The Wheat Harvest

When I was 18, I was anxious to try things I had never done before and get out on my own away from home. The opportunity to join a wheat harvest crew provided an experience away from home out on my own without my parents. I jumped on it and here’s the story.

The Wheat Harvest

 

When I was 18, I picked up the wheat harvest in Guymon, Oklahoma and got a job driving a wheat truck for a crew working there. As I recall, my cousin Scott was already there working and he had just quit, so he rode home with my Dad. They had two school buses. One was equipped with bunks for the crew and one the boss lived in. He had an older lady that cooked all our meals who had a room in the back of the bosses bus. There was a table for eight where we ate in the bus. As I recall, we had four 16 foot header John Deere combines and six trucks in the two different crews that were there working together. We cut wheat in the Guymon area about two weeks before moving on. We were hauling the wheat to a grain elevator in town. On the first load I hauled, I got into town with the load of wheat and came to a stop sign. I tried to stop, but didn’t allow enough braking time with a full load aboard. I went flying through the stop sign but fortunately no one was coming so I learned the easy way to allow plenty of stopping time with a load on. I was a double clutching fool and I loved driving the trucks. At first they gave me the old dog truck to drive until someone left, then I got one of the newer trucks.

 

The guy I was working for was named Al and he was a real grouch. Well let’s face it he was just an asshole. When we emptied the trucks we lifted the bed with the hydraulic lift and then propped it up by sticking a 4 x 4 between the bed and the frame until all the wheat was out. One time I forgot to take the board out and had taken on part of a load and noticed the board was still in place. So I lifted the bed up removed the board and started to let the bed down easy. With the load on the truck, the bed slammed down fast and hard against frame and I saw Al heading my way in his pick up truck. He cussed me out for ten minutes and told me I was lucky I didn’t bend the frame of the truck. The next time I forgot to take the board out, I just left it in there and the weight of the load pulverized it and I just found a new board.

 

We moved on to the Campo, Colorado, area and cut there for two weeks and then to just south of Denver. We were unloading to silos on the property there. They rigged a small wooden box around an eight inch diameter auger that lifted the wheat into the silos. A guy stood in back of the truck and guided the driver back with motions until the truck was correctly positioned. I was backing up on one trip and the guy in back kept telling me to come back farther. He finally backed me into the auger housing and the truck dented it. Here came Al cussing and raising hell with me while I was trying to explain what happened. He cussed me for about 20 minutes and stomped off.

 

Finally we moved to near Fort Morgan, Colorado, north and east of Denver. It stormed one day so we went into Fort Morgan and did some beer drinking. On the way back, I barfed out the back of the pickup moving at 70 miles per hour. One of the combine drivers brought a bottle home with him and I guess he drank on it all night. We cut wheat the next morning. We had instructions not to unload the combines on the go so we stopped the trucks and unloaded in place. The drunk combine operator had other ideas that day so I pulled up and stopped like I always did, but he just kept on rolling and dumped 5 or 6 bushels of wheat on my truck cab and on the ground. He stopped and I moved up and he finished loading me cussing and yelling at me the whole time. When I pulled away, I saw him on the ground trying to cover up the wheat he had dumped on the ground. I just laughed and went on.

 

Al’s crew was going farther North but I had had enough so I caught a ride to Guymon, Oklahoma, with the other crew who were going home and passing through there. Al gave me a check for $135 for two months work and I didn’t have a penny besides that check. I got off at the bus station in Guymon and borrowed a dime to call my Dad to come and get me. He showed up in about an hour and the wheat harvest was over for me.

 

This was my first time away from home, and I guess I faired fairly well. It was an experience I won’t ever forget even if I did get chewed on and cussed a lot.

Ready to take on the world starting with the wheat harvest.

Combine cutting wheat in a wheat field near Guymon, Oklahoma.

Combine loading wheat onto a truck for delivery to the grain elevator.

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Thanks for reading The Wheat Harvest,
Hawg Jaw Bill