I made a beer run a few minutes ago and when I got home, my pscho neighbor Bruce was on his front porch with his wife Pam giving him a backrub.
"Hey Sugar, am I next? I did 12 hours today."
"Fuck you, Kenny. I done 14. Left when you did at 5 this morning, just came in. Me first."
"Yeah? Whatcha doing nowadays?"
"Trees."
"Shaking or sucking?"
"Shakin' after wake-up, suckin' after dinner."
"Both? That's some rough shit. How's the rigs?"
"New, AC, CD, PS, all that good shit."
"Need any help on the weekends before harvest ends, let me know."
"Will do, Bro. Goodnight. If you still want that backrub, I'll send her over in 10. No happy endings. Tip well."
"No happy endings? No thanks. I'll be lusting for days. And goodnight to you too, Bro."
Okay, let me interpet for all you motherfuckers that don't have an agriculture background.
Bruce is putting in 14 hour days, dawn to after dark.
The almond crop is fucking HUGE here and this time of the year, the crop is coming in all at once.
What Bruce is doing is driving a shaker in the morning, a vacuum in the afternoon. The shaker is a machine that looks like a giant beetle - low slung to the ground, with pincers extending out the front. The pincers grab the trunk of the tree and just shake the fuck out of the tree, making all the nuts drop to the ground.
You can always tell when an orchard is being shook by the huge amount of dust erupting from it. Not only do the nuts get shook off, but so does all the dust that's settled on the trees since the last rain, usually March, maybe April. Then all that fucking dust blows across the road I happen to traveling on, and we are talking ZERO visability for a couple of hundred yards.
After he shakes the trees in the morning, he goes to a vacuum truck that sucks all the fallen nuts off the ground and conveys them to a truck following behind. This also causes huge clouds of dust because he also sucking up a shitload of dry dust which is separated by the vacuum truck. Nuts into the truck, topsoil back into the orchard.
The equipment he drives is modern as fuck. Pushbutton controls, Air conditioning, CD player for his Merle Haggard, Power steering, all that good shit. I wouldn't doubt it even has a fucking cup holder for his beer.
(Okay, I need to point something out here. Bruce probably earns better than $100 an hour. Why? It's skilled labor. It last no longer than 4 weeks a year. So far, on Thursday, he's put in 96 motherfucking hours. No days off untill the harvest is over.
And it's extremely hazardous. We actually have a disease here called Valley Fever that is an affliction of the lungs caused by the dust and molds raised by shaking. It kills folks in the cities, you can almost imagine what it does to harvesters. Bruce is an old timer at his trade and he's only 53.)
He offered me his wife for a straight backrub, no blowjob at the end. I graciously refused because I don't fuck with married women, any woman that gets that close to me is gonna fuck me and last but not least, Bruce is pyscho.
Got it?
Is Bruce the guy with the daughter that took out a hornet's next on the back of your garage / shed once?
ReplyDeleteKen, you ought to get an editor or something and take your blogs and compile them into a book. It would probably be a best seller, 'cause your posts are entertaining as hell and ya just can't make this stuff up!
Have a great weekend (and CGD too)!
Tom
I know what you mean about the dust, I was up there two (three?) years ago visiting a friend that lives up at Le Grand. He happens to own a few acres of almond trees and was in the middle of harvest at the time. FWIW, he was also head guard (or whatever his title was) at some prison or another in the area. I don't suppose that you may have run into him at some point did you? He has since retired and make his $$ as a bass fisherman. He always was a lucky SOB.
ReplyDeleteYep, Bruce is Missy's daddy. She's a hottie, he's fucking nuts, and his wife Pam is a sweetie. Can't say nothing bad about them folks.
ReplyDelete