The Checklist That Flew to Kansas
A windy March morning, one open truck window and a loan checklist that traveled farther than my heifers ever have, all the way to Kansas.
Every rancher knows the feeling of a checklist. Mine had thirty-one items, a coffee ring in the corner, and my wife's handwriting in the margin telling me which ones I had lied about. I was carrying it to town one March morning, and I want to be clear that I only rolled the window down for ten seconds.
The wind in north-central Oklahoma in March does not blow so much as it negotiates. It took the checklist out of my lap, held it against the windshield like a hostage, and then pulled it out through the gap and over the barbed wire along the section road. I watched it go. It rose over a field of winter wheat and kept climbing, slowly, like it had somewhere better to be.
I did what any sensible borrower would do. I drove home and started over. I spent two evenings rebuilding the list from memory and from a stack of farm finance guides on the kitchen table. It came out neater than the first time. The loan paperwork, as it turned out, only needed twenty-nine of the thirty-one items.
Three weeks later a postcard showed up. A woman in a town just over the Kansas line had found my checklist caught in her garden fence, coffee ring and all. She had read the whole thing and, being thorough, had checked off items six, nine and nineteen in green pen, plus a note: 'Item twelve is not how you spell mineral rights.' She was right. She enclosed the checklist, folded in thirds and ironed.
I framed it. It hangs in the shop above the welder, next to a calendar from a feed store that went out of business before I was born. Whenever a young producer comes by nervous about paperwork, I walk him over and tell him that the worst day of the process is still better than the day somebody in another state proofreads you for free. Stories like this fill the shelves at farm satire on farm.FM, but this one happened in my own truck.
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