Dayton Washington

The rolling Hills of the Palouse

 

Myron, his cousin Chuck, and I... the three of us drove down to the pea harvest in Myron's 1950 Ford. The radiator leaked so badly we had to stop every fifty miles or so to refill it. When we finally got there we had prearranged through our boss to rent a room in the basement of a couple of spinsters. There were five rooms down there that were rented out every summer during the harvest season. Each room had about three or four kids of various backgrounds... some were college students while others were kids like us... about eighteen of us... out on an adventure... we were all white.

We were idle... the harvest hadn't started yet... Dayton was a small town of maybe 500 to a thousand in population until the pea harvest. There wasn't much to do but drink beer and wait for Curly to call. Birdseye had a processing plant there and at harvest time the population boomed top a couple thousand. Most were Braceros... Mexican migrant workers employed in the processing plant while the rest worked in the fields driving reaper trucks and so on.

There weren't combines, as used for wheat, for reaping peas in '65'. The operation required a reaper rig to be towed that conveyed the peas, vines and all, to trucks chained to the sides of the rigs on when reaping parallel to the slope of the steep side to keep them from rolling down the grade.... this is what we called Palouse Country. Palouse Country was laid down like giant sand ripples forming the rolling hills of southeastern Washington after the Missoula Ice Dam broke at the end of the last Ice age. Peas and wheat are draped over rounded hills that resembled high seas more than terra firma to me. The Braceros braved the hazards of driving those trucks and rigs.

Once full, the trucks carried their loads to hoppers. The hoppers that swallowed the peas... vines and all on one end, shook the peas from the vines, separating them and shitting out the vines into piles on the other. A fork lift picked up the vines and loaded dropped them into spreader trucks. Spreader truck then took the vines to be spread in a carpet to dry into hay. We, white kids, drove the spreader truck. As mentioned before, Braceros were assigned to drive the more dangerous ones that hooked up to the reapers. I had no idea what or where they were from. I had worked summers in the cherry and pea harvest but, in those days, the harvest used winos from skid-row to do most of the job. I did know some "Indians"... brown skinned... not red....we called Native Americans Indians back then... these guys looked like Indians to me. I had no idea how right I was.

My friends, Myron and Chuck, were pretty good about being open-minded but we still had remnants of racism from where and how we were raised. We used the term "Greasers" for them and they used the term "Gringos" for us. The migrant workers, however, lived in barracks housing provided by Birdseye. Otherwise, we got along fine as we were spending 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in the fields with each other All of us white kids in our basement rooms were hired by Curly, an independent contractor and friend of the spinsters.

Waiting for the harvest to start got us around town... to the local drive-in... the teenage social venue there. I recall PT 109 played damned near all summer but every kid from Waitsburg to Dayton showed up regardless. Myron happened to have the good-looks of the young-bad-boy-Elvis so we met all the prominent town girls there. We obtained a few cases of beer via one of the college boys and threw a bash. At the party we had the \mayor's daughter, the daughter of the owner of the only hotel in town and another one whose folks owned the music store. Yep, these were the upper-crust girls in town.

Sometime in the late hours... just when some of us were getting near to closing-the-deal with the town girls, the police showed up. The whole force... two of 'em. It was a Mayberry town... two cops and a jail right off the lot of a movie set for a Western flick. Someone egged the squad car as it passed by... probably one of the college boys... not sure... could have been a local. We were rounded up and thrown into the local hoose-gow... us boys, that is... the girls were all sent home. The college boys posted bail but Myron, Chuck and I were locked up for the duration. The duration meant until the harvest began.

One incident I still smile at had to do with an Olympia beer label I carried in my wallet. In those days Olympia beer labels were stamped on the backs with a dot system of some sort. Peeling off the label one found these dots: one dot, two dots, three dots and four in a row... I don't know what they were for but it was common among most teens to put the phone numbers of girls on the backs of these labels as a rating system. Supposedly, if a girl's numbers was on a "One Dotter" it meant the barer only got to "first base" with her. Go figure the rest... if her number was on the back of a "Four Dotter" it was a "Home Run"... she went "all the way!"

It so happened I had all the town girls' numbers on the back of a "Four Dotter". It was only a symbolic boast because, of course, I hadn't hit a home run with any of them... yet. When the Sheriff questioned me about the label after going through my wallet, I smirked, "Oh, it is the only paper I had at the time."

"I do know something about these labels," he said. Shit, I hadn't figured on him knowing at all what they meant. These towns people were very puritanical and protective of their girls from those of us who came down from the big cities of Spokane and Seattle, with the intention of corrupting their fair young maidens.

We were locked up though and Curly told the Sheriff he could hold us until harvest began. That was the best way he knew of to keep us out of trouble.

It was a lark for us The jail was an old one with bars on the window in the bull pen that could be opened for ventilation. One of the girls even showed up and passed us cigarettes through it. We had access to our bunks in separate cells all day... there were about five cells. One was kept locked and was occupied by a guy who masturbated at almost every waking hour... breaking only for meals. I don't remember what he was in there for but, as he was usually jerking-off, it was uncomfortable talking with him and no one tried... some sort of sex crime I suspect.

After we recovered from our original hangovers, as the bull-pen resembled a zoo-cage, we goofed off and entertained ourselves at times by pretending we were monkeys; hanging off the bars, hooting, grunting and pounding our chests. I can say this for the times, a small town jail served us well as far as meals were concerned. We had oatmeal in the morning... baloney sandwiches at night and a hot meal for lunch. Lunch was great. We were chained together and paraded down the main street in town to the local restaurant where we sat down to a regular meal. It was, without comparison, the best jail I have ever had the honor to be locked up in! Then we were paraded back to the bulpen and repeated the routine until harvest finally began.