Modern Migrants : Twenty years ago, 2 college grads went to work picking pears and apples. The fruit became a way of life and they soon learned why many descendants of the dust bowl stayed in the orchards.

In 1972, Toby Sonneman was a restless hippie living with a bunch of friends in a San Francisco warehouse. A recent graduate of the University of Illinois, Sonneman needed a job, but no “Establishment” occupation appealed. She didn’t want to sit behind a desk.

Then someone mentioned that fruit was ripening up north.

Soon Toby and her then-boyfriend, Rick Steigmeyer, were traversing the Washington Cascades in Rick’s old VW bug. They joined a migrant crew in the foothills, where they rose every day at 4 a.m., wrapped their fingers in adhesive tape and went to work picking pears and apples.

Most of the other hippie pickers they met tired of the physical labor after a season or two. But for Sonneman and Steigmeyer, the fruit run became a way of life. They were married in a pear orchard in 1975 (“between the Bartletts and D’anjous” Sonneman says), and for the next 12 years they supported themselves solely by following the harvests.

The couple’s experience has yielded a richly detailed account of the daily lives of one group of modern migrant fruit pickers.

“Fruit Fields in My Blood: Okie Migrants in the West,” published by University of Idaho Press and winner of a 1992 Western States Book Award, is Sonneman’s and Steigmeyer’s loving paean to a little-known subculture, the descendants of the “Okies” who fled the Great Plains states for the Western fruit fields during the drought, dust storms and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It had been a revelation to Sonneman and Steigmeyer to find that, despite the low status and physical and financial hardships of fruit picking, many children of the dust bowl refugees chose to continue their parents’ legacy in the orchards.

“I read ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in high school, and I remember thinking: ‘Oh, it’s too bad those people are all gone,’ says Sonneman, 42. “So, when we started working in the orchards, I was really surprised to meet people who were the children of the dust bowl migrants. They were still there, and in full force.

“And once we started talking to people, we realized how many of them really loved the work,” she adds. “I was struck by the fact that most of them had chosen this life.”

Sonneman and Steigmeyer also succumbed to the pleasures that make some people choose migrant work: watching the sun rise over an orchard from the top of a ladder, jumping into an icy irrigation canal after a hot day’s picking, swapping stories back in camp while a pot of apricot jam simmers over a Coleman stove.

In addition to enjoying the freedom and mobility of fruit tramping, the couple found a warm sense of community among the migrants. In every camp, Sonneman and Steigmeyer ran into families who welcomed them and their first child, Zak, who was born during the fruit run in 1979.

The Okies are firmly connected to their large, extended families and to other fruit-picker families, says Sonneman, who grew up in a middle-class Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side. Newborn babies spend their days in bassinets in the shade of the trees while their parents pick fruit nearby.

“There were a lot of characteristics about the people that I really admired,” says Sonneman, who wrote the text for “Fruit Fields in My Blood.” (Steigmeyer took the photographs.)

“They have a strong work ethic and a great sense of perspective. They are incredibly hospitable. And they never take themselves so seriously that they can’t laugh at themselves or their situation--even though it’s a situation most people couldn’t tolerate.”

Her last comment refers to the difficult conditions migrant workers continue to endure.

In “The Grapes of Wrath,” a California migrant explains the evolution of the word Okie : “Well, Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. . . . Now it means you’re scum.”

Pickers are still reviled. Sonneman and Steigmeyer were refused motel rooms and denied the use of public restrooms because of their occupation.

Fruit pickers also must contend with poor sanitation, exploitation and poverty. During a typical year, Sonneman and Steigmeyer made about $6,000 to $7,000 on the fruit run.

They’d start the season in May, picking cherries in Lodi or Stockton, Calif., then follow the ripening cherries north to southern Washington in June. By August they’d be picking pears, winding up the season in mid-September bagging apples in Wenatchee and nearby Cashmere, Wash., where they now live.

Sonneman and Steigmeyer, both college graduates, found that many of their new neighbors had grown up on the fruit run and had never graduated from high school. The couple’s mentor and best friend in camp was Walter Williams, who had been picking fruit since he was a child.

During the dust bowl years, Williams’ father built a camper from flattened tin cans and moved his family from Texas to California to pick cotton, peas and fruit.

As the young couple’s fascination and respect for Williams and the other fruit pickers grew, Steigmeyer began carrying a camera into the fields, and Sonneman started transcribing conversations with workers.

Eventually, the amassed pictures and notes led to the idea of the book. That concept took on more urgency each year, as the pair began to see the ranks of Okie fruit pickers dwindle.

Jobs disappeared as developers gobbled up orchards, turning them into housing subdivisions with names like “Cherry Tree Acres.” Growers hired increasing numbers of pickers from Mexico and Central America.

More and more of the fruit pickers Sonneman and Steigmeyer knew began to “settle out,” leaving the fruit run and taking jobs in towns and cities. Because of the increasing difficulty of getting work picking, Steigmeyer and Sonneman also began to feel pressured to hang up their buckets.

In the mid-’80s, the couple rented a house in the Cascade foothills and learned to cope with rent payments and utility bills for the first time in their married lives.

“At first it was really hard for me to stay put,” Sonneman says. “The migrant mentality--and we really had it--is if something goes wrong, you just leave.”

Steigmeyer, 45, got a job with the Wenatchee World, where he covers agriculture. They had a daughter, Aviva, now 6. Recently, the family completed the settling out process by buying a 1909 farmhouse in a Cashmere pear orchard. Their old trailer now serves as Sonneman’s writing studio; she is working on a novel about Okie migrants who settle in the cities.

“It’s really difficult to settle out, because work experience in the fields is not of value to most employers,” she says. “Even for us with our college degrees, it hasn’t been easy. We lost a lot of the advantage we had when we started picking fruit.”

The couple has successfully made the transition out of migrant life. But, as the book’s title suggests, the fruit fields do get into a person’s blood.

For a few weeks each summer, Toby Sonneman still straps on her old “picker’s pal” (a metal cherry bucket) and tramps into the orchards near her home to work side by side with the Okies who still follow the fruit.