The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

The first load took me three tries to get right. The field was four miles south of Honeyford road, black and flat, with a harvester working one end and a loader operator named Marv waiting at the other with the conveyor boom raised against the gray morning sky.

I backed Unit 7 under the boom in the dark with my window down, and Marv guided me with a flashlight, left hand, right hand, hold.

The beets came down in a roar. Twenty-four tons of them, round and rough and the color of old cream where the dirt had fallen off.

The whole truck shook and settled. The smell came up through the cab, cold and earthy and sweet, like a root cellar in October.

“You’ve done this before,” Marv said when I pulled forward. “Soybeans,” I said. “Soybeans don’t weigh like this.” He grinned. “Go on. The scale’ll be backed up.”

It was. The line at the piling station on Highway 17 ran a quarter mile out onto the shoulder, trucks idling nose to tail with their running lights on, steam rising out of the stacks in the early dark.

I got in line behind Hank Olson’s rig and waited, and I did not fall asleep, though I understood now what Shane had meant.

At the scale a young man in a hooded coat leaned out of a window and handed me a card.

A man on a platform drove a long probe into the beets and sent a sample down a chute to the tare lab, where they test how much dirt and sugar a load carries.

Then I drove up the ramp to the receiving hopper and pulled the lever. The hopper took the whole load in a minute.

Out on the field of piles beyond it, the piler’s long boom swung slowly back and forth, laying the beets down in a wall that grew taller with every truck.

Clarence Hegg stood on the platform above the scale with a clipboard and a cup of coffee, his white mustache frosted at the tips.

He did not wave. He just lifted his cup an inch, which from Clarence is a speech.

I got my first ticket at 6:12. By then the sky was going from black to dishwater gray over the beet fields, and I had the second load already behind me.

By five o’clock the sun was already low and red behind the piler.

I pulled up the ramp and dumped my fourteenth load of the day with my hands shaking so hard I could hardly find the lever.

The ticket came out with the number 14 and the weight on it. I read it twice.

On the way out, Clarence was standing at the edge of the gravel lot beside his pickup, and I stopped the truck and rolled down the window.

“Fourteen,” I said. “I saw.” He looked at the ticket in my hand and he looked at me. “That’s the first fourteen anybody’s hauled on Unit 7 since Ben went down.”

“Is it enough?” “For one day.” He almost smiled. “Go home, Stephanie. Sleep. Do it again at five.” I did it again at five. And the next day. And the next.

I will not pretend it was romantic. It was cold, and long, and loud, and my shoulders ached by Friday.