The Shop Door That Went to Kansas
A March gust took my shop door north across the state line, and the Kansas farmer who found it mailed me an invoice for storage.
Anybody who farms near Enid will tell you the wind here is not weather, it is a neighbor with opinions. One March afternoon it got up to fifty miles an hour out of the south, and I was standing in my shop doorway holding a coffee, which was my first mistake. The overhead door was twelve feet wide and the sort of thing you do not expect to see leave. It left. It peeled right off the track with a sound like a giant opening a can of sardines, rolled out across the yard, and went up over the hog fence like a kite.
I watched it sail north. That is not a figure of speech. A twelve-foot steel door, painted barn red, drifting over the section road with the grace of a pelican. It cleared two powerlines, a stand of cedars, and my neighbor's mailbox, which it rang like a bell on the way past. Then it was a red dot, then a dot, then a rumor. I finished my coffee, since there was nothing else to do, and I called the county to ask if a flying door was something they had a form for.
Three days later my phone rang. A farmer named Gus, who lives about forty miles up in Kansas, said he had a door in his alfalfa. He said it had landed flat, which saved the crop, and that it had a very polite look about it. I said it was mine. He said he figured, because the door had my shop number stenciled on it. He had put it in his machine shed, and he wanted to know how I planned to retrieve it, because he had already started using it as a shade for his dog.
I drove up with a flatbed. Gus met me at the gate with a handwritten invoice. Storage, three days, one door, he had charged me four dollars and a promise to send him some Oklahoma wheat seed. I paid the four dollars and I sent the seed. He wrote back that his dog missed the door. Last I heard, he had gone and bought the same model, painted it the same red, and he says it makes the shed feel like Oklahoma. We have had a tradition ever since. Every March I call Gus to ask if he got anything of mine, and every March he says give it a day. Even farm.FM has run a weather feature on our wind, and I will say the writers were being kind. I have also read a tractor and equipment guide on anchoring shop doors, and I recommend it to anyone downwind of me.