The Chronicles of a Farmhand
Harvest Season
This is the third episode in The Chronicles of a Farmhand short story series. Each story is a stand alone Auto Fiction based on my experiences working as a farmhand.
Like most mornings I’m up before dawn. It’s nearing what should be the end of harvest season, but we’ve still got over 1200 acres of peanuts to pick. It rained the day before yesterday — not heavy or long, but enough to cost us a day. It’s cold and the wind is up this morning — so it’s dry, and I can already see when I pull up to the field that Gung Ho Joe is raring to go. No sooner than I am able to look over my combine, Jake’s walking over.
“Let’s try it,” he says as he hangs up his cell. “Daddy’s crew has been picking since 8:30.” Guess where Jake gets his Gung Ho from?
So myself and the other hands, one other full time guy and one seasonal, reluctantly turn to mount our steeds for the day. It’s all hands on deck during harvest season, so even the cowhands are on the picking crew. I’ll be in my John Deer 280-8R, Antonio is in his 295, and Don will be driving a smaller Kubota.
Don is a seasonal hand, and he’ll be running the dump cart for us. Me and Tony usually have to dump our baskets on the wagons ourselves — the dump cart usually goes with the Amadas pickers, but we’re all together today. Cane, the other full time hand is already in the field we’ll be picking today — or attempting to pick over there across the pond. He’s getting his self propelled Amadas combine ready to go.
Now don’t get me wrong, these tractors are the pinnacle of farm equipment, but you sit in one for 10 hours a day with no break and even the Taj Mahal will feel like a dungeon. I crank my Deere and start a book on the Bluetooth, but see that there’s going to be a tricky exit to this field. So I opt instead for a little Stevie Ray Vaughn. I like music when I need focus.
Ready to begin the adventure that will be today, I put my foot on the clutch and slide the gear knob to forward. But as I release the clutch, instead of moving I get an obnoxiously loud sound. A high pitch beep is screaming at me and the monitor’s saying, “OPERATOR NOT IN SEAT!” 😒 Now of course I am in the seat — it's a bad sensor, just not bad enough to fix. So I reposition myself and try again — yay we’re moving.
Now, to get to the next location without catastrophe is my sole focus. As I mentioned before, the exit of this field looks pretty tricky, if not treacherous AF.
