Man, I enjoyed those days.

I asked one of my friends, who was a farmer, if I could help him during harvest.

I had just quit my job as a schoolteacher, and having had farm experience growing up, wanted my boys to have a bit of it also.

It worked pretty well because as fall came on, the sprinkler work slowed, and I could pretty much dedicate as much time as harvest needed.  My wife picked the boys up from school and brought them out to the field, or, if the route driver had room in their van they brought my boys out.

I guess I must have helped them with harvest about ten years.

Back when I started, we still ran tandem axle trucks. 

Gutless as a gizard when loaded.  They were fun to drive though.  It was always a challenge to get the gears right against the hill we had to climb while traveling the 9 miles to the elevator. 

Thirty-seven miles per hour if you weren’t bucking the wind.  Thirty if you were.  Sometimes, after that hill, on a good run, you might see forty-two.  The only position for the foot feed was flat on the floor.  Coming back, downhill and with the south wind at your back, they screamed out at sixty.

Then one of the trucks got traded on a white Freightliner semi.  Now we were cooking with gas, although the poor guy who had to take his turn at the tandem suddenly had a rough day of it, underpowered, and no A/C.

Next year, a red Freightliner joined the line up, and then both of us truck drivers were equal. 

Sort of. 

The red truck had Jake brakes. 

The white didn’t. 

The red truck had deep bass sounding horns. 

The white had a femmy little honker. 

The red truck had cloth seats. 

The white had vinyl. 

The red truck had synchronized gears. 

The white didn’t as much. 

The red truck was underpowered and heated up easily. 

The white was overpowered and hardly heated. 

The red truck had power windows. 

The white had hand crank windows. 

The red truck had a power tarp. 

The white still had the old hand crank that sometimes made the person rolling it back tread air with it on a windy day.

The white quickly became my favorite.

Someday, maybe I’ll write about the adventures incurred at the elevator.  But today it’s about the feedlot we sometimes hauled to.

I liked that feedlot.  Almost better than the elevator.  I liked to watch the cowboys sorting out the calves and I liked that it was a one man show, which meant there often wasn’t more than two trucks there waiting to dump.  Three, was max.

I had long ago memories of this feedlot.  Back in the day when we hauled high moisture corn that we dumped over the side of the above ground silo to the floor below where a loader tractor scooped up huge scoopfuls and dumped it into the biggest grinder I had ever seen.  Everyone drove tandems back then.  Semis were still used only for serious over the road truckers. 

So, when it was your turn to dump.  You backed up an incline to the top and side of that silo.  The man there to help you dump was often one picked out of a dime a dozen who needed temporary work and who knew nothing of trucks nor of the extended time needed to get them stopped when loaded. 

It was more than once I thought I was going over backwards, down to the floor of that silo, some fourteen feet below.

But now, it was all semis, and we pulled straight off the scale to a small pit that measured approximately four feet across and two feet wide.  The pit wasn’t any deeper than two feet, and at the bottom, an eight-inch auger ran horizontally until it was about two feet out of the pit area, and then it angled up to dump into a transfer auger that could be switched to the various bins. 

You had two options when you were unloaded to get back to the scale.  Back up and crank your trailer to the right before driving forward in a large half circle to get back on the scale.  Or, if you were down for it, back up all the way from the pit to the scale and see how well you could center it.  If there was no other truck there, I usually tried backing it in. 

I hadn’t hauled more than two loads there when I pulled up to the pit and no one was around.  I waited for a few minutes before getting out and looking around for someone to start the auger.  I eyed the switches and thought about starting it myself, but I could envision the debacle if the second auger didn’t switch on and everything jammed up.

I didn’t find anyone on the main floor of the mill/flaker, so I climbed the ladder to the second floor.  While I was up there, I heard this urgent, high-pitched voice calling to me, “I’m over here, I’m over here.”

Here was to my left.  He soon joined me on the second floor and asked if I wanted to see the setup.  He said he had designed parts of it and poured the cement for all of it besides being the regular maintenance man for the whole feedlot. 

The first thing that struck me was his black plastic cowboy hat.  I had never seen an adult size plastic cowboy hat before.

The second thing that struck me, almost literally, was the longest string of linked together cuss words I had ever heard.  Most I recognized, but then he switched to Spanish, and I was spared momentarily.

The third and fourth thing that struck me was that his coloring, dark brown with jet black white hair, and his voice, urgent, higher pitched and commanding, both reminded me very much so of someone.  I just had to figure out who. 

Papa Don. 

The incongruity of it made me almost double over with laughter.

Because see, the Papa Don that I knew was a preacher, and quite a preacher at that.  He had also been a missionary, and once I asked him how many times he had been to Africa.  He didn’t want to say, but eventually he said quietly, twenty-seven.

And so here was this fast cussing, loud talking, very self-aware man that looked and sounded just like Papa Don.

Less the cuss words, of course.

The guys I worked for asked me, once I was on my way home, what I thought of the load out guy.

“Papa Don?” I asked.

And I guess from there on the name stuck.  And we always laughed when we thought about it.

Over at that feedlot, they didn’t probe your load for a moisture sample.  They gave you a red Folgers 1 gallon coffee can and when you were dumping your load, you were supposed to reach in under the truck and fill the can.

Papa Don’s job was to run the augers or check how full the bins were by using his home made ‘Y’ shaped sling shot wrapped with innertube rubber to shoot rocks at the bin while listening to the sound they made.  He said it saved him a heap of blankedy blank climbing in a day.   We truck drivers were responsible for catching a moisture sample and to dump our trucks, while standing just behind us, the invective poured out.

I was so entranced, I guess you might say, by how explicitly the everyday sentences were peppered with those peppery words that on one of my loads I almost forgot to get my moisture sample.

I hurriedly reached under the truck, as the last bit of corn was about to pour out to get it. 

And just as hurriedly my phone flew out of my shirt pocket and immediately disappeared into the pit under a pile of corn.

I was too stunned to do anything, but not Papa Don, with a screech and several words, he had that whole shebang shut down in a second. 

“Let’s get your @#%!! phone,” he shouted.  The bars on the pit were just wide enough for me to reach the top of the auger, not the bottom. 

Papa Don took control of the situation right away, telling me to reach my hand in there while he would kick the auger on and off.  His theory was that the bleeping thing was at the bottom of the auger, and it would be carried up to the top with the spiral of the auger.  If we were lucky, I’d catch it on its way past.

Fortunately, no OSHA man was on site.

I had about given up on it, when I felt the slick cool surface of my phone.  I almost didn’t get it as I felt it sinking back down.  All I got was a corner, and then I had the same problem as the monkey with his hand caught in the tin can because he was holding the shiny thing in his hand. 

But, finally, with enough twisting and turning, I got it out.

What rejoicing. 

Papa Don in his language, me in mine.