Two Identical Pickups at the Co-op
I drove home in a stranger's white Ford with a stranger's dog, and the stranger drove home in mine, and nobody noticed for forty miles.
Every farmer in Garfield County drives a white three-quarter-ton Ford with a toolbox across the bed, and for years I figured this was a coincidence. It is not. It is a conspiracy, and the dealership is in on it. I walked out of the co-op one morning with a fifty-pound sack of mineral, set it down in the back of my truck, and climbed in the cab, which smelled nothing at all like mine.
It smelled like cinnamon gum. I have never owned cinnamon gum. There was a dog in the passenger seat, a big yellow one with a ball in its mouth, and he looked at me with total acceptance. I said hello. He said nothing, being polite. I figured my wife had gotten a dog and not told me, which is a thing she has done before, and I started the engine, which turned over, and drove forty miles home to the farm.
Meanwhile, on the other end of this story, a farmer named Ray had climbed into my truck, which he thought was his, and he had gone home with a toolbox full of my wrenches and a seat covered in my sunflower seed shells. He drove straight to his barn, unloaded a sack of my mineral onto his own pile, and did not catch on until his wife called and asked who the dog belonged to. The dog, it turns out, was Ray's, and was sitting in my kitchen eating my wife's leftover chicken.
We met halfway, in the parking lot of a diner in Hennessey, and swapped trucks in the rain like a spy movie. Ray handed me a ball slobbered past recognition. I handed him a thermos he had apparently been drinking from for two hours. We shook hands and agreed to paint a stripe on our tailgates, mine orange, his green. Then we found out that three more farmers in the county had already done the same thing, and we had ended up with the same stripes. The farming stories on farm.FM would call this a classic, but I would call it a gap in the dealership's imagination.
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