SUMMER VACATION WITH MOM

     It was the summer between my seventh and eighth grades and I had just turned thirteen. My brother, Bill, two years older, and I, were slated to spend the majority of this vacation time with Mom. She lived in Bend, Oregon, on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountain range, with her new husband, Bob. We lived in Lake Oswego, Oregon, on the western side of the Cascades, roughly a four-hour drive between the two.
       The idea of spending nearly two months with Mom had its good and bad sides. It was good because I still loved her, even though she had left us six years earlier, and because there was the unspoken hope that she might someday return. The bad side of visiting Mom and Bob was that Bob was a part of it, and it was their home. I was always suspicious of Bob and held the little kid instinct that he couldn’t be trusted. I didn’t like him and the feeling was mutual.  Which was why he was always picking on me. Case in point: one night the four of us were playing cards and Bob was obviously cheating, slipping cards from the bottom of the deck.  When I called him on it he laughed in my face. Furious, I threw my cards down on the table, stood up, and declared, “I’m not going to play with a cheater. I’m going to play with myself!” and charged out of the room.  Bob laugh even louder, yelling, “Yeah, you go do that!” (I didn’t understand the tactical opening I had left him with.) But there was another time he was so nasty to me with a crude joke that my mother exploded in a fury at him, letting loose a torrent of protective maternal invective at the top of her lungs that was so loud she froze the whole house in fear. It was in the immediate aftermath of the silence that followed, that I knew I had a mother who still loved me.
         We got out to their house located just outside of town on several acres of land, which included a private airstrip, a runway to accommodate Bob’s Cessna 180, a four-seater single-prop airplane.
       It was going to be the longest extended vacation ever with  Mom. However, a couple of days later, Mom pulled us aside and a new plan was laid out for the two of us, a new plan for the summer, full of fun and adventure, a character-building adventure. Now, as soon as you hear the words, “character building”, you know you’re not going to like it.
        Bob and Mom had arranged for Bill and me to spend the summer on a wheat ranch, working.  Bob had a friend, a Mr. Hudspeth, who owned one of the largest wheat ranches in Eastern Oregon, something like 50,000 acres, and he was more than happy for the extra hired hands. It wasn’t as if Bill and I had any say in the matter; it was decided for us – a fait accompli.
        So, a few short days after arriving in Bend, we climbed into Bob’s Cessna and took flight into the blue morning sky heading east. I don’t really remember any specific conversation during the flight, just some vague talking sounds coming from the front seat, Mom trying to paint a rosy picture of the adventure to come, barely audible above the loud and constant growl of the airplane’s engine. We flew above a terrain that was expansive and vast and essentially deserted. Looking out the window, I remember seeing miles and miles of endless rolling hills covered with billowing windblown wheat fields. This is what we finally landed on, a converted stretch of field that had been cut down to make a rudimentary landing strip.  Bob taxied to a stop next to an old pick-up truck and we were met by Mr. Hudspeth, a crusty old codger. Greetings ensued and everybody had their smiles on, except for Bill and me. Then we watched Mom and Bob climb back into the plane and take off into the still blue morning sky and disappear into the direction from which we had just come.
       Mr. Hudspeth drove us in the pick-up down to the main farmhouse, which operated as the headquarters of this working wheat ranch. It was where all the meals were served and it had several rooms upstairs where most of the hired hands slept. There were a large living room and a long porch outside with wooden chairs. The dining room opened off the living room and accommodated a sizable table, where everyone sat together at mealtime. Mr. Hudspeth introduced us to a few people, including the main boss, and more or less just handed us over to strangers, with instructions to get us bunked, get us fed, and get us to work. Separate from this main farmhouse was a smaller but nicer farmhouse where the head guy, the main boss, lived with his wife and 14-year old daughter. These two women did all the cooking—-three large meals a day for upwards of a dozen people—-and kept the main floor clean. I remember the daughter being pretty.
       Now, there’s one thing about the main boss that was new to me and to which a few people would refer to from time to time behind his back, and that was that the boss had tits. Big tits, as big as a full-grown woman’s and he had to wear a bra. Most of the time he would cover them up with his blue work shirt, but every now and then he’d walk around the house with just his white tank top on and it’d be hard not to look at them.
       After introductions, Bill and I were led out the back door to a shack about 30 yards away. It was situated under the shade of a big old tree and it didn’t look like it had seen a brush of paint in a long time. There were no interior walls, just the frame structure of a square shack, boarded up on the outside with weathered planks. When the wind blew outside, it was drafty inside. There was no plumbing, just some creaky beds and some wooden boards for shelves and one exterior door that never seemed to close right.
       The next day, it was an early rise, breakfast at 6 am. Then we were loaded into the trucks that took us up to the fields. Being the smallest person there, I always rode in the back of one of the pick-ups and it was cold most mornings, especially before the sun came up. And then, of course, by mid-day it got really hot, the kind of hot that makes almost everything stick to your skin, like wheat dust and wheat chafe, the latter of which, when it got down into your jeans, required immediate attention.
       So, we worked the wheat fields of Mr. Hudspeth’s wheat ranch, with a crew of about ten to twelve men, mostly misfits, parolees, probationers, some down and out adult delinquents, and a few serious dimwits. I remember this one guy, you couldn’t say the word “mother” around him or he’d explode into a paroxysm of profanity and run insanely out of the room. I learned that the hard way. At dinner one night, I spoke the word ‘mother’ in some lame adolescent joke and this man dropped his fork and sprang up from his chair, screaming, “don’t you talk about my mother. Don’t you ever talk about my mother!” and he cussed his way out of the room. From upstairs you could hear him slugging the walls for a while.
        It turns out I was too small to lift the bales of hay up onto the flatbed truck. Each bale weighed 80 to 90 pounds and try as I might, I couldn’t get them up there. So, being as I couldn’t do the full work of a man, they said I was only worth half of what they paid the men who could. The minimum wage at the time was $1.35 an hour, half of that was .67 cents, which is what they paid me.
        They finally settled on me walking ahead of the flatbed truck and pulling the bales into straight lines so the men who could buck the bales onto the truck wouldn’t have to veer very far to pick them up. At one point, they did try to teach me how to operate and drive the big truck, which was a prospect beyond my wildest dreams. Imagine me, driving a thirteen gear truck, sitting up there on high in the cab, while my brother had to slog along bucking the bales all day behind me. It was a possibility that couldn’t be topped. But they gave up on the idea pretty fast after I messed up with the clutch one too many times. I just couldn’t get the hang (quickly enough) of working the clutch and the accelerator at the same time, which made the truck  lurch forward or slam to a halt going backward, causing the stacked hay bales on the flatbed to tumble down.
         We were warned to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes, the kind that likes to sun themselves in the field and become almost invisible in the color of the grass. You had to be careful not to step on them, which I nearly did a couple of times, the rattle of the snake’s tail so loud and frightening I swear I leaped 20 feet high and 20 feet backward, landing in a sprint, screaming, “Snake!” There were also badgers, which we saw, but only at a distance; flat, low to the ground, aggressive looking. We chased one once to his burrow in the field, but he wouldn’t come out and let us get a better look, even after I found a stick and poked it into the hole several times. We found out later that badgers belong to the wolverine family and could have, in the blink of an eye, torn our faces off. We saw a cougar once, stalking the ridgeline, looking lonely and hungry, but he never got any closer. And there were the porcupines that would come and visit us in the middle of the night, as we slept in our rustic little shack. The thing with porcupines, we learned, was that they liked to clean and sharpen their quills on old boards, which made the exterior walls of our little shack the perfect tool for their needs. That first night, the scraping noise that the sharpening and cleaning created scared the bejesus out of the two of us, having no idea what the sound was.
        There was also a fistfight, if you could call it that. A couple of weeks into our sojourn, a 16-year old juvenile delinquent from reform school was sentenced to work the ranch, and they bunked him in with Bill and me. After exchanging greeting preliminaries, we all agreed that a pillow fight was in order, and we began to whack each other in friendly fashion. But then, I got in a better than expected whack in the new guy’s face and his look of shock was so funny that Bill and I couldn’t help but laugh. This made him furious and set off a barrage of profanities and fist punches directed at my brother, who was ill-equipped to avoid them. After landing a few choice hits, this scary young man slammed outside, nearly wrenching the door off its already rusty hinges. He was never seen by us again.             

         Later that day, I heard my brother crying from inside the barn. He was hiding behind a large stack of hay bales. Approaching quietly, I shuffled my feet in the gravel to let him know I was there. He stopped crying, but his eyes were red with tears. I sat down nearby, but we didn’t talk. Bill and I weren’t really friends. We were two angry boys, who took that anger out on each other, fighting constantly, with me usually getting the short end of the stick. But now, we only had each other, and an unspoken truce seemed to have been agreed upon. After waiting a bit, I climbed to the top of the haystack and sat on the highest bale. Looking down, I saw that Bill had started throwing rocks at the back wall of the barn, denting the wooden planks. I stood up and stretched out my arms, pretending to do a swan dive, but Bill just ignored me. Jumping down, yelling, “Geronimo!” on the way, I landed on a bale right next to him. But even that death-defying feat didn’t shake loose the hurt he was feeling. After one last hard pitch, and one last dent in the wall, Bill said, “I hate this place,” and walked out of the barn into the bright daylight. Sitting on the bale of hay and plucking at the twine string that held it together, I hummed an old cowboy song for a while. Then I caught a couple of barn mice and put them in a box. I watched them run around for a bit, looking for a way out until finally, they stopped. Then I tipped the box over and left the barn. The dinner bell was ringing.