One crisp afternoon last fall, I was driving down a dirt road, lost in my thoughts, enjoying the beauty of the country around me, when I had to stop. Blocking the road were a Chevy pickup, a mud-caked four-wheeler and two dismounted riders standing next to their trusty steeds. Just beyond them I could see a herd of perhaps 100 cattle lazily making their way down the road, contentedly grazing on whatever grass they could find poking through the newly fallen snow.
The conversation taking place among the folks obstructing my path didn’t appear to be an urgent one. But I recognized the faces, so instead of impatiently honking the horn and waiting for them to get out of the dadgum way, I turned my car off and sauntered over to join the impromptu conference. The two riders were a rancher and his son, in the midst of moving their cattle to a different field where they hoped was enough fall feed left to put off feeding hay for another week or two. The ATV was driven by a neighboring rancher who had stopped to ask whether his friends had seen a couple of his own cows who had yet to make it home off the summer range. In the pickup sat a farmer whose spuds were in the cellar with still no buyer and whose sugarbeet harvest had narrowly beaten the snow.
Each had his problems, and each was willing to lend an ear and a word of advice or encouragement. But the conversation soon turned to families and high school basketball and whose kids were coming home for Christmas.
I was warmly welcomed into their little powwow and gladly joined in the good-natured ribbing and innocuous scuttlebutt that quite often causes these dirt road traffic jams.
Last month I wrote in this space about how fast-paced life in agriculture really is. And truly, it is. It takes a special kind of human being to want to lead such a life and to succeed at it as a career. Perhaps it’s the stress, the burden placed on producers by the unending demands of their jobs, that makes them just want to simply stop take a break to chat in the middle of the road, even as an important task is in progress. Perhaps we just need to refuel once in a while.
Or maybe it’s simply that the intangible trait that makes a guy want to work 18 hours a day in the dust and mud is the same crazy gene that makes it impossible not to stop and B.S., even for only a minute when a neighbor pulls up. On the most superficial—yet fundamentally accurate— level, neighbors who produce the same commodity are business competitors. But beyond that, we’re all intrinsically connected by the understanding that if we’re having a rough go of it, Floyd up the creek probably is, too.
It’s an almost primal appreciation, one that gets increasingly easier to ignore with each day lived in this hectic time in history. I’m thankful for those people in my life who rekindle that appreciation in me when it begins to falter.
I’m sure I had somewhere to go that afternoon last fall, but I don’t remember where it was. What I do remember is the camaraderie and dumb jokes shared with old friends who sacrificed a few moments from their busy days to simply care.
As I slowly maneuvered my little red Hyundai through my friends’ cowherd, I couldn’t help but let a smile creep across my face.
Life was—and is—good.