Dear County Agent Guy

by Jerry Nelson

  We would haul away on the twine until our fingers felt like they were breaking and our arms threatened to pop out of their sockets. Calling a veterinarian to help was deemed an outrageous extravagance, on par with sprinkling caviar on your oatmeal.

  One day, when my wife and I were still pretty much newlyweds, I noticed that one of our heifers was lying on her side out in the cattle yard, striving mightily to deliver a calf. I could see that the heifer had little to no chance of succeeding without assistance. It was as if a Mack truck were trying to squeeze through the kitchen door.

  I summoned my “town girl” bride and dug through the twine pile until I found a good, strong baling twine. I had just snuck the slipknot over the calf’s front legs when the heifer glanced back and suddenly noticed that a pair of creepy humans were messing around with her nether regions.

  The bovine sprang to her feet and tore across the mucky cattle yard at a brisk gallop. She seemed not to notice that my wife and I were being towed along behind her. It was kind of fun, actually.

  Sort of like water skiing, only in mud.

  The heifer would stop to push whenever she was overcome by a contraction. My wife and I pulled so hard that our fingers turned purple and our arms lengthened by several inches.

  Did I mention that my wife was eight months pregnant at the time? I figured, what the heck, the more ballast, the better.

  The heifer dragged us alongside the fence, no doubt hoping to shred her human tormentors on the barbed wire. When she stopped for a contraction, I whipped the twine around a wooden post and took a quick wrap. When the contraction was over, the heifer tried to run off and the calf popped out like a cork from a champagne bottle. The heifer then galloped away, leaving us to deal with her sputtering newborn.

  My wife looked down at her manure-spattered clothes. “Are you sure this is how it’s done?” she asked.

  “Nope, we got lucky this time. The next one will likely be a lot tougher!”

  “Well, I’m not going to do this ever again!” she snapped as she slogged out of the cattle yard. She was so upset, I figured it wouldn’t be a good time to point out that she had lost a shoe.

  But she was right. The next day, a sparkling new calf puller mysteriously appeared in the barn. A debit in the checking account for approximately the price of a calf puller appeared later that week.

  I guess that’s the price of progress. •

  Adventures in Cow Herding

  A vast assortment of slogans pass for wisdom on bumper stickers, but I like one I saw many moons ago that declared, “Cows don’t give milk. It’s taken from them by force.”

  That sentiment could be interpreted a couple of different ways. Being a dairy farm kid, my first thought was “Right on. Dairy farming is a tough job and it’s about time we got some recognition.”

  I was so moved, I considered writing a letter to my congresspersons stating that dairy farmers deserved to be honored. But then someone informed me that this is why we have June Dairy Month.

  When I was a kid, the arrival of June meant many good things. It meant no more school, no more morning bus to catch, the suspension of scheduled bathing, and generally reverting to an untamed state. But above all, June meant the beginning of the grazing season.

  We had a pasture, but also took advantage of the free fodder growing in our road ditches.

  The ditches that bracket our roads are a gift from civil engineers. Roads—even the humblest gravel avenue—were all brought into being via a long process of scraping and packing and grading the soil. A common practice for a township thoroughfare was to construct a “two-rod road.” This is a road that measures two rods—thirty-three feet—from each side of dead center.

  The ditches that keep our township gravel roads drained are somewhat of a no-man’s land. The landowner pays taxes on all the ground up to the center of the road, but because of erosion concerns, isn’t supposed to farm past the imaginary two-rod line. However, haying or grazing the ditches is perfectly acceptable.

  Grazing cattle in the road ditches was actually possible when I was a kid due to the fact that barbwire fences still marked every two-rod line. Back then, it was unimag­inable that farmland would ever become so valuable that fences would be ripped out so that every possible square inch could be tilled.

  Herding our Holsteins in the ditches took a bit of planning, along with a crack cow-handling team. This team often consisted of my sister Di and me.

  To the layman, our job may have seemed simple, consisting mainly of heading out ahead of the herd as they munched their way southward from our farmstead. When the cows reached the end of our gravel road, it was up to us to turn the bossies around and encourage them to head back toward home.

  We had tools to help us with this very vital job, the main ones being sticks that we would wave threateningly at the cows. These were backed up by pebbles gathered from the edge of the gravel road. If our shouting and the waving of our sticks didn’t convince our cows that they needed to turn back, we would reinforce our message by winging pebbles at them.

  Herding was usually a fairly tame experience. Di and I had ample time to talk about all manner of things as we kept a weather eye on the cows and enlarged our pebble arsenal.

  The cows would at first frisk around, relishing their newfound freedom. But it wasn’t long before they became serious about the task of gobbling grass. As the cows gulped down the luscious greenery, Di explained how cattle have the ability to eat now and chew later. As a teenager, I attempted to duplicate this feat numerous times but without success.

  One June, when I was maybe seven, Di and I were making our way south from the farmstead. King, our German shepherd, had volunteered to tag along; owing to the “shepherd” part of his pedigree, we assumed he would prove an able assistant.

  As we passed a culvert, King began to snoop obsessively at one end of the huge tube. A horrible cacophony of snarls, squeals, and growls erupted from the ditch. King had engaged in battle with a giant raccoon.

  A blur of fur rolled up onto the gravel road. It was difficult to see who was winning; the raccoon was nearly as big as King and was obviously an experienced scrapper. Di and I could do nothing but watch from what we thought was a safe distance, gathering large pebbles and hoping that the melee would resolve in King’s favor; we had no idea how an angry and wounded coon might react to the sight of a pair of kids armed with sticks and fistfuls of pebbles.

  News of the battle thundered across the prairie on an expanding shock wave of roars and yelps. The cows halted their grazing and froze in midchew. They stared with bovine fascination, clumps of slobbery grass dangling from their mouths.

  The hurricane of caterwauling boiled across the steaming gravel road until King at last gained the upper hand. Seeing an opening, he seized the colossal raccoon by its throat and pinned it to the ground. The masked varmint was soon reduced to an inert bag of mangy fur and broken bones. Our cows, sensing that the show was over, calmly resumed grazing.

  Such a thing never happened again, so I guess the word must have gone out in the raccoon community that King was indeed Canis rex.

  Remarkable and scary as that incident was, it wasn’t without an upside. Because it proved to me that producing milk can sometimes involve a great deal of noise, along with some very high drama. •

  Domestic Lessons

  My wife says that when we first met one of the things she found attractive about me was that I had been “pre-trained.” Specifically, she found it appealing that I had grown up in a family of five sisters and had thus been exposed to the lofty standards of behavior that females expect, such as no spitting in the house and closing the bathroom door before you settle in to make a boom-boom.

  In addition to such things, we boys (I have two brothers) were also taught how to cook and do laundry. If you were a male growing up on our dairy farm, you had to possess a Swiss Army knife–like skill set, cap
able of sorting cattle in the morning, clothes in the afternoon.

  I’m not complaining. On the contrary, learning how to perform domestic chores came in handy when, for a few years, I led the life of a Norwegian bachelor farmer. It was useful to know which household tasks—such as extinguishing a grease fire—required immediate attention and which jobs could be put off until later. For instance, who, exactly, cares about the petrified spaghetti that has glued itself to the couch cushion? It’s not as if the president is going to drop by!

  One of the earliest domestic lessons I learned was how to whip up enough pancakes to feed ten people.

  It somehow became a tradition at our house to have a Sunday evening supper of pancakes and bacon. Perhaps it was a subliminal echo of Sunday morning church services with its Communion wafers and syrupy wine.

  When Sunday evening’s cow-milking operations hit the halfway mark, which meant there was less than an hour left before we were done, I would be sent to the house to construct a pancake supper. Our pancake recipe is a snap: two of everything except for the sugar, which is a third of a cup.

  Getting the batter right is an art. Too runny and your pancakes will be thin as Bible leaves; too thick and your flapjacks will be tough and doughy and will have approximately the same density as lead.

  We had a massive cast iron griddle that could accommodate six pancakes at a time. Gauging the proper griddle temperature is a marriage of magic and science. When a droplet of water (or spit; not that I would know anything about that) hisses and bounces across the griddle, it’s ready.

  As the pancakes piled up in quantities that were measured by the foot, I was also frying mounds of bacon. One spring, Dad took a skinny old sow to the butcher shop and she bestowed us with strips of bacon that were nearly a yard long and lean as shoe leather. Just as tough, too.

  The objective was for supper to be on the table by the time milking was finished. We could thus be done eating by the time Bonanza came on.

  Bonanza was a popular television Western about a single dad who was struggling to raise a family under difficult conditions. And by “difficult” I mean “on a replica of the Old West frontier as envisioned by Hollywood set designers.”

  Bonanza detailed the travails of the red-blooded, all-American Cartwright clan. Its rugged, steely-eyed patriarch was portrayed by Lorne Greene, a Canadian actor who was of Russian descent. The Cartwrights employed a cook named Hop Sing, a Chinese gentleman who neither hopped nor sang.

  Our pancake supper would be narfed down swiftly and our family would gather around the TV. We didn’t want to miss a millisecond of our time with the Cartwrights!

  The cast of Bonanza were all guys, so there was a lot of manly action, such as fistfights, gunslinging, and posse chasing. Despite the distinct lack of feminine influences in the Cartwright household, none of the guys ever sat on the couch and clipped their toenails with a hedge trimmer or excavated navel lint with barbecue tongs. They were a pretty genteel bunch.

  A female love interest would occasionally pop up on the show, but the gals never stayed for long. Ben, the paterfamilias, had buried three wives; perhaps the ladies got wind of this and wisely decided that attempting to domesticate the Cartwright guys wasn’t worth the risk.

  Some years later, I was living the life of a Norwegian bachelor farmer when I acquired my own love interest. One Sunday evening, I invited the young woman out to my humble little dairy farm for a home-cooked supper.

  I was in a tizzy regarding what to serve the young lady. But then my boyhood domestic training kicked in and I decided to whip up a batch of pancakes and fry a pound of bacon. When all was ready, I nervously set it before my lady friend. I was worried about what she would think of my feeble offering. Would she turn up her nose and proclaim that such a supper—and by extension, I—was lame?

  “This is wonderful,” cooed the woman who would soon become my wife as she poured syrup over a heap of flapjacks. “How did you know that we used to have this at our house every Sunday night?” •

  My New Address

  I’ve got a new address, don’tcha know.

  Like many who live out in the country, we have recently been assigned one of those new-fangled “E-911” addresses. Up until a few years ago, our address was simply Rural Route 1, Box 38. This has been replaced by a set of impersonal numbers that are similar to those that are used for urban addresses. We now even have signposts at the intersections of our township roads that denote streets and avenues! What manner of urbanized hell will come next? A Starbucks at the end of my driveway? Is Google Earth behind all of this?

  In the name of modernization and efficiency, I am now burdened with yet another set of numbers to remember. As though I didn’t have enough integers rattling around in my head with stuff like my Social Security and my driver’s license, and then there’s my wedding anniversary, which of course is . . . um . . . Excuse me for a moment. I seem to have this sudden urge to run out and buy my wife a romantic greeting card.

  One of the problems I have with this new address is the fact that it sounds so much less pastoral than the old “Rural Route” system. I often have trouble convincing city folks that I really do live out in the middle of the boondocks.

  Another problem is the system they used for numbering the streets and avenues. Apparently, they started with a street called “First” somewhere around the equator and worked north from there. The net result for me is a street address that reads about like the value of pi when it’s divided out a dozen places or so. It’s enough to arouse concern about the so-called efficiency of this system.

  Hysterical woman: We have an emergency! Send help!

  Dispatcher: Keep calm, ma’am. Just give me your New and Improved address and we’ll send someone right out.

  Woman (near panicking): Um, let’s see . . . It’s 5280 31427th Street. No, wait. I think it’s 31427 5280th Street. Yeah, that’s it!

  Dispatcher: Okay, so you’re saying we should send someone out to 3180 52427th Street? Or was it 52480 3127th Street?

  Compare that to the old system, where an emergency call might go like this:

  Caller: Send help! This is Alma Klinkhammer and we live on the old Jensen place!

  Dispatcher: Okay, Alma, stay calm. Now, which Jensen place is it? The “Tramp” Jensen place or the “Crazy” Jensen place?

  Caller: I don’t recall . . .

  Dispatcher: Well, “Tramp” was the one who always had that three-legged dog following him around, and “Crazy” was the one who kept that big flock of sheep.

  Caller: Oh. Send them out to Tramp’s, then. Say, didn’t those boys have a sister named Olga?

  Dispatcher: Why yes, I believe they did. Isn’t she the one who ran away with the Tattoed Man from the circus when she was sixteen?

  Caller: Yeah, that’s the one! And didn’t their father have a glass eye? . . .

  My wife, being a city girl, had her own problems with conquering the fine art of navigating out in the country. I soon discovered that telling her things like “turn at the Mannerud corner” didn’t help her any.

  Once, shortly after we married, I asked my wife if she could bring dinner out to me at a distant piece of land I was farming. She replied, “Sure, just tell me how to get there.” I began instructing her as to how you go four miles south, then three west, when she interrupted me.

  “Just tell me how many blocks it is and cut out that silly east or west crap. You think I’m a ship’s captain or something? Just say where you go left or right like any normal person would.”

  My wife was eventually able to forge her own system for navigating around the countryside; if things had been left up to her, we would have street names like “Rock Pile on the Hill Avenue” and “Old Corn Picker in the Weeds Street.” And the road we live on might be known as “Dead Skunk in the Ditch Boulevard.”

  But, alas, it appears as though we country folks, in th
e name of progress, are going to be stuck with these new and improved yet cold and impersonal addresses. Now I have another set of numbers to memorize, along with my zip code, checking account, blood type, wife’s birthday, and . . . um . . . Just a minute here. I seem to have been seized by this sudden urge to call the florist and have something sent to my wife.

  And you know, I think I’ll tell them to deliver it out to our farm, which is otherwise known as the old Charlie Sween place. If the delivery driver doesn’t happen to know where that is, just tell him that we live a mile east of Heppler’s slough and half a mile north of the Mannerud farm. And should he become lost, simply send him the GPS coordinates of that new Starbucks at the end of my driveway. •

  Old Frank

  When my wife and I first started farming, we rented a half-section of land from an old guy named Frank. Frank was well into his eighties by then, and rumor had it that he was a millionaire.

  Old Frank had a unique way of communicating with people. For instance, if he were to say, “I know a guy who should check his zipper,” it probably meant that my fly was open. Or he might say, “I don’t mean to tell you your business but . . .” and then he would go ahead and tell me my business.

  His business advice was always augmented with an earthy, homespun yarn concerning a profitable exploit he had pulled off during his four score years of living. I found these parables enlightening and entertaining at first, but after hearing them a dozen or more times, they lost much of their charm. I could never decide if Old Frank’s memory was slipping or if he merely enjoyed the act of telling stories.

  And I suppose there was some valuable advice hidden somewhere in those stories. Especially if I ever decided to buy land during a Great Depression or wanted to sell fat hogs to the Department of Defense during the Second World War. But no matter what the content of his anecdote, he invariably ended it with “And I never made so darn much money in my entire life!”