The first thing Curly did once I got there was to show me how to use the grease gun… grease every nipple under the truck before each shift… check the fluids… radiator and brake fluid.
"You ever use a five gear-shift?" he asked.
"Ya, sure."
"Do you know how to double-clutch?"
"Ya, sure."
"Okay, take a left when you get to the highway and about a half-mile you'll see the break in the fence. Follow the tracks till you get to the hoppers. Chuck will show you the rest from there."
"Ya, sure."
That was all my training so far. I climbed up behind the wheel and got it going in first gear… got it away and over a hill and outa sight from Curly. Okay, I had to shift into second gear now. I pushed in the clutch peddle twice but the grinding of the gears didn't allow me to put it in second gear. "Damn, why didn't I tell him the fuckin' truth…?"
I tried shifting out of first again and again before I got to the highway. Shit, I drove all the way to the hoppers in first gear. Myron slowed and waited for me to catch up then drove his rig... tore up the impossibly steep grade. The dusty ruts wound their way up that steep hill… I mean steep hill. First gear was good for that. Damned hill was straight up! Then, once at the top, the ruts skirted the un-harvested field on a precipice so steep I feared I would be tumbling down it if I made the slightest miscalculation. When we finally got to the hoppers Myron asked, "You fuck, where were you? You must've been crawling… what's the matter?"
"Damned thing… I couldn't get it in second gear!"
Myron laughed at my embarrassment, "Get in my truck… I gotta show you how we run these spreaders anyhow." I was as excited much as I was embarrassed. This was a real job… a real truck… I watched carefully and listened as Myron showed me how to rev the engine in sync with the transmission. When we got to a part of the field that was level… "Here is where we do what we do. Pull this lever to engage the spreader… keep an eye on the tachometer… 1,500 rpm… you'll get used to it and will be able to tell by the sound of it after you make a few runs."
"How do I know when it is done? I can't see anything back there."
"You go by the feel of it too. The engine will race when the load is empty."
"Gotcha…"
"Just lay the rows down without overlapping. Keep it straight. After you do it a whole shift or two you can do it in your sleep."
We worked twelve hour shifts… in the daytime the thermometer rose to 104 degrees… nighttime was in the thirties… fearfully close to freezing 'til midsummer. We worked either from eight am to eight pm or eight pm to eight am. There was no clock to punch but if you were late for your shift you royally pissed off whoever you were relieving. We were all buddies but… Hell, I always showed up on time. And the dust… man… the dust in the fields… the soil on the tracks… it was driven over and pulverized into a fine power that got into every crevasse of one's body. How did it get into the crack of my ass? It did and other places too. After each shift I went straight to the shower… cleaned the dust out of my hair but wasn't done 'till my fingernails were clean... used the hair on my head as a fingernail brush. I wore a hat, but, for all of us regardless, our hair would be so full of dust that it couldn't be figured for whether we had blond, brown, red or black hair. We all had the same color of skin too. Brown, black or white… we were all the color of the dust…
The color of the dust and our fellow laborers was washed off after each shift in our own places and the division between us and the Hispanics was silently reasserted. In the fields we took breaks together and the only difference was us white boys ate sandwiches while the Braceros ate burritos they heated on the manifolds of their trucks… we couldn't see each other's skin color. But back in town it was another story, they stayed down by the processing plant and, I didn't see any at the drive-in either. It was an unspoken apartheid of sorts.
I loved the night shift out there on the high seas of the Palouse. Deer crossing the beams of my headlights… the sound of the engine purring as I laid down another row of hay… taking a break and laying in the pile of vines at midnight where the fermentation of only a few hours put out enough heat to warm us… talking about our dreams and futures while gazing up into the crystal clarity of the night sky… stars so near and bright that they touched the hills far away from the loom of the light glowing on the horizon from Waitsburg and Dayton. Sweet silence and solitude in spite of the noise from the machines of harvest… it transcended.
After sunrise and a full night that turned the harsh glare the sun on sore eyes the trucks were parked for the next shift near any road a car or pickup truck could be driven to. They were then greased and taken up what was usually a perilous trek through steep grades following deep rut winding round and to wherever the hoppers were planted. Those hoppers had to be towed up the same tracks too… amazing when I think back on it. No one was killed in the process.
We used Myron's car and one of us always had the opposite shift so we were usually able to get to work in one car. If not, Curly would pick us up and deliver us if we were in different fields. Once one field was done everything had to be hauled out and over to another. Occasionally a truck would break the chains holding it to a reaper and roll down into a gully… the driver… thrown out in a heap of broken bones to the side, would be rushed to a hospital and another would take his place. There were no seat belts… there was nothing but the price of paying attention or the shear luck of making it through that amounted to the best safety gear we had. The tedium of repetition… driving to the hoppers… waiting… laying in one of the heaps of fermenting hay… the fork-lift loaded the truck… driving to the spreading field… shifting int first… pulling the spreader lever… rolling along at fifteen hundred rpm… rhmmmm… maybe ten minutes?... disengaging… tearing back down and up over the deep, powder-dust, ruts to the hoppers.
I have worked hard since then on just about every kind of shit job… but driving those spreader trucks at breakneck speeds up and down and to the sides... sailing through the fields was work… hard, dirty, grimy, dusty work… It was also the unspoken commitment to each other. Once I had a fever… I'd caught a bug… There was no calling in sick. Damn, I had the day shift too. My fever had to be over a hundred and three and so was the temperature out in the fields. I was so weak I could hardly pull myself into the cab. Curly pulled up as I was starting… Ah-ha, I thought, I could ask him for the day off.
Curly just grinned, "Buck it up kid… the harvest doesn't wait until we feel like working." And he drove away.
Ahhh... My first real job!
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