Harvesting Persimmons

A typical Korean countryside autumn scene is that of bright orange persimmons (감) hanging alone from the branches of a persimmon tree (감나무), the leaves of which have already fallen. Fall is also the time to pick the persimmons and eat them, leave them to ripen, or string them together vertically and leave them hanging to dry. Unlike with an apple tree, however, it's not a good idea to climb a 감나무 to try to pick the persimmons - its branches are too brittle. In fact, an old Korean saying or joke upon seeing a child who has broken his arm is to ask if he was climbing a persimmon tree. So how do you get to the persimmons that are so way up high?

I suppose you could just move around a very tall ladder and pick them by hand. But because the branches are so brittle, you can extend your reach and break a branch off for yourself with a simple tool like this:

To break the branch, you just catch it in the nook and twist.
Now, recently my mom came to visit from Oregon and took me to her friends' country home, which is where I took these pictures. One of the first things I did when I got there was to learn how to pick persimmons from their tree since they had so many to harvest. But rather than climbing a ladder with a sack and using the branch-breaking stick, I learned to use a much niftier device that works on the same principle. It looks like this:

So you can see that this is a stick with a sling-shot shape that has a very ratty looking bag hanging from it. This stick is tied to a very long piece of bamboo, which has the advantage of being relatively light and very sturdy. To use this - and this is the fun part - you lift up the stick and enclose a persimmon in the bag from the bottom. Then you push the stick forward and up until the twig that is holding the persimmon is right in the nook of the V shape, the persimmon right under it. There has to be tension between the bamboo stick and the tree for this to work. When you twist the bamboo (and sometimes you have to twist a couple times), the twig breaks and the persimmon plops right into the bag. Like so:

This may seem like a strange post, but for some reason, this was one of my most satisfying and even relaxing experiences in Korea. It's very simple and easy, but it takes some degree of attention and a little skill to guide the stick up past the lower branches and to get it situated right in relation to the persimmons you're trying to get in order for the twisting to work. I liked the simple ingenuity of the tool - which is just a branch, a piece of bamboo, and some cloth and string - and the actual sensed experience of picking fruit this way: the snap of the twig and the increase of weight in your hands as the persimmon(s) fall into the bag fifteen feet up in the air from you, the balancing act of lowering it to the ground while moving your hands under each other to bring the other end of the stick closer so you don't have to walk as far to pick the fruit out of the damp bag, the sounds of the branches and persimmons that sometimes fall unintentionally, the holding of each success in your hand, watching the pile of fruit grow. It could make for another good persimmon-related poem for someone more poetically ambitious than I. It also probably helped my experience that I wasn't really obligated to do any of this work, only as much as I wanted, and that on the day I did most of the picking (unlike when I took these photos, the next day) the weather was great and the persimmons were brighter against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.