If I wasn’t working construction in the summers 
during high school, I was hauling hay. 
The bales went on forever. We threw them and stacked them 
on the back of trucks and trailers, threw them into barns 
and stacked them to the beams. Inside the barns 
and in the fields, it was hot, but outside a breeze 
might cool the sweat, almost give you chills. 
For lunch we went to a country store where old men 
sat on the porch eating crackers and summer sausage 
and called everyone Boss. The foreman of our crew, 
whose father owned one of the ranches we worked, 
would buy bologna and sliced cheese, a small jar 
of mayonnaise, an onion or two, a half-dozen pickles 
from a jar on the counter, and a loaf of Wonder Bread, 
and we would find shade beneath a tree and eat sandwiches, 
washing them down with water from a cooler, 
sharing the same tin cup. We were a merry gang of hay haulers, 
but I quit after reading Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, 
having realized there was more to life than making hay, and fishing. 

Bio: Bob Lucky