Stock Auction in Gordon Nebraska

I'm in Gordon Nebraska at the moment, a small town of 1800 people in the state's North West. The main crew has traveled North into South Dakota with three combines. Ron, Turkey and I have been left here with two combines and will cut 300 acres of wheat as soon as it ripens - it's taking a long time to do so. We've had the last two days off and we'll have at least another two.

To fill time, we went to the local stock auction yesterday. It's held every Tuesday. Ron took this video. It's amazing to listen the auctioneer. The three buyers present would indicate their bids (in either 25 or 50 cent increments) with tiny finger movements which the auctioneer would pick up from his booth above the pen, about ten metres away.

Also of note is the little steel barrier underneath the auctioneer's booth. Ron called these the "Jesus Posts" because it's the only refuge for the stock handler if an animal charges.

In the case of this old bull, they weren't really necessary. Compared to some of the others that came through, he was incredibly docile. The handler had enough trouble getting it to leave the pen at the end of the auction.

Ron talked to the buyer after the auction. Sadly, for this old guy, it was the end of the road; he was off to the knackers, probably to be turned into dog food.

Harleys in the Black Hills

There’s nothing like a ride on Harley Davidson to raise one’s spirits. We arrived in Gordon Nebraska on Wednesday 16 July after a few days off in Colorado only to find that the wheat there was at least a few days off being ripe. On the Thursday Greg told to get lost until Sunday. First stop for me and a couple of the other guys was Rapid City Harley Davidson.

Rapid City is the centre of the Black Hills region of South Dakota, about three hours North of where we were camped in Gordon Nebraska. The region is most famous for the four president faces carved into Mount Rushmore, Deadwood (the Wild West town of HBO fame), and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally during which 800,000 people (mainly Harley bikers) descend on the small town of Sturgis for two weeks in August.

Lobbing into the sales showroom, I was an unashamed wanna-be. I bought two T-shirts and a cap. This said, I wasn’t as bad as Lars, who went and bought himself a pair of arseless leather chaps.

I like motorbikes, but I’m not actually a huge Harley fan – they’re a bike for my parents’ generation – however there’s something magical about riding one in the Heartland and, when we ventured out the following day on our ponies, it truly was a privilege.

The weather was perfect and the scenery was inspiring. Each corner brought something new: a different type of forest, a grassy valley, a tepee, fast flowing rapids, a dam, a heard of buffalo, cliff faces, it had the lot. We clocked about 500kms over the 24hr rental.

The bike I sold before I left home was a 250cc Yamaha Virago. The bike I rented was a 1250cc Harley Davidson Night Rod. It’s a cruiser/road-bike hybrid. The main pegs are set behind your hips like a sports bike but there’s a set of pegs up front that you can put the feet up on when cruising on the open road.

The bike was QUICK. To give an idea of the power, my old 250 would hit 5th gear at about 60kph, on the 1250, I was reaching the 120kph speed limit on the interstate shifting from 3rd to 4th. Admittedly, I was a little inexperienced for the bike, but you’ve got to learn somehow and what better place than in the land of opportunity!

By far the best $200 I’ve spent during the trip to date; a stand-alone highlight.

Lars

Lars has worked seven seasons for Thurman Harvesting. He drives trucks. Greg describes him as “the most truck driving son of a bitch you’ll ever meet”. To me, he looks very Swedish; he’s 6-6 tall, very slim, with chiselled features. He has a deep voice and talks really slowly with a thick accent.

He walks the same way that he talks. Greg has a gift when it comes to making people hustle; it’s easy to be worked into a frenzy when there’s a shortage of trucks out in the field, but not Lars. He’ll swagger around his truck, to and from the elevator office, kicking up dust as he walks.

It’s hard to read Lars. He wears a straight face most of the time and is a man of few words. His response to most questions, including open questions, is a short pause followed by a drawn out “Yeah”.

I really like Lars because, like me, he doesn’t fit the typical harvester mould. He’s the most experienced on the crew, but he doesn’t flaunt it. He gets the job done without losing his head.

When he’s not on harvest, Lars lives in the Swedish countryside in a house inherited from his grandmother. In his time he’s been a bus driver in the Swedish Army and has worked in various agricultural and forestry jobs. The US is where he does his truck driving.

The other night, a few of us went to a buffet in Denver for dinner. Every ten minutes or so the restaurant would be hushed so that the wait staff could sing happy birthday, in true fast food nation style, to some poor embarrassed patron. Lars being Lars, we thought he’d be the perfect candidate…I had my camera handy.

The Imperial Hotel, Rapid City, South Dakota

The last night of our little holiday in South Dakota’s Black Hills we rolled into Rapid City late in the enening. Rapid City is one of the biggest cities in South Dakota, with a population of 70,000. Being a Saturday, it was tricky finding a motel with vacancies. After doing a couple of laps downtown we came across the Imperial Hotel.

When we pulled into the car park there was a domestic argument in full swing; a large Mexican woman in her 50s was yelling in Spanish from her second-story window at a little Mexican guy in the carpark.

Ron and Martin went into the office to enquire about some rooms - they had a couple available. The guys got our keys and directions to the rooms. We followed them through a bar. There weren’t many in there, just a couple of guys at the bar shoving each other and another little Mexican guy singing Ground Patrol To Major Tom on the karaoke machine. We went through one locked door, up a flight of stairs and through another locked door that led into a communal kitchen area at one end of our floor. We walked past a bunch of 20-somethings sitting around a table drinking and smoking cigars. Above them on the wall was a sign “No Smoking in Hallways”.

We found our rooms opposite each other, half way down the corridor. Given my first impressions, I was pleasantly surprised by the room with the exception of the duress alarm in the toilet; it was quite spacious, pretty clean, plus tonight it was just me and Ron in the room (the previous two nights in Deadwood we slept four in a double - I ended up sleeping with a 6-6 Swedish man).

After a false start, the Imperial Hotel had just about proved my initial assumptions wrong until I was woken in the early hours of the morning by a middle-aged couple checking into our room. Turns out the guy at reception had mistakenly given them a set of our keys. I think they were more surprised than I was when a very groggy James greeted them at the door in boxer shorts with a “what the hell’s going on”.

Back to the Big Smoke

A few pieces of sad news from home has had me a bit down the last couple of weeks. I haven’t felt homesick, but it’s frustrating being so far from those that are doing it tough. One quickly realises the limitations of text and email.

In the midst of this I had an identity crisis when I visited Denver Colorado. We were given a few days off after we finished harvesting in Julesberg Colorado. On our last day we went to Denver to do some shopping. It was the first large city that I’ve been to since arriving.

In one respect I really appreciate the diversity that you find in the city. But diversity will often entail good and bad. I managed to find a good espresso, I bought some funky boxer shorts from Gap, and wireless internet was available in a Starbucks on every street corner, but I also a saw a pedestrian hit by a car, a guy handcuffed face down on the ground in the mall and had to deal with a snobby shop attendant who couldn’t stop staring at my now heavily scuffed work boots.

As I walked around, I’d pick out the people that I thought looked like me – those that appeared to be living a similar life to the one that I was living back home. However, looking at them made me realise just how different my life, my work and company has been over the last couple of months. It also made me realise that my surrounds have changed me a bit. How I’ve changed, I’m still trying to work out. My afternoon was spent wandering around in a reflective daze.

On the other side of the coin, there’s a part of me that enjoys the simplicity of the country. There’s something safe about it. There are parameters, perhaps defined by values and tradition, that cause people to think alike. It’s easy to be accepted if you reside within these parameters, but life is a bit trickier if you’re different.

Meeting up with the boys to travel home jolted me back into country-land – there wasn’t much choice. The boys spent most of the three hour trip home playing a game called ‘Hey Cow’. This involves winding down the window and screaming at grazing cows as you pass by trying to make them look up. As funny as this was, my excursion back into the big smoke left me feeling a bit rattled. I was quite happy keeping to myself in the back of the van.

My goal on this trip is to be myself whether it fits or not. I think I’m doing OK so far. There’s no denying that I am very different to a lot of the guys on the crew. But I think there exists a mutual respect. One thing’s for sure, I could handle myself in Denver’s peak hour traffic.

Combines Working in Scott City Kansas

I realise that I haven't really described the harvesting process. I took this video from the top of my trailer while I was being loaded in the field. It's rare to have all five combines lined up as they are in this instance. Usually they'll be split over a couple of fields or they'll be a little more spaced out.

Each combine has a 36ft header and will run at about four miles per hour in a decent crop. So, in metric terms, five combines will shave about 50 metres off each side of the field each time they go around.

If you look closely at the front combine, you'll see the grain piled up in a bin above the cab. These bins hold about 9 tonnes when full and, if the crop is good, can fill up after one lap of the field. Usually, the combines will unload while they are cutting onto a trailer pulled by a tractor called the grain cart. The grain cart then dumps onto the trucks (as in the vid) which transport the grain to the local elevator to be stored and eventually sold.

My truck will hold about 30 tonnes of grain. When all five combines are running in the same field, four trucks can be constantly moving. On a busy day we can haul over 1500 tonnes of grain to market, which is pretty cool.

The most important part of the operation is keeping the combines moving, simply because when they're moving we're making money (hence unloading on the move). On a normal day, they'll start running at 8am and will cut through until 12 or 1 in the morning. When the drivers are eating lunch, someone else will jump in and keep them running. It's amazing how durable the machines are.

rainbow over Haswell elevator

One of my favorite pics to date. Ron snapped this late one afternoon in Haswell Colorado. I've photoshopped it a bit.

Guns and Rattlesnakes

I had to put this pic up. I'm trying to look as menacing as possible.

When I last spoke about guns on the blog, about ten people signed off their emails with something along the lines of "stay away from guns". A sound piece of advice given all of the crazy stories that come out of the US. But they're an everyday accessory in the country. In many ways they're not a whole lot more dangerous than the machinery we're using. As with the combines, the level of risk depends on who is using the gun and how they're using it. I've been shown how to handle it safely.

In this case, we had it out in the field in case we saw rattlesnakes. We're in rattlesnake country apparently. No sightings...

trains in Kiowa

Andrew took this video from the back of the service truck while stopped at a level crossing in home-town Kiowa. He actually caught two trains meeting at the crossing which is pretty rare.

Our camper was parked a little bit down the tracks on the edge of the gravel road you can see in the foreground to the left. The video gives you an idea of how loud they are. Amazingly, I wasn't really bothered by them at night. Because we've been working hard, I'm generally out when my head hits the pillow. It was hell for some of the guys though.

Blake - Haswell Colorado

On Wednesday 2 July, four of us left the main crew in Scott City Kansas to pick up an extra contract in Haswell Colorado, in the state’s south-east. We’ve got about two thousand acres to cut which would usually take about a week, but the area we’re in has been in a drought for the last couple of years, making the wheat really thin and short. The combines can run at twice the speed so essentially we’re making some easy money on the side before we reunite with the rest of the crew in northern Colorado.

The trip up was about 120 miles. When we arrived in Haswell I discovered that one of my tires was flat. Haswell is similar to Isabel Kansas; pretty much the only businesses left are the post office, the farmers’ co-op and a tiny fuel station.

The workshop at the fuel station was unmanned when we arrived, but the mechanic’s wife, who was looking after the store, arranged for her husband to meet us. He told us to get a head start on the tire before he arrived. We opened up the garage and started getting some tools out when the mechanic’s seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, turned up in a little golf buggy.

Blake was wearing a Orange County Choppers bandana, an aviator jacket over a checked shirt, ripped blue jeans and cowboy boots. You could tell straight away that he was a confident little kid. He parked the cart, ripped off his jacket, threw it on the ground and got straight to work on my tire.

We couldn’t find the right sized socket for the nuts on my wheel, but Blake was desperate to get the air gun running no matter what size the socket. When he couldn’t find the socket, he got under my truck with a jack and before we knew it he had my tire off the ground.

The older guy in the video is Ron from New Zealand and the younger guy with the cap is Steve from south-west NSW. After we changed the tire, he took me for a ride around the lot on the golf buggy which I also videoed - I'll put it up shortly.

he is indeed...loving it

Elevator Shenanigans Pt II

Me and Janelle at Kirk Grain, an elevator in Scott City Kansas

Isabel Kansas

Isabel is a tiny town in south-central Kansas about 40 miles north of home-town Kiowa. We’ve moved here now that we’ve finished cutting around home. Isabel is my favourite stop to date.

The population would be less than 100. The town is littered with derelict buildings. The only places still occupied on Main Street are the post office, the general store, an auto-parts store and a little 10sqm shed with the words ‘CITY HALL’ stuck on the front door with plastic letters.

The thing I like about the place is that, contrary to it’s neglected exterior, it has a warm spirit, unjaded by a tough recent history.

Many of the locals are Mennonites, which may have something to do with the vibe. They’re a Protestant denomination, similar to the Baptists, but they’re pacifists, most notably rejecting church organisation. They look Amish in that the men have long bushy beards, wide brim hats, and wear slacks hung off suspenders, but clearly they’ve embraced some elements of modernity because a few of them cart grain in some pretty modern looking dump truck.

A guy called ‘Buddy’ refuelled my truck at the Farmer’s Co-op. He’s lived in Isabel all of his 60 years. Apparently the town nearly died when the local school was shut down in the early 70s. The only thing keeping it alive today is the grain elevator. It’s a huge week for them; yesterday they took about 3000 tonnes of wheat.

We’ve set up camp on a vacant lot near the elevator for the next few days while we cut around the area. This pic is of a house across the road. The building in the background is the elevator.

Elevator Shenanigans

A harvester’s biggest foe is monotony. Everyone in a crew drives around in circles; for the combine drivers it’s clockwise around a field, for the truck drivers it’s the same route from the field to the grain elevator and back 15-20 times a day. Every crew member has his own way of breaking up the day. We’ve all listened to the entire contents of our iPods a few times. I’ve recently resorted to listening to the ridiculously bigoted Fox News talk-back, pretty popular here in the mid-west.

When we were cutting around Isabel Kansas, Tim (another truck driver) and I came up with a new pastime. We both admitted to having a bit of a crush on one of the girls working at the elevator, so we set up a competition to see who could get to know her the quickest.

You only get about 15 seconds contact each time; ducking into the office with your field name on the way in and then picking up your docket on the way out. Added to the challenge was the fact that our girl was very shy.

I was the first to get her name. There was nothing smooth about it. She came out of the office with my docket and, in a cloud of dust and shouting over the roar of the engine, I met Lisa. There must have been a tone of urgency in my voice because she looked pretty startled, like I was getting her in trouble.

Tim made a breakthrough when she gave him a complimentary Kansas Wheat calculator. I thought he may have had the upper hand, but following him over the weighbridge, I was given one too.

It got to late in the day and I got a rush of blood to the head. I decided that Timmy and I needed a portrait with Lisa. It was a semi-inappropriate proposition but I put it down to a you’ll-only-be-here-once moment. I went over the weighbridge before Tim and caught her before she went back into the office and stuttered some stupid story about capturing elevator memories. She was up for it, so I parked and when Tim came over the weighbridge we held up the scales while we ‘captured the memory’.

The next day things were pretty quiet in the office. We found out later that her dad worked in the office. I think he gave her a talk about not associating with harvesters. Any more photos and I think Timmy and I may have been leaving town with shotgun-peppered trailers.

The competition continues; who can get the most candid shots with elevator staff.

pimped-up pic of my truck

Obviously the same storm as the wide shot below. This storm came through late in the afternoon and hung over us but never dropped any rain which we were bummed about because it would have meant some time off - we can't cut when the wheat is wet.

I realise I've got a lot of pics of my truck up, but it's the centre of my world at the moment, and I kind of like that. I spend up to 15 hours a day in it. We meet at about 7 in the morning and I give it a once over. Once we start cutting, I'll park in or beside the field and load up with grain whenever the combines get full. I then take it to the designated elevator which can be around the block or, in the case of Haswell, 20 miles away. When the five combines are running in the same place, our four trucks will quite easily be constantly moving, especially if the elevator is a bit of a drive away.

There are times, however, when the grain does not accumulate as quickly. At these times I'll park-up and hang out. I've got a sleeper at the back of the cab (bigger than the bed in our camper!) which I'll have a snooze in, lot's of food and plenty of reading material. I have to pinch myself sometimes when I ponder about my surrounds.

Truck Under Storm Scott City Kansas

Three of our combines working at sunset around Isabel Kansas

Bones

‘Bones’ is one of Greg’s full time employees. He doesn’t come on harvest with us but looks after parts of Greg’s business back in home-town Kiowa, mainly hauling fuel to local agricultural outfits.

He’s a great character. He smokes a lot (including in the fuel tanker) and will have a beer in hand and his esky nearby after five o’clock. He’d be in his early 40s, quite skinny, dark complexion, wears a moustache and has a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth. He has a contagious laugh with a smoker’s rattle. There’s a tattoo on his left shoulder that is meant to read ‘Bones’ but it looks more like ‘Barry’. Unfortunately for Bones, Barry is his best friend’s name.

When he’s not in the tanker, Bones drives an old brown pick-up. It’s a 1984 Chevy, has no rego, cracks throughout the windscreen, and a ripped up interior littered with his cigarette butts.

He drove me out to a field on my first day of work. When I got in the pick-up, naturally I reached for my seat belt. It took me a while to find it. I had to fish around right behind my seat. When I finally got hold of it, I started yanking at it but it wouldn’t extend. Bones piped up, “I don’t think that works”. He had a confused look on his face - not many people wear seat belts in the country. There was an awkward silence as I fumbled to tuck it back under the seat. “Yup, she’s as old as dirt”.

travelling south

After two weeks preparation, we left for Texas on Wednesday 28 May to start cutting wheat. We cut about 7000 acres down there over 15 days. I took this video by the side of the road on the way down. It's pretty funny, you'll just here the boss Greg yelling at me at the end of the video to get going. We'd been sitting roadside for an hour and he came back just as I was goofing-off.

Eight vehicles set off in convoy; 4 semi-trailers towing the combines and grain-trailers, two trailer homes (one for the boss and the other for seven crew members!), our service truck with tools, fuel etc, and a mini-van that the crew use for excursions around town.

The journey down was about 400 kilometres and took us a little over seven hours.

I was thrown one of the semi-trailers to drive. Driving a semi is a bit of a coup for me. It was one of my goals coming over here. I knew it was on the cards but I didn’t think that I’d attempt it so soon and on such a big truck.

In Australia I simply would not qualify for the license because I haven’t got enough hours on a truck. Also the whole process can cost thousands of dollars.

Over here, I drove myself to the motor registry in the truck, paid $35 for both the theory and practical test, failed one component of the practical, drove myself home in the truck, showed up again the next day, paid an extra $1.50 to redo the practical component, passed and came out with a license that allows me to drive anything up to a triple trailer combination.

Many would say that it’s foolhardy giving someone like me a license. But it exemplifies part of the American ethos that I love; if you want to do something, you’re given the opportunity. Greg lives this out through his business. If you’re willing to listen and work hard, he has the patience to teach. It doesn’t matter if you’re a city boy.