Anybody want an eighty-pound bale of hay?

Bucking hay.
Stepping off the back porch and just a few steps from the breakfast table I would be struck by a marvelous sight. At first glance you would think a giant yellowish and white fireball was coming up out of a volcano. No, a brilliant sunrise rose up into the clear blue skies over the snow-capped Mount Shasta in northing California. An early morning fantastical sight I witnessed most days from a cattle ranch almost in the shadows of and west of Mount Shasta. And as some of you may know, Mount Shasta is an extinct volcano. At the ranch I worked on was a good fifty-miles from the famed northern California snow covered peak. A light weight pores lava rock known as Pumice was all over the flat landscape near our ranch house. The main house, barn, and tractor shed was just off old US-99 between Weed, California and a small town of Gazelle. About thirty miles or so south of the Oregon border. A place where in the early evening mosquitos will find you for sure.
But wait a minute, what was a L A teen boy doing up on a northern California cattle ranch. It certainly wasn’t for the money. It was a six-week summer job between my junior and senior year in high school. My high school friend Jim’s uncle owned the ranch. Our job was to mow, rake, bale, and buck hay off hundreds of acres. The hardest part of the job was loading bales of hay on to a flatbed truck and haul it all to a larger stack of hay. Repeated many times each day. None the less, a humongous mountain of stacked hay would be waiting for dispensing over the winter months as cattle feed.
This hay hauling would go on from just after breakfast and up and until dinner time and sometimes after. Six days a week. Hot, grueling, itchy, sweaty hard work. The hardest work this 17-year-old boy had ever done before and since. Pass the iced tea please.
The best part of the whole experience was a Greyhound Bus ride back to Los Angeles. Followed by a trip or two to the beach that summer. Pass the baby oil please. Whew! Get this experience behind me for sure. When does school start?