Bran knew all the ropes

Bran knew all the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who have got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. There they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he’d caved in, but he fourteen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweaty clothes he’d still feel through his sleep the tingle of the sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of the thresher, the grind of gears of the tracks carrying the red wheat to the elevators. He began to speak like a harvest stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruit cannery on the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job full of the sour stench of rotting fruit peelings . there they read in Solidarity about the shingle weavers’ strike and the free speech fight en Everett, and decided they’ go down and see wht they could do to help out.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos