Harvest at 110 degrees

If you’ve ever heard about the cushy life of farmers who harvest their fields from the air-conditioned cabs of their combines, and truck drivers doing the same, well, it might be true for BIG farmers, but for average Joes like us, the American Small Farmer, it’s hardly true at all.

Yes cabs of our very old combines are air-conditioned. But … these cabs are designed like mini-glass greenhouses to begin with. If they weren’t air-conditioned, the combine driver would literally fry to death.

Frequently, it’s necessary to open the door a crack, because the outside air IS actually cooler. But then the dust blows in. (Before cabs, farmers used to get emphysema from all the dust.)

If the air-conditioning is working well, it can only keep the inside of the cabs about ten degrees cooler than the outside air. So yesterday, it was 90 degrees in those tiny little glass boxes.

But the truck drivers have it worse. Yesterday, we had a skeleton crew. Our older truck driver, Ken, is out for the rest of the season, due to the fact that he thinks he may be suffering from lyme disease. (He hunts bears in Michigan every fall, which is where he may’ve contracted it. We have no lyme-bearing tics in this area.) Our daughter with the three children also took the day off (and me! not babysitting her kids and puppy).

The truck-driving crew was down to Rosanna and our 21-year-old nephew, Jens. Fortunately, we were harvesting at the River Ranch, where we have home storage (grain bins) and it wasn’t necessary to truck the wheat more than a mile or so. Home storage means that fewer truck drivers are needed to keep up with the output of the combines. Assuming both combines are running. Very often, one or both of them is broke down.

Back to harvesting at 110 degrees: Rosanna drives the Kenworth, which is does not have air-conditioning at all. But the air-conditioning in the other trucks is faulty at best. 

Poor Rosanna, with the heat coming off the truck’s enormous, (Cummins) Diesel engine all day long, the inside of her cab was about 110 degrees. 

She complained about it, but not as much as you might think. She is a real trooper out in the harvest field, and an excellent semi-driver.

What do you do when you’re working in that kind of heat? 

• You drink, literally, a gallon of water throughout the day. 
• And you hop inside your dad’s “air-conditioned cab” whenever possible, to enjoy the mere 90-degree heat. 
• You also confiscate every lunchbox ice pack that you can find–your own, your dad’s, your brother’s–and press it against your overheated body until the ice in the ice packs melts. 
• Then you get out the towels you had soaked in water and press them against your skin. The towels are wet, but unfortunately, they’re not cool. 
• You look forward to when it’s time to unload your truck, so you can get out and stand by the auger at the grain bins and watch while the wheat unloads. (You also need to be proficient at getting your truck in exactly the right spot, running and manipulating a 60′ auger. Rosanna can do it!)

So that’s what harvesting at 110 degrees was like yesterday. Rosanna’s biggest beef was that a half-dozen photographers from Seattle (or somewhere) had discovered the River Ranch Road and were there, taking pictures of the incredible views. But also of the trucks as they passed by them on the dusty, single-lane, sometimes winding road. I guess they were taking pictures of the “wildlife” (combine/truck drivers) in their natural habitat. 

Oh, and Rosanna had never seen the GeoCache that someone had planted behind a tree ten years ago. She opened it up and studied its contents. Unfortunately, there was tree sap all over the openers, and so her hands got pretty sticky.

The dust, the heat, the sap … her energy was still quite sapped (pun intended) this morning as she headed off for work.

But we called in reinforcements … her sister will be out by 11:00 am, and I will be babysitting again …