The truck drivers of harvest

It’s a life of stubble, dust, kernels and gears.

Every August, the days reach their longest for the truck drivers of harvest.

From middle-school kids to college students to farmhand fill-ins to almost any walk of life, the drivers step up into the trucks to transport wheat to grain elevators all over Whitman County.

Shannon Zakarison, 27, of Brooklyn, New York with her two-ton Chevy north of Pullman. She grew up driving for her father and grandfather’s farm, and was back to help on a visit west.

This year, it happened later than ever, but the work was as timeless as always. Changing and staying the same as the years pass.

Truck driving for harvest began back in the 1920s when threshing and grain sacks began to be phased out. The sacks were then stacked and transported by horse and wagon to warehouses.

As the combine drivers roll across the hills, cutting wheat for the world, the truck drivers are never far away.

“It doesn’t really matter if I liked it or not,” said Dylan Schmick, 19, delivering a load to the Endicott elevators for Sonray Farms. It was his last day, after three weeks straight of driving for his father.

“I still do enjoy it, though,” he added, pulling off his Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. He has driven harvest truck since he was 14 and got his ag driver’s permit.

Normally the job takes about four weeks.

“It’s just dad and I, basically,” he says of harvesting the 1,500 – 2,000 acres of mostly soft white wheat.

As a student at St. John/Endicott High from 2006-2010, he could count many of his classmates who were fellow truck drivers. Now it is less as his peers have left the area or go to colleges that start early.

That afternoon in Endicott it was one less again, as Schmick packed to leave for his sophomore year at WSU. With an undeclared major, agriculture is one option on his mind.

He grew up watching his dad as a third-generation farmer. Schmick would be the fourth, if he chooses.

Out in the fields, there is a lot of time to think.

Many times there can be a half-hour wait out in the fields with no companion but the buzz of distant combines cutting away.

Schmick listened to the radio and lifted weights.

“I’m not a big reader but this would be a great time to read,” he said.

In his last week driving this year, the days started extra-early. Schmick went with his dad, Steve, who is an assistant football coach for St. John-Endicott, to help at practice from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., then back to the truck and combine.

On campus in Pullman this fall, Schmick might run into another harvest driver, if indeed he was able to get out of the field. Austin Miller, 22, was on his second harvest near Palouse for Kirk Dugger Farms.

“Like the city, like the beer,” he said of the spelling of his name.

In a pink plaid shirt and sun-faded carpenter jeans, Miller logged 100-hour weeks during harvest. Driving was just another of his tasks for his role on the farm staff.

“Another job,” he said of driving truck. “Just another thing you do on a farm, you can’t be specialized, you gotta be able to do it all.”

He is a civil engineering major, a senior.

“Something like that,” he said.

Driving another truck in the same field that Saturday was Roger Durheim, 65. The last time he drove truck at harvest was 1964.

He came back in 2011 to help a friend, Kirk Dugger, with the late cutting and driving.

Retired from his maintenance job with the federal government in Spokane, Durheim often goes to combine demolition shows in the summer with Dugger. This year, he told Dugger he’d be glad to help out with the late harvest if needed.

Since many of Dugger’s young drivers figured to be back in school by cutting time, he needed him.

By Aug. 27, Durheim had been out in the fields for three weeks, staying in his camper at the Palouse R.V. Park.

The last time he was out working harvest, combines didn’t even have a cover on them. The headers were 15-feet long. Now they are 35-40 feet.

But the hours are similar.

“Up at 5, in the truck at 6,” Durheim said. “Last night we ate dinner at 11:30 p.m.”

His first route each morning is driving Highway 127 to the river at Central Ferry, with a load from the night before. The bushels are loaded onto barges and shipped down the Snake and Columbia Rivers to Portland, where they are loaded onto ocean-going freighters.

At the river, as at all elevators, a federal grader takes a sample of the wheat and gives the driver a deposit slip to record how many bushels he unloaded.

Grain is just like money into a bank. The dollar bills become anonymous, as do the kernels, so it’s the deposit slip that tells how much you have.

All together, it was Durheim, Miller and three other drivers hauling the loads for the Dugger operation.

Durheim said the waiting time is the same as it was in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Being out there brought back memories, some tougher than others.

When he was 18, his father got in a bad car accident driving into town to get parts during harvest near Cheney. Durheim and his eighth grade brother had to finish the harvest themselves.

There was one thing he still has from all the way back then.

“I kept my CDL license in the event I might need it,” he said.

Shannon Zakarison, 27, grew up near Pullman on her father’s and grandfather’s farm, graduated from Pullman High and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She teaches classical percussion and plays drums in bands. In the summer, she comes back to visit, which also means work, too, when you’re on the farm.

This year, there wasn’t much harvest work until near the end of her stay. But soon she was back in the familiar surroundings of the old two-ton cabs.

“The fun part is the puzzle of how each truck works and how to run them and shift them,” said Zakarison. “There’s all kinds of little tricks to them. Each has its own personality.”

Out on the hills, as she waits for the next grain load, Zakarison, reads books from home and brings her drumsticks and practices on the dashboard.

Her cell phone was in a Ziploc bag to protect it from the dust.

She grew up doing just this, since she was nine or 10, driving with a lunchbox behind her back so she could reach the pedals. After graduation, she went to the University of Puget Sound before transferring to William Patterson University in Wayne, N.J.

Back on the farm, it’s a long ways from the five boroughs and their eight million people.

“I like the solitude,” Zakarias said. “But by the end of the day you’re like desperate to talk to somebody.”