odd jobs: a memory

My summer job in high school was driving combine on a grass seed farm. A grass seed combine harvests the crop by picking up a swath of grass and shaking the seeds loose. While monotonous, it's not a bad way to spend five weeks of summer--I listened to books on tape, watched the sunset six days out of seven, and pulled whatever pranks you can think of when you're bored and in possession of a CB radio. (I also got into country music and talk radio, including the religious stuff, where I learned that even on-air exorcisms have to break for commercials.) In the end, I was rewarded with what my boss thought the ultimate compliment: he told me I'd make an excellent farmer's wife.

Oregon state law requires that anyone under the age of 16 take a tractor safety course before operating farm equipment (that is, unless you are the child--or wife--of a farmer). Thus the first summer of driving combine, I spent three days at Linn Benton Community College, driving farm equipment around the parking lot and watching low-production safety videos. It certainly would have been more entertaining had I managed to talk to the boy who was generally acknowledged to be a local heartthrob, and was inexplicably enrolled in the same course. Instead, we independently endured the hours of videos that admonished viewers to "avoid the drive shaft" and "only wear a seat belt if your equipment has an approved rollover device." In between verses of their theme song, "Highway to the Danger Zone," they showed clips of what happens when loose clothing gets stuck in rotating machinery--at the last second, they'd switch the hapless farmer out for a leaf-filled dummy, which would fly around the spinning rod, spewing multicolored leaves and stuffing. Memorable stuff. For the sake of illustration, here's a similar type of movie.