Apple Country

This past weekend the Champlain crew took a train out to rural Quebec for some apple picking. Just a breath away - a twenty minute train ride - from the pillars of concrete and glass that construct this hectic urban landscape, there are orchards. There are trees fruiting.

In the above pictures I make my first appearance on this blog. I'm the bearded one with glasses on the far left of the circular wood-cut-out children faces. My hand also makes a cameo - the one with the hornet on it. And you can see from these pictures that we, as twenty and twenty-one year old college students readying ourselves for the "real world" of e-game design and public relations and broadcasting professions, are still absolutely enthralled by childish activities like petting farm animals and picking apples And this is a great thing. If everyone on this earth had their own farm animals to pet (or use for food) and orchards to harvest, then the world would have much fewer disputes and strife. Young and old alike can enjoy a day's worth of apple picking.

In about fifteen minutes, we had already picked as much as our apple bags could hold. At that point I was looking for the largest, reddest apples to pick and eat on the spot. After about five red giants, I was appled out. So there was a bit of time lingering before the bus left for the train station and I took a walk out to the unpopulated parts of the orchard next door. And out there in the middle of nowhere in Canada, you can pretend you're in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. It's the same landscape. The fields are yellow and withered and the trees are bright oranges and reds, as they should be this time of year. It's natural dying beauty - that flickering spark before a desolate winter. And Burlington came out of the same landscape as Montreal, more or less, a few degrees of difference. We both have apple picking and cider and pumpkin craze in autumn, but there's a border that separates us and thus a cultural split, and that seems to make all the difference.