The Harvest: Heat and Sips of ‘Indian Kool-Aid’

Stella Tucker welcomes the occasional outsider to her saguaro camp, a jumble of cots and cooking paraphernalia around a lean-to of tar paper and plywood.

She leads the way through a stand of saguaros, stepping carefully among withered brittlebrush and shin-threatening cholla cacti. It’s over 100 degrees at 6 a.m. and climbing toward the day’s high of 110.

For protection, she wears sneakers, a baseball cap, long cotton pants and a faded flannel shirt flapping open over her T-shirt.

She and her sister, Anna Gomez, take turns knocking down fruit with a stick made of dried saguaro ribs.

It is Anna’s first harvest since her 26-year-old daughter was born and she’s happy, chuckling when fruit falls on her head.

The sisters recall childhood harvests from horse-drawn carts, sometimes sharing a private joke in the softly clipped syllables of the Tohono O’odham language.

The fruits are about the size of eggs, though skinnier around the middle. The tough skin splits open to reveal a bright red pulpy core dotted with pinhead-sized black seeds.

Three hours of picking brings the sun uncomfortably high and fills a one-gallon pail with pulp.

Back at the camp, they thin the pulp with water and treat themselves to dippers full of pulpy but refreshing “Indian Kool-Aid” before putting the mixture in a pot over a wood fire.

It will be boiled, strained and boiled again in a long, hot day’s work to yield a few jars of jam and syrup.