Revisiting the Lessons of Youth 30 Years Later

It is twilight. I am standing outside a locked wire fence that surrounds the feedlot where I worked three summers as a teenager. A new owner, I’m told, is attempting to revive the operation yet again, but for now the place seems a ghostly wreck.

Pens that once held as many as 50,000 head of cattle are all but empty. The grain elevators and storage tanks sleep under blankets of rust. Squirrels dart about everywhere on frantic sundown missions.

Of course, twilight always was a strange, melancholy time at the Noble’s Land and Cattle Co. feedlot. At dusk the hiss and thrum of the mill would cease, and the cattle would rise up by the thousands and shuffle about inside their pens. This stirring would send up thick clouds of dust that, backlighted by the fading sun, turned golden red in color. And the dominant sound was that of tens of thousands of hooves thudding against the dirt--a herd on the march to nowhere.

I have come back here to make a list. It is a list of all the things I learned nearly 30 years ago in three summers at this feedlot. My list-making was triggered by a newspaper headline. “Summer Work Is Out of Favor With the Young,” the headline declared. When I spotted this headline my first reaction was: Good for the young.

I was remembering, sourly, how difficult it had been to haul my then skinny frame out of bed at 4:30 a.m. every day, six days a week, for the 35-mile drive to the feedlot and 12 hours of low-wage work. I was forgetting all that I learned in those summers. For instance, how to cool beer with a fire extinguisher.

As I mentioned a few columns back, in another context, on slow Saturday afternoons the mill hands would gather in the cinder-block control room with a six-pack of beer. They’d set the cans against a wall and blast them with the gas of a fire extinguisher, chilling the beer in a flash. This, though, was not the only lesson I took away from my summer work experience. In fact, I am a bit startled by the length of the list I’ve built in the half-hour I’ve been here, peering through the fence at the ghost mill, remembering.

Here was where I learned how to talk to truck drivers. They’d pull in by the score each morning, hauling grain, and as they waited to dump their loads they’d share with me, the 16-year-old grain-tester, stories from the road. These tended to fall into two main categories: stories about outwitting the California Highway Patrol, and stories about carnal adventures at truck stops.

Here I learned about work, hard, physical work in the oven that is the valley in August. This probably explains why the jobs I’ve held since all have been of the kind that require soft chairs and indoor “work” stations.

My views on immigration were formed here. I worked alongside men from Mexico. They were not “aliens,” though I assume some were a bit short in the paperwork department. They were not “invaders.” They were just men who worked hard and talked dreamily about saving enough money to return home and start cattle ranches of their own.

I learned about maintaining perspective. A good day was one spent driving air-conditioned trucks through the pens, delivering feed to the cattle. On a bad day they’d hand us a shovel and send us out to scoop manure from the troughs.

“It all pays the same,” one of the veteran hands would say with a shrug.

I learned about mistakes. I once managed with one wrong pull of a skip loader lever to unleash a river of molasses across the feedlot. It took the entire crew all day to clean up the mess, a massive operation, and the total damage was calculated to be in the tens of thousands of dollars. The foreman who informed me how much I had cost the company said he wasn’t going to fire me or even chew me out. It was clear, he said softly, I already felt rotten enough.

I learned not everybody is born lucky. There was a worker named Alvin, a stumpy little man who once had a job flagging for a crop duster. He was standing in the road one day, waving a flag to show the pilot where to spray, when a woman in a Cadillac struck Alvin and dragged him some amazing distance. He lived, only to be sued by the motorist for the damage his face caused to her bumper. This sorry story was told on Alvin again and again in the little cafeteria where we ate lunch. He didn’t seem to mind. He’d listen, blush and smile his broken smile, ruefully shaking his head at his own misfortune.

I could keep going, but the point should be clear by now. When I was young and ignorant of the world I landed by luck on the other side of this fence and found out some things no college or summer camp could have taught me--a common enough experience. And please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I learned the answers to all of life’s riddles at this feedlot; I suspect I didn’t even learn a fraction of the right questions.

For instance, none of my rustic tutors ever told me how tedious, seemingly endless, 12-hour workdays with distance will become mere tics in a life that seems to race along all too fast. Nobody in that lunchroom ever suggested that in 30 years I might come back and find all of them scattered and gone and the place overrun by squirrels.