It can’t have been that long ago since we installed the first pivot in a hayfield on our place. Sometimes it seems like just a year or two ago, when in reality, it’s probably been closer to two decades. For the most part, like many new technological advancements, as they relate to my life, the pivots have been a time and labor-saving miracle. There’s rarely a time when I pine for the days of moving wheel lines or hand lines, or even further back, chasing water through ditches and across fields with a shovel. Rarely, but not never.
Rescuing a pivot that’s stuck or replacing a gearbox or changing a pivot tire in the mud with the pressure of the clock as it ticks down the hours and minutes of my water turn or the arrival of the swather can make the simplicity of the old times seem pretty enticing. On top of the inopportune regularity of the minor emergencies are the tedious, routine maintenance chores like servicing of gearboxes and tires and filling in the tracks.
We have a pivot of grass that I’m pretty proud of. It’s always outproduced my expectations. The field is less than ideal when it comes to farming, hence the decision to plant it to grass. There are several swales and old stream channels that pass through it, a circumstance that lends itself to deep ruts in the pivot tracks. Mine is kind of a one-horse outfit, but on occasion necessity dictates that I bring in some outside help. Enter Crew, the stout 12-year-old-neighbor boy whose father, like many of my neighbors, is quite accustomed to digging me out of any number and type of literal or metaphorical mires.
I had a dearth of straw left over from my winter stack, so I determined that it would work as excellent organic material to fill my pivot tracks. I enlisted Crew as my crew to help pitch the straw off of the old flatbed as I filled the ruts, while my dad drove the old truck straddling the tracks. With temperatures approaching summerlike levels and the ever-present gentle southern Idaho breeze, it was a miserable chore, but my crew never complained.
On the second day, to break up the monotony of the task, we diverted our energies to the corral by the house. I had several new bulls that I needed to brand and turn out into the bull pasture. As it turned out, one of the new bulls, a coming 2-year-old, did not take kindly to being pressured by creatures who walked upright on two feet. I’m not talking simply blowing snot, shaking his head and a two-step bluff in my direction.
This was a full-on chase, all the way across the pen, ending with a madcap leap and scramble over the fence. My agility was tested to its limits, as was the young Crew’s mettle. He quickly found the weak spots on the rotting top rail, but he never faltered or complained. As a matter of fact, I think he relished the excitement and challenges offered by my semi-trashy but mostly functional working facilities. In case you’re wondering, the bull wasn’t quite as bold doing battle with a cow pony, and I eventually won the battle.
Between bouts with windblown straw and pivot tracks and matador training, we slipped down into town for lunch at Oakley’s lone gas station. As one might expect, we ran into several locals who were taking a similar respite from the day’s farming and cowboying chores.
As we were putting the finishing touches on a platter of finger steaks and fries, Dave, one of my good friends, mentioned a news episode he’d seen by Steve Hartman of CBS Evening News. It chronicled the recent experience of some ranchers in the Sandhills of western Nebraska as they dealt with the devastation of the recent wildfires that ravaged the area. Dave told me he’d send me the clip.
Later that evening, after I’d dropped Crew off at his house up the road and finished the chores, I dragged my weary bones into the house and collapsed into my big chair in the living room. Bits of straw and windblown dirt filled my eyes, ears and pockets, and scratched my skin where it had invaded even the tiniest openings in my collar and spaces between the pearl snaps of my shirt. I took my phone from my pocket and looked up the link Dave had sent me.
What I saw and heard in that three-minute story, at once astonished me yet came as no surprise at all. It told the story of a couple in one of the most remote stretches of the Sandhills whose entire ranch had been consumed by fire. Faced with the prospect of losing everything, they were met instead by the miracle of integrity that is the rural farming and ranching community of a land that is too often portrayed as a fractured and broken nation, fraught with political division and acrimony.
The story spoke of farmers and ranchers and truckers who anonymously sent thousands of tons of hay to members of their rural family, whom they’d never met, as they were in their darkest hours of need. One volunteer who helped coordinate the collection and distribution of hay, her voice cracking as her eyes filled with tears, noted that every single person she contacted, no matter how dire their situation, deferred any help until their neighbors, whom they deemed in greater need, were first served.
My wife came in the back door from her gardening chores and approached me with concern as I sat there in my chair and tears filled my own eyes, and I was slightly overcome by the emotions of gratitude that had unexpectedly overtaken me. It’s a common and underappreciated theme in my life: the spontaneous kindness and generosity of those whose mission it is to feed and clothe the world. Whether it’s the neighbor kid helping me sort bulls and scatter straw in the wind or complete strangers gifting hay from 1,500 miles away, rural goodness just rings differently.
