My dad used to let my all of us kids ride home on top of the hay truck. We stacked the hay so high that we could give signal lights a good swing. We thought it was great; he would be on the highway doing 60mph or so and we would sit hold our arms out at the very front of the load and imagined we were flying. Thank goodness the truck didn’t have good brakes!
My dad was a master with rope, but one time we had a loose load and dad said he didn’t think we should ride home on top of the truck. On the way home the whole load started rocking and we lost half of the bales as we went through town. We all had to scramble because we heard sirens as we were throwing the bales back on the truck. Dad had had a few difficulties with traffic cops back then. We got out of there just before the sirens got to us. We had to leave a couple broken bales.
I rode the bales down a time or 2.