ЕГЭ по английскому языку (аудирование №9: детальное понимание текста)

Summer work

When I grew up in the American South, summers were brutal, reaching 42–46 ºC. We found summer jobs at the cotton compress, the pickle plant, unloading railroad boxcars, painting houses, mowing lawns — anything to occupy ourselves and make a little money.

When I was fifteen, the employment office in town listed a job in a canning factory in Wisconsin, paying 85 cents an hour. That was more than we were making at home and Wisconsin was cooler than where we lived, so I and two of my school friends embarked on the great adventure.

To get to the canning factory, we rode 1400 km in an old school bus filled with hard-scrabble country farmers, who found they could make more money as itinerant workers in the North than farming their small bean patches in the South. Once there, we slept in a barn on canvas cots, and were assigned jobs in the factory or in the fields. The crop was peas; and when the peas were ripe they had to be harvested immediately or they’d rot. So we worked 16–18 hours a day for five weeks to bring in the harvest.

Field work was a delight in the cool Wisconsin summers. The pea vines were cut at the ground and loaded onto trucks with pitchforks. They were hauled several miles to a vinery that stripped the vines and husks from the peas, which were then sent to the cannery. The vines were stacked and let to rot for fertilizer; and every vinery smelled like a sewer that could be smelled miles away. In the cannery, the peas were sorted into sizes, sent down a conveyor belt where we picked out any dirt or weeds that remained, funneled into cans, cooked, and packed into cartons for shipping. Seeing the dirt that survived the process, we stopped eating peas for years after.

When the season was over, we hitchhiked home, rather than endure the ride on the school bus. We told friends about the work and beautiful weather, the money we’d made and the fun we’d had. So the next summer over twenty school mates hitchhiked north in teams of two, racing to get there first, catching rides on freight trains when cars weren’t stopping for us on the road. We learned to follow the harvest, working in the canneries farthest south where the peas came in first, then moving to those farther north to catch the next harvest.

The following summer, probably forty school mates made the pea harvest. Some took other paths and went to the cherry harvest in Michigan or the corn harvest in Illinois. Hitchhiking isn’t always safe and there were many of us on the road, but as far as I know only one team was robbed and left on the highway in their underwear. Other than lost dignity and bruised feelings they were not harmed. Through some process at our school, the pea-pickers became a breed apart from any group, to say nothing of the stay-at-homers. They were welcomed home by the girls at the end of the summer; and the tales they told — some of them true — inspired awe and admiration. They became a band of brothers, who, even when they meet years later, find themselves talking about little else.