Photo by Twila Nies
This seems to be a year filled with “big numbers.” My husband and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. I turned 70 at the end of 2023. And Al Gustin is celebrating his 50th year of writing his column for North Dakota Living.
Last fall, I had the pleasure of meeting Al and his lovely wife, Peggy, on a bus trip to Branson, Mo. It was surprising how much Al and I had to talk about, including the joys (and sometimes headaches) of writing a column. We agreed writing a column is like always having “homework” and always being on the lookout for “something” to write about. We laughed at some of our shared experiences being “noticed” around North Dakota.
I had brought a few of my novels along on the trip and I gifted one to Al and Peggy. A week later, I found a copy of Al’s book, “Al Gustin’s Farm Byline: Reflections on North Dakota Agriculture, 1974 to 2013,” in my mailbox. I set out to read it. Those columns were like opening a Pandora’s box full of memories.
Let me set the stage a bit. Most people who don’t know me well assume I’m a “city girl.” But, people who know me well know differently. An example: Shortly after my first novel was released, I got together with a good friend I don’t see often. As we slid into the café booth, she said to me, “Let me see your hands.” Weird request, but I complied, laying both hands, palms down on the tabletop. She looked at my hands and my short-clipped and unpolished fingernails, and gave a big sigh.
“Thank goodness,” she exclaimed. “If you had your nails polished, I would have known all of this (meaning having a book published) had gone to your head.”
Nope, I was still small-town “me.” While my dad was a banker, he was also a cattleman with a small farmstead and pastureland, which meant there were cattle (and fences) to check and weeds to spray. I often rode along in the pickup. We bounced along gravel roads and section lines. I learned how to open barbed-wire gates at the same time Dad was pointing out different breeds of cattle.
One of those trips is seared into my memory. On this trip, my dad brought my sisters and a cousin along to pick chokecherries in a shelterbelt across the fence from our pasture. Dad held up the barbed wire, while we carefully snaked beneath those flesh-eating prongs. We ran to the shelterbelt with our buckets and began picking those deep-maroon berries, sampling about as many as we put in the bucket. (If you’ve ever eaten chokecherries fresh off the branch, you know those first couple bites dry and pucker your mouth. Once you get past that, they are sweet like candy.)
All of a sudden, we heard a loud bellow coming from the other side of the fence, where my dad was with the pickup. A bull in the pasture had spotted us across the fence in the trees and did not like us being there. (The fact I was wearing a bright red jacket might not have helped matters.) He backed up, pawed the ground and then charged the fence!
I might have been 10 years old, but I can picture it like it was yesterday. We kids were frozen in place. Things like this only happened in cartoons, and this was no cartoon. The bull backed up and charged again, as the barbed-wire fence bent with his weight.
Dad jumped into action. He maneuvered the pickup between the bull and the fence, then pushed the furious bull waaaay back into the pasture. Dad hightailed it back to the fence, jumped out of the pickup, leaped the fence and raced to us hunkered behind the chokecherry bushes in the shelterbelt.
“Hurry up,” he urged, herding us toward the fence and the safety of the pickup. As we ran, he told me to take off my red coat. (That’s the moment I learned bulls hate the color red!) We belly-crawled under the fence and crowded into the pickup at the same moment the bull came running back.
I can see the next scene in my mind as clearly as if I was watching a replay. Dad started driving away from the fence just as the bull came charging full bore and rammed headfirst right into the grille of the pickup. Whomp! Even that didn’t stop the angry beast. He backed up and rammed us again. Not one to back down from a fight, Dad pushed on the accelerator and forced the bull backward. At that point, the danger was over, but it was head-to-head combat between an angry bull and an even angrier (and protective) Dad.
Dad won, as the bull finally turned tail and ran away.
Other columns of Al’s had me remembering “The Farmer” magazine to which my dad subscribed. He and I were both “readers,” and I always found something interesting to read in that farm news.
Who knew a book about farming, cattle prices, machinery and wheat prices could unleash so many memories in this “city girl,” who is a small-town girl at the core.
Al, thanks for the memories. And congratulations on 50 years of writing!
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Roxanne (Roxy) Henke still loves a bumpy ride in a pasture, checking fences, admiring crops and staying out of the way of any bulls!! You can contact her at roxannehenke@gmail.com.
