Word: callings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pots and clean up the ones that have exploded. The darkness is over now and so is all the mysterious excitement of the smudgepot fire-dance. The smudgers are tired and dirty, and maybe beginning to think that they won't be around when the next Call comes. But the doubt is as momentary as the cold: when the victorious smudgers make their 9 a.m. appearance at school, strutting through the halls in their combat clothes and bragging to everyone that they're going home to bed, they know they've found one good way to teen-age heroism...
...country or at any other time of the year, people would see smudging as the grotesque menial work it really is. But in the winter, California teen-agers who shun lawn-mowing will lie on top of their beds, dressed in innumerable mittens and sweaters, waiting for The Call...
...Call usually comes at about midnight, when the orange growers and their Mexican foremen finally stop hoping and realize they have to light the pots. The growers, of course, hate to call out the smudge crew; one good night of burning pots can cost many thousands of dollars for oil and labor. But when it comes down to a choice of letting the whole grove turn into sawdust-sacks or calling out the crews, the growers send out The Call...
...cozy suburban homes, The Call relieves a lot of anxieties. Many highschoolers have gone to bed or left for parties without doing any school-work, taking the calculated gamble that they will not have to show up in school the next day. Sometimes the smudging call doesn't come through, and frantic students have to dig by spontaneous excuses to get out of tests. But as soon as The Call comes, academic worries are behind and it's time to head for the groves...
SMUDGERS have thirty minutes from the time The Call comes until the time they have to show up at the smudging barn, and most of those minutes are taken up trying to find enough clothes to protect bodies against the unleashed natural fury of a smudging night. Experienced smudgers know that the unspeakable 26-degree cold will instantaneously disintegrate ears, fingers, heads, or any other parts of the body left uncovered, and so they dress with a ferocious passion, trying to save their lives. When they are finally bundled into two pairs of pants, five or six sweaters...