at the station to dangle our skinny legs over the edge of a vat and cast around for diversions suitable to our sophisticated natures.

“Let's go downstairs to the outhouse and look at those dirty pictures on its walls.”

“Nah, we can’t figure out what's going on in those pictures anyways. Let’s have a hand grenade fight like in that war movie at the Pix last night.”

“OK!”

We chose up sides. Very painful.

“We get Susie. She can really throw a pickle.”

“You guys take Woodie.”

“No way. You take him. We had him last Saturday.”

Sides finally chosen, we lined up on the east and west sides of the building, taking positions behind vats of our choosing. Into the brine go our clammy paws—an act as painful as being a prisoner tied to one of Atilla's four horses especially if you had bitten your nails to the quick at school the day before.  Billy Steig hurled one at Mick Johnson. Direct hit. Brine in the eyes. Tears. Recriminations. Pickles flew thicker than confetti on V-E Day. After half an hour, we were soaked with brine, smarting with the sting of pickling salt or the bitter knowledge that a Bob Feller you are not. Then the noon siren wailed and we trudged home for Saturday lunch: Cherry Kool-Aid, Bologna sandwiches, and – pickles, canned at home, thank goodness, by my grandma.

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554

Dave Wood, woodworking again, column, pickles