Trail of friends

I have repeatedly said the best thing about what I have done in the past quarter of the century is develop a great network of friends. Nothing matters more than having people you can call in a time of need and they drop everything to help.

Recently I had to call on friends in a time of pickup troubles. I loaded a bull to take to North Dakota and from there I planned to head to the North Dakota Horse Park for a celebration by The Wall of Honor for our nation’s veterans. I was just about to Lebanon, South Dakota, when the strangest noise I had ever experienced in a vehicle occurred. I wasn’t sure exactly what happened until I looked under the hood and it looked like the back of the engine had blown completely off. This black dually was clearly toast. It did not owe me anything as it had close to 560,000 miles when it blew.

I was sitting on the side of U.S. Highway 212 when a nice couple from Minnesota stopped as they were driving through but couldn’t be of much help in their sedan. Instead of stressing, I decided to just sit a minute and think about who I knew that lived close. The first person that came to mind was the guy who chewed me out the last time I had pickup problems in this area and didn’t call him. Custom harvester Perry Hoffman lives about 45 minutes from where this happened and was ready to send a truck to save me but he also knew whose yard I was sitting in front of.

So, as I started walking out into the field to talk to some guys I saw baling hay, a pickup came my way driven by Mike DeRouchey, brother of longtime family friend Fred DeRouchey. Mike pulled me off the highway into his yard and suggested that it might be easier for me to just borrow his pickup to finish my bull delivery so I was off and rolling after a two-hour delay. I needed to call some people in Minnesota because when I got done in Fargo I was supposed to be a part of the Minnesota Summer Beef Tour. I called organizer Angie Ford and told her I would be back in Gettysburg, South Dakota, at 8 p.m. on Saturday and if she wanted me at their event she would need to figure out how to get me to Minnesota on Sunday and back to Nebraska on Wednesday. Twenty minutes later she had a plan and Ryan Verlinde from Tracy, Minnesota, would be calling me.

Verlinde called me and he knew exactly who to call in Gettysburg, South Dakota, who had connections to Minnesota that may be willing to let me borrow a pickup. I can’t say thank you enough to Verlinde for introducing me to Tregg Cronin who not only had a spare pickup but also a reason to come to Minnesota to retrieve it. So I finally arrived in Minnesota for the two-day event and just needed to figure out how to get back to Nebraska.

As luck would have it Verlinde has a sister that lives in central Kansas who was planning to attend the beef event and go right past my house on her way back home. It is almost like the grand plan was for me to leave home with that pickup and meet a host of new friends who are now part of the network without any clue what benefits may actually arise because of what, on the outset, looked to be a total disaster actually turned out to be just the opposite. I even found a guy to pull my gooseneck trailer back home to Nebraska on his next trip.

The truth of the matter is that all of this happened because of the amazing people in my life. Today we talk so much about corruption and people who don’t share our values. I suggest we pause for a moment and think about how many great people there are in this world that we are lucky enough to call our friends. By God’s design, I had a few old friends who led me to a whole string of new friends and now I will await the phone call from any of them with an opportunity that will allow me to return the favor.

This journey is truly a trail of friends.

Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the views of High Plains Journal. Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].