The truck is different but Fred is the same. Anyway, there was no mistaking them because the only light in the lot sprayed down on them. The truck is white now, with a long nose. Like driving your car, he said. Except slower and bumpier, I think. But the size is deceptive: even when you’re going fast, your majesty makes the scenery crawl.

At first we just talked stuff in the languid night. He keeps a pepsi in an extra boot leg. It made me want a pepsi too, even though it was not yet six a.m. So we stopped at a rest stop among the dozing trucks and I hopped out to use the bathroom and to buy a Coke from a machine.

And then we were back on the route, that worn, familiar route he’s been driving his entire life minus sixteen years. Memories from the trips I took as a kid mingled with my adult curiosity about the job. I asked a ton of questions.

By seven a.m., Fred was shooting the breeze with the boomer, a fellow he’d known a long time. It was sunrise and 24 degrees. The boomer cracked open a harvest cake with his automatic hook and the moist scent of freshly cut hay on an August evening seeped out. It reminded me of hauling hay when I was kid. They’d pile the trucks so heavy with the bales that the front end of the truck lifted off the ground a couple of inches when it first tried to go. They let me ride on the very top, my lithe child’s body wedged into a gap between bales and my hair blown back. I loved those rides! I felt like I was on top of the world.

They loaded the first trailer. Then we uprooted and drove to another farm for the second batch. I’d gotten chilled from hanging around outside taking pictures, so I stayed in the truck for the second loading, watching the bales swing through my view in the side mirror.

Then we rode in a pickup with a farmer at the wheel and Fred sitting beside. Fred window-shopped the guy’s hay and we drove from field to field surveying the crop. These men share age and strength and the esoterica of their trade. I soaked up the local prosody and learned the scoop.

I learned that those circular irrigation systems cost about ten grand per hub—that they’re highly sophisticated computerized deals. I learned about local competition between Ellensburg Timothy growers and the Basin growers. I learned export is a big big deal, even for hay, which you wouldn’t have thought to think, right? I learned that a frost increases the sugar in apples, and it’s a good thing before the harvest.

I learned that those weigh stations on the Interstate weigh each truck as it rolls on the freeway; the roll through the weigh station itself is to visually inspect the trucks. The sensor hanging above the right lane can communicate a truck’s specifications to the weigh station personnel, thereby allowing the truck to pass without the roll-through, as long as the truck has a transponder.

In George, we rolled across the scale empty and again when we were full. The difference in weight is the amount of hay Fred bought. He wrote checks to the growers and the woman there at the station hung them on a line strung across the window. The growers come by later for the checks.

And I learned that the profits from The Gorge at George are not shared with the community; that, in fact, the community bears the costs of an increase in traffic accidents and property damage. Fred said people who don’t know any better—who think those fields are empty or just full of grass—drive off into the fields, often running over irrigation equipment that costs thousands of dollars to replace.

On the way home he told me that even though he’s been driving the same route for over thirty years, something looks a little different each time. He pointed out a stretch just west of Ellensburg that he finds particularly pretty. He said I’d just missed the fiery reds of the season. He treated me to lunch at a roadside diner in Vantage. We had pie and cake.