As it turned out, I didn't really have a shot at getting the internship. I wasn't working towards the right degree to have a future in that kind of thing, anyway, a
nd paid positions like that aren't typically awarded to nineteen-year-olds.
"Okay, so this sucks," I thought, "but I put in an application for a scale girl at Pacific Northwest Farmers Cooperative and had a friend put in a good word for me... That one has to pan out, right?"
Well, it did and it didn't... The guys at CHS called me several weeks sooner than PNW did and I went in for an interview. A job offer came soon after without a word from any of the other places I'd applied. About the day after I accepted the position at CHS I got a call from PNW asking me to come in for an interview.
When putting in that original CHS application I understood I would be doing odds and ends kind of work and hopefully pushing papers once harvest came around. I laid everything out on the table during that interview; that I'm a bad driver, I get lost more than I care to admit, and I'm really not cut out for sweeping and shoveling all day (due to an elbow injury from a previous job, the fact that I'm prone to heat exhaustion, and, y'know, my size). For whatever reason, they offered me the job anyway and I ended up taking it.
Now let me tell you something about CHS Primeland. The people there are absolutely AWESOME. Nearly everyone spends their days dishing and taking crap from each other and telling ridiculous stories. When I wasn't hauling chemical out to farmers (using google map pins my boss sent to me so I wouldn't get lost) and breaking down the cardboard boxes our chem supply comes in, I got paired up with a girl who grew up in the same general area as me. She had just graduated college and I realized after a while that we actually had a class or two together. Her nickname was Mouthy and we got along just swell.
For several weeks the two of us got shipped down the Kendrick, Idaho, which just so happens to be the second-hottest place in North Idaho (or at least I think so). We spent hours cleaning up grain and dust in the ridiculous number of grain storage buildings down there and shoveling out back where spilled grain had started to grow and form a gross, slimy carpet. It was a good time.
I also spent a week in Cavendish, which is a total of an hour from Moscow (and pretty much any other form of civilization). The two guys there--Tony and Eric--are some of the funniest, nicest old kooks I've ever met. There I got to sweep out bins and complete chemical inventory (about three times).
More than one of my days was spent knee deep in a boot pit full of slimy rotten grain. Oh, the memories involved with that adventure at our Viola elevator... Even sitting outside, my boots stunk up my apartment for a solid week!
The novelty of the new job definitely started to wear off after I spent two more weeks in Kendrick sealing up tanks. Not only is Kendrick the second hottest place in North Idaho, but the grain elevator is situated right alongside a creek. Everything it set up on a giant pad of pavement and steel tanks are literally made to reflect the sunlight instead of absorbing it. Let's just say painting the hot side of those giant steel ovens in the afternoon made me a little heat sick.
I was actually supposed to get shipped down there for harvest but after my little episode of heat exhaustion the bosses decided I probably shouldn't be thrown in the hottest, busiest elevator in the state. From then on I was pretty much stuck in Moscow where we were asked, or rather commanded to get all three of the ginormous bins there totally emptied out within just a few days. Let me tell you, the time I spent in Moscow was definitely not my favorite. Every possible thing that could have gone wrong while we emptied those bins did and the whole crew got roped into working not only ten plus hour days Monday through Friday, but the weekend, too.
When our sweep auger broke down we ended up shoveling two trucks full of grain. And I don't just mean pushing a little bit of grain into the bed of a pickup, I mean climbing huge walls of wheat and trying not to get buried by it while the bottom auger runs at top speed. Do you know how heavy a shovel full of wheat is? Because I sure do, and it's close to half of what I weigh. That's not to mention the fact that those bins get hotter than hell in late July, and having six people shovel kicks up so much dust that you can barely see ten feet ahead. It was certainly a good time.
On the bright side, I got shipped out to the Joel elevator before that project got totally completed, which saved me a lot of exhaustion. I'm currently sitting in the office there, waiting patiently for another truck of soft white wheat to come in.
This is your small but determined blog author Lindsey relating to you the chronicles of Primeland. Thank you and goodnight!
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