Chapter 3: Shape Shifter

I woke up early to take Ned for his run. I had an alarm clock, and I'd set it for six. Ned looked at me oddly, but gladly padded along beside me down the stairs and into the kitchen. I let him out the back door to let him take care of his business while I got the coffee on. I was definitely going to want a cup or two before it was time to head down to Nileson's.

With the coffee on, we headed out the front door. I was grateful for the automatic percolator. I'd hate to have to make the coffee on the stove where it would have to be watched. It could happily perk up to strength while Ned and I ran.

We took the same route as the day before, and the results were pretty much the same. Ned was happy and I was sweaty when we got done. This time I'd thought ahead and put my work clothes out in the downstairs bathroom before taking off, so after my shower I was able to slip into them and head straight for the coffee.

Mom was awake and making breakfast. It smelled very wonderful before I even made it into the kitchen.

"Pancakes and sausage sound good Sammy?" she asked.

"Oh yeah!" I answered, pouring a cup of coffee and taking an appreciative sip.

Breakfast was good, and I got in a second cup of coffee, after which I had to endure an inspection to ease Mom's mind about my work attire. She insisted that she was driving me to work my first day, and that meant getting the bike in her car somehow. Fortunately, cars from this era were truly boats, with space galore, and Mom's 210 was no exception.

Mom dropped me off a few minutes before nine, and I had Mr. Nileson and Brian as an audience while I got my bike out of the back seat of the 210.

"There's a bike rack in back where you can put that, Sammy," Mr. Nileson called out. "Brian will show you where."

There was indeed a bike rack, under a low covered porch in the back, and my Tornado became its sole occupant.

"Dad's got some stuff to go over with you in the office, and then we'll get started, okay Sammy?"

What I got from Mr. Nileson was a lecture on responsibility and punctuality, a work schedule that showed I was working four days a week during the summer, plus any extra day when freight came in, which was usually once a month. In the winter I could only work after school, so assuming I lasted, come winter I could work six days a week, but only Saturday would be a full day.

"The law says I can hire you for $1.00 an hour, Sammy. Even if you were an adult, the minimum wage is only $1.15., but since we're a retail store and you're a student, the law says I can pay you less."

"Okay," I agreed. Heck, at a dollar an hour, I'd get rich pretty quick!

"I'm going to pay you that dollar an hour, but I expect you to mostly be working in the feed and seed bins to start, and that is hard work. A man's work. If you prove you can handle it, I'll pay you a dollar and a quarter an hour."

My grin must have grown wider, or he anticipated it, because he didn't even pause.

"But ... that won't be until at least the beginning of July, okay?"

"Okay," I repeated.

I had some papers to take home, and Mr. Nileson showed me where the employee mail slots were so I could pick out a slot for my papers until it was time to go home. It was also a sort of break room, with a coffee pot and a counter with a sink and a refrigerator. The middle of the room was filled with a round table and six chairs, as well as an old, worn looking sofa against one wall. I took advantage of the opportunity to put my sack lunch in the fridge.

The feed and seed bins were hard work. Under Brian's tutelage, I spent my first day learning how to pour feed of various kinds into burlap sacks, run them through the seamer to seal them off, and stack them.

The feed came in separate from the other freight, and was stored in huge bins that were like miniature silos. There were different feeds for cows, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and horses. There were a few other kinds of specialty feeds, but they came already sacked.

The first step in sacking feed was to clean out the hopper. The various bins all fed a single hopper using a swiveling chute arrangement. Once you'd filled the hopper, you used it to fill the sacks. It was dusty work, but dry, and not unpleasant smelling. The first day we sacked chicken feed, and Brian told me that we sold more of it than all the rest combined.

"The other feeds are mostly additive feeds, with special nutrients or vitamins in them that the animals need. They get normal food, hay or whatever, and this stuff is just a supplement. The chicken feed though is what most of the farmers in the area feed their chickens all the time."

The seamer was like a big sewing machine that used twine instead of thread.

"Make two passes with the seamer," Brian explained as he was showing me. "Flip the sack after the first pass, and then run the back side through again; and keep your fingers away from the foot!"

I watched as he did it, and saw that there was going to be a trick to getting the sack flipped without wasting twine. Brian flipped the sack with what I knew had to be years of experience, and the seamer barely paused as he did it. When he was done he had a small loop of thread to be cut off the end of the sack that left less than a foot of wasted thread on the floor.

I got shown, but I didn't get to do, until the hopper was almost empty.

"Okay, you do as many sacks as you can get out of what's left in the hopper."

I'd been watching pretty closely. You filled the sack just so full, and folded the burlap at the top in just a certain way, crimping the edged at the sides when you folded. I tried to duplicate it as closely as I could. The really hard part was holding the weight of the sack while keeping the folds flat and aligned for the seamer. My first sack had a pretty wavy seam when I finished, and the two lines of twine crossed each other once, which I hadn't seen any of Brian's do. The second wasn't much better, but I thought I wasted less twine making the flip. The third sack only got filled half full.

"What next?" I asked, hefting my partial sack of feed.

"Load the hopper again and fill more sacks."

And so we did. My last sack from the tail end of the feed in the first hopper load got finished from the beginning of the second hopper load.

"That'll be our starting sack for the next run," Brian told me. "Put it over there for now." I saw a table with several other sacks on them, and hefted the sack up onto it. There was a pile of really big clothes pins in a basket, and I saw the other sacks were held shut with them, so I grabbed a couple and closed my sack.

We wound up filling the hopper two more times in fact, and filling and seaming sack after sack. I got to do the last couple sacks at the end of each hopper full, and I was getting better with the seamer. My seams were straighter, though nowhere close to Brian's perfectly straight ones, and I was getting closer on limiting the amount of wasted twine.

"Now we stack the bags of feed we've finished sacking." Brian told me.

I don't know if it was conscious or not, but I noticed that Brian referred to the sacks as bags, once they were filled and seamed.

We had a low flatbed cart with real rubber tires that Brian took me to get.

"The carts always gets stored here when not being used," He said.

The cart came out of another covered area like the one where I'd
parked my bike at the beginning of the day, but this one had a concrete floor and wasn't elevated. It was along the side of the big equipment shed that stood alongside and slightly back from the front of the main Mercantile building. There were probably a dozen carts and other things under there too, hand trucks and wheelbarrows and a few things I wasn't sure of.

As interesting as filling sacks had been, stacking bags was hard work! We stacked them on the cart first, twenty at a time, and then hauled the cart around the corner to the sales area of the yard. There were already stacks of feed here, and the chicken feed was in pretty serious disarray.

"We need to consolidate all these partial stacks of feed towards the front and then stack these new bags behind them."

We had finished the rearranging of the old stacks and had just started on stacking the new stuff when Mr. Nileson came our way, stopping and waiting for us to stop what we were doing.

"How's Sammy doing so far?" he asked, once we'd stopped.

"Pretty good," Brian said. "He's already getting pretty good running the seamer, he just needs to get used to the weight of the sacks and he'll be doing straight seams, no problem. I didn't even have to show him how to do the seams, he just figured it out from watching me."

"Good," Mr. Nileson said, giving me a nod. "Listen, we just got an order phoned in for a hundred bags of chicken feed from Art Shauls over in Charlestown. Sounds like he got in an argument with his regular feed store. You two take a short break and then get on that order."

"Sure thing Dad, the argument wasn't about not paying his bill was it?" Brian asked.

"No," Mr. Nileson laughed. "But he's paying cash up front anyway this time."

So we took a break, washing the dust off and sipping a glass of ice tea in the break room. Brian said his mom tried to keep a pitcher full in there at all times, and if there was a pitcher in the fridge it was fair game.

We went right back to sacking chicken feed once we got done with the break. We counted the feed we'd already sacked that was still back at the hopper, and there were 63 already bagged. We bagged another hopper full, which got us up to a hundred and eight, so we threw the hundred bags for Mr. Shauls on a pallet truck, another item that came out of that covered area, and ran them up to the loading dock, which was on one side of the feed area we'd been rearranging stacks in earlier.

"This the Shauls order?" The man at the loading dock asked. I recognized Mr. Greer, I knew his sons Chuck and Bob, who were older than me and in high school, and his daughter Rebecca, who was a year younger than me. He was also the coach of the Little League team that I used to play on.

"Hi Mr. Greer," I said.

"Hi there Sammy. I heard you were starting work here today. Are you enjoying your first day?"

"Yes sir," I answered.

"We're going to miss you this year, Sammy."

"I was only an average player, Mr. Greer," I countered.

"Well, you could have been pretty good if you'd have worked at it. You always had a good eye, and you're quick for your size."

I took the compliment with as much good grace as I thought I could get away with, but I remembered that kids my age should be embarrassed by compliments, so I went with that. I stared at my shoes and muttered "Thanks."

"If this job whips you into shape, you should try out for the high school team. You're going to grow some soon too I'd guess. You'll be the tall and rangy type they like to put at first base."

I thanked him again and Brian and I headed back to the feed and seed bins. Mr. Greer had given me something to think about for sure. I had loved playing baseball the first time around, and along with Carrie and Ned, was one of the things I most regretted loosing.

"He's right you know," Brian said as we began filling the hopper again. "Chuck and Bob told me their team in Hermiston could use all the help it can get next year. Half their starters graduated last month."

My first work day ended at 2:30 in the afternoon. Three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon were all I would work except on freight days. We had a half hour lunch between 12 and 12:30. The bike ride home wasn't bad at all, but the shower sure felt good.

Dad got home about an hour after I did. I got a nice hug before he too hit the shower, and I made myself scarce by taking Ned for a walk so he and mom could say hello.

Dinner conversation was equally divided between talking about Dad's job, my new job and the upcoming camping trip.

Dad's job was a little bit of the same stuff, different day kind of story. I tended to think of him as a surveyor, but that wasn't true. He did do a lot of surveying as part of his job, but really he was an engineer for the State of Oregon, and his job involved mostly keeping track of the impact of the dams being built on the Columbia River by the Army Corp of Engineers. Ronald Reagan was decades away from his fascination with the phrase 'trust, but verify.', but Dad's job was essentially the verify part of the State's 'trust' relationship with the federal government and the Army Corp of Engineers.

His work on the McNary Dam had brought him to back to Oregon in 1947, the year I was born. I'm not too clear on the details, but I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad had been an item before he left for college and became an item again the minute he was back. They must have been, because I was born barely ten months later, and I think the wedding was a bit rushed. Those events might be the source of whatever was up with Mr. Taylor.

Dad kept right on doing what he was doing when the Dalles Dam began in 1952, and just added a bigger load when the John Day dam began construction in 1958. He had been gone a lot the last few years, but the work on the Dalles Dam was done now, and he was mostly kept hopping by the work at John Day. That this dam was further away than anything he'd worked on since I was born was a contributing factor to the time he spent away from home.

"Dad, what are you going to do when the John Day dam is done?" I asked.

"Well, that's a good decade away, more or less, and I hope to be in a position to retire out of the State by then and maybe open my own engineering business. It would mean moving I think."

I remembered that dream from my first life. It was one Dad didn't get to realize the first time. The money was just never there. Maybe the new me would be able to make a difference.

That bit of wool-gathering got Dad derailed in talking of his work, and he naturally was interested in how my first day had been. I told him pretty much everything, including what Mr. Greer had said about baseball.

"You're likely to be pretty sore in the morning Son," Dad cautioned me after hearing my tale.

"The Absorbine Jr. is in the downstairs medicine cabinet," Mom said. "You should take it up with you when you go to bed tonight. You might need it in the morning."

"Did I hear right that your running with Ned in the morning now?" Dad asked. I nodded.

"Skip the liniment until after your run," Dad suggested. "You may decide you don't need it if you loosen up enough from the run."

The rest of the evening should have been spent talking about the camping trip, and it did start that way.

It should be noted that Oregon in 1961 did not have a lot of state parks, outside of the coastal regions, and the ball was barely rolling on the state's park system. Where we were, camping was truly roughing it. There were places that could be considered relatively tame, and Mom had managed to hold out for her favorite this year I discovered. My attitude had aborted this trip the last time through, so I had no memories of it, or of this discussion.