Udder End Farm

You can’t be a goat rancher without a truck. How could you haul your hay? I appreciate trucks. I guess I don’t really hang around with anybody who doesn’t appreciate trucks. I know a lady who hauls her goats in the back seat of her minivan. I have trouble, sometimes, remembering to respect her. Sometimes the goats end up driving the minivan, which indicates they have trouble respecting her too.

My daddy raised me on Fords. Back in the 60s and 70s when trucks were made out of substantial steel, he kept a fleet of very basic F150 2-wheel drives for his construction business. He drove them until the bodies rusted away. You could watch the pavement rushing by under your feet through the holes in the floor. Those trucks would rack up about a million miles and the skeletal remains would still be chuffing down the highway. My daddy was very loyal to Ford Motor Corporation. Before he built houses for a living, he built Ford factories. Daddy’s midlife crises exhibited itself in the purchase of a 1978 Chevy truck, automatic transmission, power windows and cloth seats, A/C and an FM radio- it was apocalyptic. It killed him- literally killed him, I mean. He died a year later. In my family there is some speculation about that. Just after that truck took up residence in our garage (Garage? He never kept trucks in the garage!) Daddy decided to teach me to drive. On the first lesson I ran drove his new Chevy over a cement mixer. I’ve always had a nagging suspicion that I was somehow responsible for Daddy’s demise.

I did not actually learn to drive until I was about 19. I fell deeply, passionately in love with a 1946 Willey’s Power Wagon painted turquoise blue. Scrolled in delicate pink letters just below the cable & pulley windshield wipers was the pronouncement “Cream Cheese”. Wow. Not only did I learn to drive it, I learned to disassemble that flathead 6 and put it back together in good time with a minimum of leftover parts. Cream Cheese didn’t mind a whit. She just kept on grinding down the road, up the road, off the road, or anywhere you pointed her. It’s too traumatic to remember the details, but somehow another jeep freak managed to talk me out of my blue baby. Ah, I was such a young fool! What a great goat hauling unit she would have been. I did not actually own livestock in those days, so I never found out how many goats, or bales of hay, you can stuff in a Willey’s wagon. If anyone knows, please pass that info my way.

When I started dating my husband he offered me the use of a real pickup truck. It was a big, ugly, blaze orange, Dodge Ram Beast. I can’t recall many technical details, but I remember some interesting ones. The heater had quit, so Eric mounted the fan unit of a Vega in the front seat, and the hoses ran under the steering wheel, out the side vent, and through a hole chopped into the hood. This truck was an automatic. Please understand that I have never learned to drive an automatic. To this day, I will persist in trying to step on the clutch at given RPMs and lock up the brakes. At the same time I drive off the road while fumbling around trying to find the gearshift. In spite of its size, the Beast was totally gutless. It would have struggled to carry a ton of hay on its back and I doubt it would ever pull a trailer full of goats. The coolest thing about it was the bullet holes- real bullet holes, not those silly little stickers. They ran all the way down the driver’s side (over the gas tank). The previous owners of The Beast were a pair of wealthy Mennonite pig farmer’s sons from Edina, with a passion for automatic weapons and dirt bikes. I happened to be present the day they were out shooting up a remote corner of wilderness, and one of them popped a few rounds into the door.
“Hey!” yells Mikey, “you just shot the truck!”
“Yeah!” screams Phil, “that’s a real cool noise!”
They looked at each other meaningfully for a minute, laughed maniacally, and simultaneously opened fire on the Beast. I used to get a kick out of telling people my boyfriend got mad at me and shot up my truck as I was making an escape for my life.
Well, he married me anyway.

My mother passed away about this time, bequeathing me her Mustang and a small stipend. I bought myself a Thoroughbred horse with the cash. I need to explain that even though a Mustang is not a truck, you can carry four bales of hay in the trunk. A Mustang is not a 4-wheel drive either, which is what you need to get out of the barnyard after you have unloaded the four bales of hay from the trunk. I found good home for the Mustang and kept the Thoroughbred.

I applied the Mustang money to my very own first real Pickup Truck, paid in full, titled in my name. I purchased it from a little old oilfield company hand that only drove it to the shop and back 4 days a week, with a mere 19,000 miles on her. She was, incidentally, a Ford; a 1986 F250 4wheel drive (lock in hubs) in nondescript desert tan. She had a fuel injected 460 V8 and pulled my brand new 5-horse slant load trailer (custom built and painted to match the Truck) up and over these great Rocky Mountains without a sigh at 17 miles to the gallon. I was so proud of that Truck! I remember the first time I looked under the hood. I had never seen a fuel injected engine before. I thought space aliens were nesting in there, and they had eaten my carburetor. It was at that point I began paying someone else to change my oil. Cream Cheese had not prepared me for a post-modern world.

She was a fine and faithful Truck. She and I, the horses, and the first wave of goats logged about 35,000 each year until the kids (two-legged) arrived. I still have nightmares about the untimely destruction of my Truck. Tooling into town one afternoon prior to hunting season, I swerved to get a closer look at a couple of promising mule deer, and took an unscheduled flight through Doug Dembowski’s mule pasture. Encountering some turbulence, we bounced over and over and over. It seemed to last about 20 minutes. I struck up a little conversation with God in the next seat while we were in the holding pattern. God suggested I consider the merits of seat belts. I crawled out from under the remains of my truck with a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, and a new religion. Thus it was I entered my Toyota phase.

I did have a choice, it’s true. We owned a fairly new F250 extended cab, which we used to haul our water. It was a large lumbering vehicle, expensive to operate and too big to park anywhere. In fact, it is still hauling our water faithfully, although it has not improved in character over the years. I didn’t want to drive it back then anymore than I do now.
I chose the Hurtling Death Wagon instead. My husband had somewhere acquired a sporty little SE-5 extended cab with, of all things, a camper shell. I guess he hoped to use it for a hunting buggy. Hah! The fiend who previously owned it had apparently rolled it into Doug Dembowski’s mule pasture at some point, because it sported more Bondo than sheet metal. He also did a 12 inch suspension lift on it with his own three hands -we had to bend the mount brackets to install the shocks. The children and I would undulate rhythmically down the road and sway wildly around corners while enjoying the view from our lofty heights. During hunting season we’d put on a set of 32 inch Super Swampers and it was like driving a DC-3 down the highway. Of course it couldn’t pull my trailer, but we loaded our goats into the camper shell, opened the back sliders and, Voila! Air conditioned goats! With the camper shell on and the tailgate down I could stuff 18 bales of hay in there. It was kinda fun, but I guess it made Eric a little nervous.

I will always remember the day my darling hubby took me down to the dealer and told me to pick out a shiny new MommyMobile. I received my very first, fresh-off-the-showroom-floor new truck. I will never be able to explain why I chose another Toyota. What was I thinking? How could I pull a trailer? How fast were those children’s legs growing? Maybe at the time I considered letting Mr. Nice Guy borrow it for hunting. It was a nice little truck: easy to park, reliable, good gas mileage, and it would pull a two horse trailer with one small horse in it. That Toyota would reliably convey 24 bales of hay or forty bags of goat feed, three Petersons, and two violins any time, any where. It had a CD player. I stuck it out for almost 3 years. I hit my first deer, ever. Then I proceeded to hit 4 more deer. The last deer attacked my truck and jumped on the hood after I came to a complete stop in the road. My daughters grew legs 5 feet long.

It was during this time that I began showing Boer goats. I admit that it was all a diabolical plot to get my husband involved. My Toyota wouldn’t pull the big trailer full of goats. I learned, stranded on a remote mountain pass, that the old water truck wouldn’t haul the trailer full of goats. Hubby’s truck was the only vehicle that would safely tow a trailer full of goats, and since he couldn’t bring his boat and my trailer at the same time, he might as well go along- quietly- to the goat shows.

A little over a year ago newspapers began appearing all over my house. A series of mysterious phone calls were made. Pads of paper covered with figures were left lying around. One night Hubby made his announcement.

“I need a tax deduction. You need a truck. Go down there and get a new Dodge. That Cummins diesel is a known quantity and it’ll haul your goats anywhere you want to take them. I’m going fishing.” He had to repeat himself twice.

Despite the fact that it seemed to be fashioned from plastic and pop cans, that truck cost more than some small homes in our local marketplace. That’s interesting when I think about it; as I homeschool our girls, what their music, their orthodontics, and their other little hobbies, not to mention my goat herd, it seems as if we have come to spend a lot of time actually living in the truck. I chose a well loaded quad cab, silver to hide the dust, cloth seats, power windows, standard transmission. I was terrified as I drove it around the dealer’s parking lot, refusing to take the thing out onto a city street. A Dodge clutch is not a Ford clutch, and certainly not a Toyota clutch. I had never even ridden in a thing that large in my entire life. She looked about 17 feet wide from where I sat and seemed to occupy 3½ lanes. She was very big, very shiny, and very, very nice. I dubbed her the QE2, drove her home over the mountain and hitched up the trailer. The next morning she and I hauled 2 kids (two-legged) and 20 of my finest goats up I-15, through Salt Lake, on Friday, July 3rd. We hit Provo at the 5:00 PM rush hour, and it might as well have been Houston or Denver. Did I mention I’m not a city driver? My relationship with God reached an entirely new level. By the time I returned home the following Monday my whole life had transformed in some very mysterious ways. Hoo-HUH! It was at that point I began paying someone else to keep my truck washed and detailed. The world was not prepared for a post-Toyota Jeanie.

That sure was a beautiful truck. I just couldn’t bear the thought of loading it full of hay and scuffing the wax job. Maybe I was just a little too proud. Ya know, in an instant, your whole life can change. You can go from having legs to having no legs. In a single moment you can go from life to death. In the blink of an eye, you can take an unscheduled trip through Doug Dembowksi’s mule pasture, and go from having the biggest, shiniest, nicest, thing in town to having a… farm truck. 4 strands of barbed wire and 286 feet of mature sagebrush will make the most beautiful truck in the world look just like a working farm truck. You don’t even want to know what I was blinking at.

It’ll still haul my goats anywhere I want to take them. I have no problem loading on 48 bales of hay; and just think of all the money I’m saving on detailing.