The Blue Mountains of Oregon are beautiful but treacherous in winter, and I found myself having to drive it twice on snow-packed freeways in December as I traveled to Coeur d’Alene for the Tri-State Grain Growers Convention. (Not the smartest thing I've ever done, driving that stretch – but then I keep telling myself it can't be any worse than the stretch from Mountain Home to Boise in winter, can it?) My prayer was not “help me to not break down” (because how realistic is that in an old vehicle?) but rather “If I’m going to break down, please let it be in farm country.” A farmer would help me. Others might just as likely drive on by and flip me off for obstructing their cruise control speed.

Case in point: Just a month prior, my husband and I hitched up our wood splitter to haul across the county and, as luck would have it, the hitch hadn’t seated itself properly on the ball and it came unhitched. So we dragged it what seemed like several hundred yards by the safety chains until we could get stopped, all the while with the hitch tongue plowing a small canyon in the shoulder of the road.

But we got it stopped, and my husband has decked out his truck-bed toolbox with anything you can think of that might be helpful in a bad situation (… not like we haven’t been here before), so he rummaged around and we were soon digging the asphalt and mud from the hitch with a screwdriver, and trying to get the lock mechanism working again.

About that time, a pickup rolled up and a fellow asked if we needed help. We said no, we thought we could get it. We must have looked pretty needy, however, because he pulled off the roadway anyway and came back to help ­­– thank heavens. Turned out we needed him a whole lot more than we originally thought because he ended up changing ball size for us and jimmying the lock mechanism until it worked, and he was a lot more flexible to crawl under the hitch and figure things out than we were. We were up a creek and didn’t even know it.

It's not the first time I’ve had a vehicle problem in farm country (and it won’t be the last), but in farm country there are people who stop and offer help. And because they’re in muck boots or cowboy boots or steel-toed boots with grease all over them (toting a farm mutt in the pickup bed), I know they just want to help – it’s what they do. They look out for each other, and me, when I'm in farm country.