"Them and Us"

When I was twenty and a new father, I drove trucks and cut hay for Western Alfalfa in Berthoud, Colorado.  Western Alfalfa made feed pellets out of the hay cut, hauled away, and processed from local farms and ranches stretching from the foot of the Rockies to Kansas and Nebraska.  It was the best paying job I could find at the time and I started to work the day after my last final at Regis.  The job paid a buck sixty an hour, but time and a half for overtime, and since I had to put in eighty-four hours a week, that added up to more cash than I had ever made before.

I worked in two week rotations throughout the harvesting season.  Monday through Saturday I would work from 5:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.  On Sunday, I'd come in at 5:30, work until 11:30, go home, try to sleep a little, come back at 5:30 p. m. and work around the clock until 5:30 the next morning, thus changing from the day to the graveyard shift.

Mostly, I picked up hay in a dump truck and drove it back to the mill where it would be processed into little green feed pellets, put into sacks, and carted off to feed stores across the country.  If you forget about the hours, there was a lot about the job I liked.  I liked driving by myself on country roads with the windows open.  I liked, and continue to like, the smell of cut alfalfa.  I liked the challenge of getting my truck into a field that defied entrance.

There were special times when the mill in Kersey, for instance, broke down and we would have to help them with their alfalfa.  That meant thirty and forty minute drives to and from the fields and life was good and easy.  And, of course, there were always rain delays.  Sometimes I got stuck out in the field with Ronny, the main cutter, and we would sit in my cab, or in a nearby barn, or under a tree, smoke, and hope that it would rain long enough to call it quits.  The best rain times were when I was at the mill waiting for the feeder lift to empty its load and the showers would come.  Standing in the mill with the rest of the crew was more interesting and a lot more comfortable than out in the field with Ronny.

Every  once in a while, when the field wasn't difficult to cut, or when they were short handed, I would get a chance to get up in a tractor and cut the field.  It was just like mowing a lawn only with more things that could go wrong.  Mostly, it was fun and I could see how you could spend a life cutting fields and hauling hay.

I was the only college type there and the rest of the guys took a certain delight in that.  It was vindicating for them to point out simple--for them--things I couldn't do, thereby proving that all that money spent at Regis had gone to waste.  But it was alway good-natured and, let me assure you, I gave as good as I got.

We all became pretty good friends, a friendship nothing like the ones I had back at Regis, or even the ones I had in high school.  In high school, I'm ashamed to admit, I used to make jokes about Future Farmers of America.  I mean I was in a group at Loveland High School that made it a point to wear wing-tips to school.  I had three pair:  cordovan, black, orange--yes--orange.  The FFA types wore baseball caps before it was fashionable to wear baseball caps.  They  wore cowboy boots before it was fashionable to wear cowboy boots.  They wore too tight nylon jackets, snap button shirts, and the outlines of chewing tobacco tins in their back pockets.

It was amazing.  All those guys I looked down my adolescent nose at in high school had turned into the crew at Western Alfalfa.  Ronny the mill operator, as opposed to Ronny the cutter, was my favorite, probably because we ended up hanging out together during rain outs.  The inside of the mill, right up next to the machinery, was one place you didn't want to be if you didn't  have to and Ronny had to.  As the hay fed through the grinders and compressors and god knows what on its way to becoming a pellet, a green mist of alfalfa dust gave the whole place an eery glow, Ronny beside a gear or a door wielding a pipe wrench or hammer.  He would emerge from the mist to say hello or bum a cigarette, but the mist would stay with him. His hair--after two summers I never could determine whether he was a blonde or brunette, not even in local bars after work--was always coated with green dust and, always the most affable of men, when he smiled, even his green teeth couldn't keep you from being happy to see him.

Lou was the field boss.  He was in his thirties and drove from field to field in a yellow Ford pick-up with a tool box in the back.  Teddy was the other field boss.  He was older than Lou, not nearly as fat and a great story teller.  He was the keeper of the history at Western Alfalfa.  There was Tom, a veteran cutter, who always looked like he was about to keel over from the heat, or the damp, or the booze.  You name it, he suffered from it or because of it.

All those guys were married and had children, just like me.  They cared about their job.  I don't mean they cared about keeping their jobs, or worried about their "benefits".  They cared about the craft of their job.  They liked talking about what gears you could use to cut certain fields.  They liked talking about fields that were tricky to cut.  They knew a little of the history of the farms and the fields of the area.  I ended up feeling the same way, discussing with great interest every aspect of the alfalfa industry in northern Colorado.  I can still drive down I-25 past Loveland and toward Fort Collins and point out the fields we cut, what gears we had to use.  I can also tell you that the number 503 truck had no guts and the tranny was about to go, while 505 hauled ass and 519 was new, shiny, and comfortable.

Their wives came by the plant with kids wrapped up in their arms to talk about  dinner plans.  They all were happy and waved and seemed like they were looking forward to spending time with the family that night and to more days like the one they just had.

About once a week, we'd go over to The Wayside Inn and have a beer or two, rehash the day, and talk a little bit about our families.  They would ask me why I majored in something boring and stupid like English and I would just laugh and agree that it might have been a dumb move.  Mostly, we complained about work, about the weather, about the price of whatever, and then we all went home to get a little sleep until the next shift.

I like thinking about those days.  I would like to think that I could sit down at that same bar and have a beer with Ronny and Lou and we would all have a good time.

I know that on a lot of things those guys see a different world than I see.  It is more urgent, more concrete, maybe more practical.  But I bet we would all say the same things about our families.  I bet we all want the same things.  I just refuse to believe that when you get right down to it, Ronny and I are that polarized.  I wish we could stop thinking the way the media has trained us to think, in black and white, absolutes, "Them and Us."

Katherine and I always stop at Johnson's Corner for breakfast when we travel to Jenny Lake Lodge.  We've been doing this for many years and we can't help but notice that the line-up of old workers at the coffee bar is always the same.  They all have their ball caps on.  Most of them have tape measures in holsters on their belts.  They tell each other stories, laugh, agree, shake their heads.  Ronny might be one of those guys, although none of them has a green tint.  There might be one of those FFA types I used to ridicule.  From where Kathie and I sit in our booth, they all seem genuinely nice and friendly.  Of course, I have tinnitus, so I can't really hear what they're saying.

I don't like living in parallel universes with people like Ronny and Lou.  On the other hand, I like the universe I've chosen.  I hope they like theirs as well.