There's a little convenience store in easy walking distance of the hotel. Being two time zones west of home, it's easy for me to be an early riser here, and so yesterday morning at oh-dark-thirty local, I toddled over there to pick up some sundries.
The parking lot was full of serious working trucks, real cowboy Cadillacs, and the little tables inside were packed with weathered men in gimme caps bearing feed company logos, talking about whatever it is that men who have serious hands-on experience in fixing tractors talk about before sunrise.
It may be a thousand and more miles from the middle of the Hoosier state, and the accents and specific crop details may have been different, but it was like seeing Farmer Frank's blog come to life.
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Sounds like a great place to have a cup of coffee and chat with the locals. It's always interesting to just sit quietly, listen and learn about what's happening in their part of the world and how they feel about it.
I had to wait for one of those damn tractor things to get out of the way yesterday so I could get out on the road.
Traffic around here is getting worse and worse. :)
Sounds like the BS Cafe a block away from me here in Clovis, CA. Hmmmm biscuits & Gravy would be good this morning.
Reminds me of many a morning in little towns here in the western US.
The morning coffee table is to farmers, what the water cooler or coke machine and microwave is the software engineer, or the break room to a Wal-Mart employee.
A break for breath, to relax a moment and glance at the horizon for clouds, rain and such, to find out how others are coping with the latest political foibles and other vermin. This can amount to daily and long term information gathering, in preparation for making plans and decisions.
Especially if all the pie is gone.
I used to love hanging out at the truck stop in the morning with my grandfather visiting with and listening to all the working men before they headed out for a hard day.
Almost as much fun was finding out where grandma and her friends were meeting for their early afternoon tea. Even if none of them drank tea.
Even now when I go home to that little town I stop by the bakery in the morning and ask the lady behind the counter "Where's tea held these days?" It seems to move around every couple months. Then show up there around 1:30PM. It is the fastest way to find all my great-aunts, cousins, etc together in one place.
Are you walking around South Park saying "Oh, my God, they killed Kenny!"?
Shootin' Buddy
One Fall a few decades back, I took my first trip west of the Mississippi - into Wyoming, even! I still recall the amazing experience of driving all night (with my fellow students) and stopping for breakfast in the middle of absolute nowhere - defined as most of eastern Wyo - and seeing three dozen folks dining in camo with their rifles on the seats next to them. Hunting season had started that day!
Thats my breakfast most mornings.
@west- I'm an hour from you, in Hanford.
Farmers are farmers wherever you go, from the sugar cane fields around Lake Okeechobee where I grew up, to the midwestern corn growers who retire in gobs in central FL where I am now, and out West as you have observed.
One does wonder just how long they can keep doing what they do the way that they do, in light of stories like this:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/06/141114446/why-158-acres-of-corn-costs-1-5-million
The degree of cluelessness and irony contained in that piece would be hysterically funny if it wasn't so damn scary and sad. Listening to it in my truck yesterday I arrived home but sat in the driveway until it was over; I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Thank you TAM. I consider that comparison to be High Praise. I'm an outdoor person, but not the kind who wears the latest fashion trend camo or claims to have taken the biggest fish or fowl. I'm a Farmer and to be included in with the company of taciturn ranchers and cowboys (the REAL variety, not the drugstore type) is High Praise Indeed.
Thank you...
All The Best,
Frank W. James
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