It’s well over 100 degrees at 4:04, and after six hours of chasing the harvesters around a Texas cotton field, you’re well beyond parched. The only shade is the shadow that your form casts over the shorn and wickedly stout cotton stems and the fissured gray soil that they have grown up from.

While the field hands have chosen shorts and T-shirts for the occasion, you know better. Those heavy jeans have kept your legs from being shredded as you’ve navigated through the sharp branches, and while that white long-sleeve shirt may not show the salt stains of your sweat, it has done well against the sun.

You’ve chosen to tread about the undulating acres on foot, heavy boots chasing down the action and the angle and the shadow, fully engulfed in the ever-present dust as it invades your mouth and nostrils and blends with the smell of hot exhaust and hydraulic oil, all staged against a steady din of blower fans and diesel engines as the green and yellow harvesters make their way down row after row and the boll buggies dart about the fields.

You have no idea how many photos you’ve taken, but when you hear a freight trumpeting for a distant grade crossing at the same time your camera makes that little beeping sound and the digital screen displays a warning about the battery status, you hope it’s got enough juice left in it to record one more.

One is all you need.

And one is all you’ll get.


Rick Malo©2019


The last shot of a long day spent in the cotton fields along Union Pacific’s Lockhart Subdivision west of Lockhart, Texas has C44ACCTE 5786 and SD70M 4339 rolling a southbound grain block near MP40.25 at 4:04 on Friday, September 13th, 2019.

It is indeed well over 100 degrees, and this was the last shot of 662 images taken that day.

The camera clicked once, and the battery went dead.

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