Valentine
Since I was unemployed I decided to head west. With a few belongings in a backpack I had sewn myself out of a surplus duffle bag, I hitchhiked out of town headed ultimately for Oregon. I was soon picked up by an Okie in his sixties named Cal who was going to drive a grain truck in the wheat harvest. He had a job lined up already in western Nebraska, at a farm near Valentine, where he had worked before. He thought they might need another truck driver. I was hired basically on his say-so. Cal taught me to drive the kind of split-axle dump truck used to haul wheat from the combine that cut it in the field to the granary. He also told me some stories of his life, and though he was not a particularly thoughtful or articulate man, I was fascinated to hear some first-hand accounts of Depression Days and Dust Bowl Days and riding freight trains, hobo jungles and so forth. I was also rather amazed to see him still living this kind of life in his sixties. He said he now mostly stayed home in Oklahoma, living in a small house with his brother. They survived on odd jobs and social security and considered themselves semi-retired. But each year he still ventured to Nebraska and then Montana, to drive a truck or a combine in the wheat harvest.
As field hands, transient labor, seasonal migrant workers, or rubber tramps as Cal called it—meaning we traveled by car—we were housed in a small bunkhouse near the barn. We had breakfast and dinner in the main house with the farmer and his wife and two kids. We were given a sack lunch to take to work. It was all pretty casual and friendly. It took about two weeks to cut and haul all the wheat on that farm. When it was done, we headed for Montana.
Missouri Breaks
Cal and I arrived in Montana a week or two early for wheat harvest. We hung around in the park at Fort Benton on the Missouri River, along with other wheat tramps drifting into town. The park was where farmers would come looking for workers when they needed them, we just had to wait. We laid around reading for a couple of days. By the third day around noon I felt a serious need of motion and adventure. I decided to go for a swim. I got hold of a map that showed a gravel road crossing the river about 12 miles downstream. I gave Cal the map and asked him to pick me up there in a few hours. I put on a pair of cutoff shorts, T-shirt, and a pair of canvas sneakers, waded in and headed down the Missouri.
The river was about 100 feet wide and flowing around 3 miles an hour. The water was fairly warm. Big trees shaded the banks, birds sang, the sun sparkled on the water. Within moments I was out of sight of human civilization. I felt completely immersed in the river world. Once in a while a duck or other bird would become curious. Here came an unfamiliar creature, sometimes swimming, sometimes more or less crawling over the pebble bottom. The birds would land near to check me out. Occasionally I would surprise a fish or a frog. Sometimes the whole river was so shallow I had to stand up and walk, clearly not a usual event for the river creatures to behold. A strange figure rising suddenly out of the river and walking upright. But still, they seemed more curious than afraid.
After about an hour and a half in the Missouri, I spotted a dirt track through the trees on the north bank. I was getting a little chilled by then, so I decided to get out and walk for a while. The forest there extended quite some distance from the river. I was walking along this track, warming up in the scattered sunlight when I entered a small clearing and saw a doe and her fawn standing on the right-hand edge. They were about fifty feet away from me. They saw me too, and for a moment we all froze, looking at each other. Then the doe dashed across the clearing in front of me, her hooves pounding into the dirt. I could feel the vibration through my sneakers. I could hear her powerful breathing. When she reached the trees on the far side she stopped and turned her head to look back at me. I glanced at the fawn just in time to see it backing quietly into the bushes, disappearing from sight. Then the doe stepped into the trees and I was alone in the clearing.
I walked on. I swam some more and walked some more and met up with Cal. I went back to town and treated myself to a cheeseburger in the local cafe. All in all a fine day and a fine meal and life was good but still I felt an odd irritation. I felt changed by the river, and felt my return from it as a loss of something. I had felt at home there.
On the High-Line
The next day two brothers, wheat farmers from the Montana high-line about fifty miles north, showed up at the park looking for a hand. They wanted someone who could drive a grain truck, but who was also young and strong, to help them finish building an equipment barn. For them, wheat harvest was still a week or so away. I got the job, said goodbye to Cal, and rode off in the pick-up with them.
We arrived at the original family farmhouse, the home place, in time for lunch. I met the rest of the family. Grandma and Grandpa, in their sixties and both still working, but these days leaving the heavy work to the kids. Four brothers, three of them married, two with kids of their own. The youngest brother single, in college, back home on the farm for the summer. With a combination of good humored joshing and restrained respect, it soon became evident that he was the first in the family to enter the halls of higher education, and that he had been given and accepted a serious responsibility to bring this learning home to the family enterprise.
All the wives and children were there. We ate at a large dining table. Lunch was meat and potatoes and vegetables and salad and bread and milk and pie and coffee and as much of everything as you wanted and a suitable amount of time to eat it and let it settle and then you went back to work. The women cooked and served and did the dishes and looked after the kids. The men went to work on the new barn and in the evening and the next morning, we all did it again. No slackers in this family, just strong, good-natured, hard-working prairie settlers.
The three older sons and their wives had their own houses elsewhere. The total land farmed by this family was in the thousands of acres—some of it cattle pasture or alfalfa, but much of it wheat. They had obviously bought up two or three other farms because the fields were not continuous but separated by a few miles, a consolidation of small Montana farms that had begun during the depression of the 1930s.
The patriarch was like men of the land I have seen all over the West. Stooped slightly forward and listing to one side, walking with an uneven but purposeful gait. Callused hands and shoulders still padded with muscle. Thickened around the middle but still strong looking, you could easily imagine him tossing a bale of hay or picking up a young calf in his arms, you just couldn't quite picture him doing it all day.
It was plain to see that the eldest son was in charge of things now. Someone asked Grandpa a question and he clearly deferred, saying "You have to ask Sonny"—with a serious sort of tone that suggested this fact had not yet completely sunk in to everyone's mind, but he would just keep repeating it until it did. And I came to see that Sonny was well suited for this responsibility: knowledgeable, straightforward, comfortable with command but in no way arrogant about it. Like his younger college-going brother he accepted his position as a responsibility to and part of his deep connection with his family.
The family used me as a bit of a conduit and opportunity to tell stories on each other. Expressions of fondness and respect, it seemed to me, that were awkward to make too directly to one another. I was treated kind of like a distant cousin who they hadn't seen for a while, and who needed to be asked a few questions and ribbed a little bit and brought up to date on a few family facts and then given a good meal and put to work. The economics and time frame of harvest demanded more labor than they had available. To utilize that labor they had to share some of the wealth, but they also shared the human community generously, of course with the understanding that when harvest was over, that cousin would become distant once again. A distant cousin who interacted acceptably would be welcome again when similar conditions arose.We worked on the equipment barn for about a week, but when we started to cut wheat the routine changed. The dew had to dry off before we could go to work, so morning and breakfast were unhurried. Once we started though, we might work until midnight. The brothers drove the combines and, unless they broke down, they stopped for meals and for fuel and that was it. The grain trucks drove alongside the combines to unload them on the go, and then got out of their way. When the truck was full it headed for the granary. Two wives and the hired man (me) drove the trucks. Grandma and the other women and girls saw to it we all got fed. We ate four times a day, two or three times in the fields.
The Montana High-Line runs along Highway 2. It was named after the railroad line that was put through in the 1880s. Standing out in the fields, I could see the snowy peaks of the Rockies far to the west. To the north were the Sweet Grass Hills, with their three buttes poking into the big Montana sky. I was afloat in a sea of golden grain that extended as far as the eye could see. A dropped paper plate rolled and tumbled and bounded in the wind across the high prairie. The hawks soared overhead and the sun shone down and it did seem like it would all go on as long as the grass grows and the river flows and like being in that river, I was not apart from it. I was immersed in it and belonged to it and I could feel the waves of wheat moving through my body like my own breath and my own blood. It was unimaginably beautiful.
In air that clear and clean the stars don't twinkle so much as stare back at you, curiously, perhaps benignly, wondering what you're up to, as you might be wondering about them. Late one night I drove the last truckload of wheat back to the home place. Sonny was in the cab with me, along with his daughter, another brother, and two more people in back with the wheat. Going up a small hill I double-clutched smoothly down into low-low gear. Nobody said anything but I saw a tiny smile drift across Sonny's face and the chatter in the cab quieted for a couple of seconds. I felt a subtle change in the air, like a small sigh of relaxation. The hired man was working out all right, the wheat was good, no hail storm had appeared, no one got run over by a combine. Except for a shower and maybe another piece of pie, work was done for the day.
