I live in a small town in Kansas. Yesterday there was the yearly farm equipment auction at The Sale Barn (local name for a place that sells cattle the rest of the year.) I drove out there. Trucks were parked in the deep ditch alongside of the busy, 65 mph highway a quarter of a mile from the parking lot. People had been arriving since six A.M. I got there at around 11, so I took a chance and actually found a spot in the dirt, dusty parking lot.
I walked toward the fields that were packed with combines and tractors and Bobcats, parted out silos and farm implements, cattle chutes.
I gazed around at the hundreds of people, mostly men, almost all farmers. The salt of the earth. They all wore jeans and boots, or overalls, clean but well-worn with hard, demanding physical work. Almost all had a baseball hat or a cowboy hat setting comfortably on their heads.
Farmers never rest. The cattle have to be milked every day, at 6:00 a.m. sharp, seven days a week, without fail. Vacations are few and far between. The only excuse for not getting the milking done is if a tornado came through and blew everything away. Then it’s time to pick up and start over.
It was a beautiful, cloudless day. It would have been utter perfection, if not for the wind which was blowing like hell! But it was easy to find shelter among the gigantic machines perched on tires taller than me.
Occasionally you would catch a brief sense of the warm, light smell of cow manure wafting over the fields from the surrounding cattle pens. The black cattle, with tags in their ears, placidly stood in the large, one acre pens, chewing their cud, showing not the least bit of alarm at all of the hubbub. The horses, on the other hand, would prance and dance and gallop around their corrals until they just got tired. Then they’d walk up and stick their heads over the fence in curiosity. Some of them let the kids (and adults, like me!) rub their long noses. Others would skitter away, bucking and kicking up their heels if they were approached.
To one end of the fields were at least a hundred round bales of hay. Each one was about eight foot tall and eight foot long, and they were packed tightly together. They made up a playground for the kids five times bigger than a basketball court. Kids were scampering and jumping like goats, playing tag up there on their high-rise, hay bale, playing field. They’d lay down on one and roll into the crevice that two round bales made between themselves and lay for a second, just laughing. The kids who weren’t playing on the hay bales were sitting next to deep tractor ruts that had water in them, creating things out of the mud. Once I walked past rows of ginormous tractor tires, some stacked two and three high, up to five feet tall. Suddenly, on some command, tousled, giggling kid heads heads popped up out the middle of the tires, like Gophers Gone Wild, shouting at one another!
Kids were running in and down and around and out of the cattle chutes, playing on cattle feeders like they were monkey bars
The auctioneer’s voice could be heard from miles away, booming out through speakers mounted on a Gator (a little four wheel truck, kind of like a golf cart.) “I have threethousand,threethousand,dohear,threefive,threefive….HUP! Threefive! DoHearfour,four,four…HUP! Going, going….pause…And SOLD for Four Thousand!” There would be satisfaction on the face of the winner, and pained disappointment on those who just couldn’t or wouldn’t go any higher, because the tractor that sold for $4000 was worth $10,000 easy. That’s what auction is all about, getting a fantastic deal…OR ripping your own self off because you get lost in the moment and refuse to stop bidding! Here’s ours, The One That Got Away. It went for $1800 dollars. EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS! Makes me want to cry!! But..we weren’t there for a camper. We were there for a tractor…which we didn’t get either.
The equipment went for a couple of hundred dollars to a hundred-thousand plus, to be paid in cash. Those laid back farmers, those hard workin’, Good Old Boys in their dusty overalls and scruffy boots are among the richest people in the state.
I thought…“THIS is Kansas!” I know it wouldn’t be thrilling like the regular tourist places (of which I vote for Seattle,) but it was down home, earthy and just plain simple and good. The Heartland. I wish everyone could experience it, live it, breath it, just once.
Anyway, go to Seattle! Better yet, go the the country side in Washington State. It’s breathtaking scenery. And it doesn’t smell like cows. :) But it DOES smell like Sasquatch, so be careful.
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