Musteri Madness, and Apples Aplenty

Long before my current WWOOFing site, Rosenhill, had volunteers, before they had Saturday night parties every weekend, before they had a cafe even, there was the Musteri.  The Musteri seems to be the be-all and end-all of the Rosenhill entity.  It is the sacred shrine, the Holy of Holies, the bustling commecial center of the empire.  It doesn't neccessarily bring in the most money out of all the Rosenhill enterprises, but it demands the most attention, recieves the most love, and uses the most WWOOFer manpower.

"Must" is the Swedish word for "pressed juice," and the Musteri is a great machine that turns, apples, pears, berries, and more into juice through a grinder and press that looks like a machine The Once-ler would use to make Thneeds in Dr. Suess's "The Lorax."  Originally, when Lars and Emilia, the owners of this place, first bought the farm from Emilia's parents, it was just a farm, an orchard, and a giant, loud, clunky apple press.  People would come from miles around to pick apples, or more often bring their own, since it seems that every house outside of Stockholm has a few apple trees.  They would bring the apples to be pressed, but eventually the lines grew too long, so Lars and Emilia opened a cafe for people to wait, drink, eat, and spend money while waiting for their turn at the Musteri.  Over time, the cafe has become an entity of its own, and as we who work hours and hours in the dishroom and kitchen can attest, there is plenty of draw there as well.  But from the time the Musteri opens in early September to when the last of the apples have turned too rotten at the end of October, there are lines hours long and the crunching and roaring sounds of the apple grinder can be heard steadily for 7 hours a day.

It is also, on a busy day, as chaotic a workplace as you can imagine.  The process of pressing apples in a perfect world would go like this: 1) Customer's apples are dropped into a bathtub to be washed and cleaned of big leaves, snails, rotten apples, and the like; 2) Customer's apples are dropped, one basket at a time, into the apple grinder, where the apples are chewed, scraped, crushed, and bludgeoned into pulp; 3) Said pulp is sprayed through a funnel into a large cheesecloth, where another worker folds, straightens, and piles the stacks of cloth on top of each other; 4) The tray holding the pile under the grinder is spun around to the other side of the machine, where a hydraulic is turned on and the tray is squeezed, pressing out all the juice into a bucket, while a second tray is loaded with the next customer's apples on the other side of the machine; 5) The juice is pumped from the bucket to the bottles, the bottles are sealed, the reciept is written, money is collected, and a happy and hopefully thirsty customer is sent on their way.

Now since this is not a perfect world and the Musteri is mainly operated by minimally trained volunteers, plus Lars and Bo, our Musteri-guru in residence, here are the kinds of issues we usually have to deal with: 1) Sometimes, the customer has about three pounds of apples, enough to make maybe 5 liters of juice, which frankly, is just a big waste of time for us on a busy day.  Other times, the customer has an obscene amount of apples, like the 285 liter load we spent 40 minutes on the other day, while other customers watched and waited, politely feigning patience.  Even with an average amount, say 25-75 liters, there are some customers who come in bragging about how they have the most beautiful apples all from one tree, which they picked last week, and now we open these garbage bags full of apples and have to spend 5 minutes picking out all the ones that have turned black and moldy since their were first bagged a week ago.

2)  Apples come in all different sizes and consistencies, so some of them clog up the grinder, some of them blast soft juicy pulp in every direction, like Steve Buscemi being stuffed into a woodchipper in "Fargo," and sometimes, the spinning blades decide they can't chop up the apples and instead, launch them like cannonballs into the air often nearly shattering windows or nailing bystanders in the noggin.  3) Proper folding is perhaps one of the most important things to get right in the musting process.  If you fold the cloths poorly, they will pop open while the apples are being pressed, and streams of thick apple pulp will erupt out like Old Faithful.  This is also one of my favorite mistakes people make, because lets face it, it's hilarious to see your friends get a juicy, brown spurt of applesauce right into their unsuspecting faces.

4) As often seems to happen to me, the job that is one of the easiest to screw up is also the one that Bo has chosen as the best one for me - filling the bottles.  We use a powerful pump, so when you turn it on, you better have the end of the hose in the bottle you want to fill, or once again, apple-stuff everywhere.  If you turn it off too early, the bottle isn't full enough and the customers feel ripped off.  Too late, and, you guessed it, juice everywhere.  Or, if the bottle is too small, like less than a liter, or if the opening won't allow the hose inside, you need to time and aim your pumping perfectly, or, thaẗ́'s right again folks, apple juice everywhere.

But all these hazards and potential mishaps are part of the fun of working in the Musteri.  We have fun rushing around working the machine, singing and dancing to Balkan opera, James Brown, or whatever other random music has been chosen to blast at full volume so that it can be heard over the roaring machinery.  There's a sense of pride that comes with coming off a 2-hour Musteri work shift with juice dripping down your arms, and chunks of apple pulp all over your face and hair, and wherever your clothes weren't covered in the orange plastic overalls we wear.  And the customers get one hell of a show out of the whole spectacle.   This past Saturday night, a huge party was thrown here, organized by a collective of artists who wanted to showcase their installations.  At around 11 pm, a bunch of us WWOOFers got bored of the party, so we all got some beers, went into the orchards to pick apples, turned on a disco light and trance music in the Musteri, and had ourselves a midnight musting party.  Afterwards, we suggested to Lars, with semi-seriousness, that we close the Musteri during the day, and from now on, only work mildly intoxicated and at night.  Lars told us, with semi-seriousness, that he would consider it.

Blueberry Fields Forever

This blog entry is dedicated in memory of Amy Winehouse, who I recently decided I don't like anymore.  Ever since Amy died, our cook at Rosenhill's Cafe, Johann, realized just how much he loved her music, and with the same voracity with which he smokes cigarettes and cooks hamburgers, he went full-tilt, turning our own kitchen mp3-speaker system into an all-Amy, all-the-time jukebox.  From morning until night, Amy would wail and croon in her nasal alto with the strains of earnest piano and horn sections comforting her betrayed heart, over and over again.  She went "back to black" at least 9 times a day, and jokes were flying left and right about Johann's need for some Rehab of his own get off his Wine-house addiction.  But still she played on, day after day, week after week.  Every Saturday night, we would throw a party with live music for locals to come on down and have a good time, and Johann would whip out his guitar and together we would all stumble through the words to all the Amy songs we knew from all of our hours spent cooking and washing dishes in Johann's kitchen.

But it was one of the bravest things I've ever said to anyone when I told Johann one day, "I'm sorry, but I've hit a wall.  I can no longer stand listening to her.  I hate her voice, her songs are all the same, and frankly, she bores me to tears.  Please make it stop!...no offense..."  While initially a bit taken aback, Johann did come to understand my exasperation, and then Amy became a more of a big joke between the two of us.  But while it's been toned down of late, Amy has continued as an occasional kitchen and party mainstay, and I needed to get revenge on her, or her ghost, for tormenting me so, being one of the sole sources of drudgery for me in the otherwise delirious bliss of Rosenhill.

Vengence came in the form of a pig.  There are three pigs who we raise here, who eat our leftovers during the summer, and are in turn slaughtered and saved for food for the Sillen family in the winter when they close Rosenhill until the air is warm again.  A few weeks ago, the pigs decided that they no longer cared for their pen, and braving the 6000 volts of electric fence and 4-high chicken wire, began a daily routine of escaping their pen and running into the garden, the street, or the woods.  It was decided that the ringleader, the largest of the pigs, the one with the black spot on his eye, would have to be sacrificed for his bad influence, and also to make sausages for the massive annual Harvest Festival that is thrown every year.  The pig was killed, and posthumously named Amy, in honor of the other dead and beloved Amy, whose heavy mascara-job looked a bit like our Amy's black spots.  Since I was the only WWOOFer here with butchering experience, I volunteered to help carve up the carcass.  It certainly was quite a bit more grisly than anything I've ever had in mind for Miss Winehouse, but I'll take my closure where I can get it.  As it turned out later, I was also on the sausage-making comittee, despite my innate Jewish aversion to taking any enjoyment from pork (and Winehouse being Jewish herself), and with my blind blend of spices, herbs, and raw pork meat, I stumbled upon what were universally heralded to be 20 kilograms of fantastic delicious sausages, to the delight of Rosenhill's workers and hundreds of Festival Patrons alike.  So as it turns out, I have something to thank Winehouse for afterall - if, as is often the case with art, hatred begets beauty. . . or something like that.

Other than brief hiccups in music taste, things are basically splendid around here.  The farming season is on its way out, other than some harvesting and tomato plant pruning.  Even the cafe has been getting lazy during the week while students and professionals have finished their summers and go off to do things that are probably more important but a lot less fun than being here.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly what makes Rosenhill so nice.  It's partly the people, who basically don't come out to this countryside cafe unless they are already the kind of nice, friendly people who would enjoy a rural madhouse like this.

There's also the work in the Musteri, Swedish for Juice Press, where everyone in the greater Ekerö and Western Stockholm with an apple tree (and it feels like it is everyone with the lines we get) comes out to have their apples washed, crushed, wrapped into cloths, and squeezed into fresh juice for them to take home.  On weekdays there might be between 5 and 50 people thoughout the day coming by, and on weekends, the line does not end from 10 am to 6 pm.  Sometimes, working in the pressery is a chaotic, stressful, rushed affair with people running around shouting orders, trying not to let juice spill all over the floor and look desperately for more bottles to fill the juice into.  But when we are working well, it becomes an elegant ballroom dance, people switching partners, twirling around the pressing machine, everyone knowing the pattern of what to do and when.  At the end of a long shift, we all come out with chunks of apple pulp in our hair and splattered across our faces, our shirts smelling like cider vinigar, and breathless from hours of non-stop hectic movement.

We are allowed two days off per week, but most of us only bother to take one.  Last week on my day off, I went with my camera for a walk in the woods.  The woods around here are literally carpeted in blueberry bushes, and if you go just a bit off the trails, you will find endless berries that, even this late in the season, nobody has picked yet.  I just walked through the patches of berries, picking off handfulls at a time and eating them, and making barely a dent in their population.  It was one of those moments that hits me every so often when I'm in places like this, or back when I was in Mali, when at the same time I was both delighted that I was blessed enough to be able to be alive in the moment that I was living in, but profoundly depressed that I only had a short amount of time left here before I someday had to go back to what is commonly referred to as "the real world," where instead of frolicking in the woods, staying up late every night talking or watching movies with friends, and exploring the world at my own whim and fancy, I'll have to find somewhere to settle down and actually work towards a career.  I wish, as all little boys like me wish, that I could have those blueberry fields forever where nothing is real and there's nothing to get hung about, but since I'm not actually a little boy, or a Beatle, but a 25 year old man, I'm going to have to face the facts, go home, and find work.  These are difficult prospects to face while I'm still in rural Sweden having as much fun as I could hope for, and so I don't face them.  Instead I just sit here, write my blog, chat with German women, listen to Soundgarden, and think about a good way to end my blog entry before I go back to my caravan and practice playing my Jaw Harp.  In fact, I don't really need a good way to end this entry, so I'm just going to end it now.