And later that summer, I remember knowing how I wanted to be treated the rest of my life. In late April of my 8th-grade year, a friend at my church asked me if I wanted to follow the harvest with his dad's crew. Every July, I had watched harvest crews pull through my Northwest Kansas town. My friend's dad contracted with wheat farmers from Texas to North Dakota. The winter wheat ripens in Texas in early June and in North Dakota in mid-August.
Crews follow the harvest north, cutting the wheat as it ripens.
Every summer this fellow hired high school and college boys to work for him. But his boy and I were just 14. Because my parents knew the boss to be a church-going man, they consented to let me go with him and his crew for the entire summer. In early June we headed from Kansas deep into Oklahoma. Mammoth combines rode piggyback atop dual-axle trucks.