Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [79]
Amazingly, Ben agreed to my terms. I figured his local labor market must have been pretty bleak or he wouldn’t have agreed so readily. But his risk was low. They’d never worked fewer than fifty hours a week in previous years. How could he go wrong?
And soon enough, we harvested the last acre and wrapped it up in Montana. During the next few days, we disassembled machines and loaded them on trailers for transport up north. And when we left, I got my first and only experience as a trucker. I proudly drove Ben’s ten-wheel dump truck, pulling a thirty-foot combine head on a trailer. I reveled in the experience. Bearded and bandannaed, I gripped the steering wheel and shifted gears like a pro. When we reached the border, I handed over my paperwork, and they waved me through—a boring moment for a real trucker, an intense, once-in-a-lifetime moment for me.
I pulled into Ben’s huge farm complex and parked out by the shop. This was my first time in Alberta, three provinces west of Ontario, the place of my birth. Ben pointed me toward a small travel trailer set up behind the shop, where I unpacked my meager belongings and got mentally set for the long days ahead.
Then a strange thing happened. Great cloud banks rolled in from the west, and it began to rain. And rain. And rain. Day after day, then week after week. Such heavy, persistent rains were a rarity for the season, and as the days passed, the soggy wheat bent heavy on the stalk and then bowed to the ground. There was nothing to be done except wait. And wait. Restless, I puttered around the shop, swept, cleaned, and asked Donna for projects she wanted done. Eventually, I was stuck. There was no work. But I didn’t sweat it. Ben had guaranteed me fifty hours a week. So whether I actually worked or not, I knew I’d get paid.
It rained for a solid month. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that such a thing had happened. Ben stirred about uneasily, looking at the dark, spitting skies. But there was nothing he could do.
In an effort to pass the time, I commandeered Ben’s farm pickup and headed off to the town of Lethbridge, about twenty miles away. There, I hung out with the other harvesters, local guys who gladly welcomed me into their group. I loved spending time with them, absorbing the clamor of their Canadian dialect. They were good guys, all of them. One of them owned a house in town, where I ended up staying for days on end, partying, vegging, and just hanging out, waiting for the rain to stop.
After four weeks of incessant rain, the skies finally cleared. This time, it was not a temporary halt, as had happened a few times before. The sun came out and stayed out, drying the earth and the soggy wheat. After a few days, we geared up for work, silently, almost desperately.
And then we attacked—one vast field after another. The largest one was two miles square. We cut that field and many others. Day and night for four weeks we worked. And then it was done. We had finished the Alberta harvest.
It was time for me to leave that world and head back east. Back to Daviess and the people and places I had not seen for months. Ben and I settled up. He never winced, but paid me through all those weeks of rain, plus the actual hours of labor on the harvest.
It was a nice, fat check. At least to me it was. A good chunk of money. More than I had ever owned before. With the help of my new local friends, I went shopping for a vehicle. I wanted a pickup truck. A man’s wheels. We located one at a shady, small-time dealership. A Chevy, built in 1979. Blue, trimmed with a wide gray stripe on its sides, and dual exhausts. It was a classic truck with high mileage. But most important, it was priced within my budget—twenty-five hundred bucks. With what I had earned from Ben, I could buy the truck, get it licensed and insured, and still have enough left over to make it back east.
It was my first vehicle since the