This will be the last installment of “At the Docs” until I get back I reckon…

It was early afternoon, and I was back to tilling trees.  The two weeks were nearly over, and I mostly tried to stay numb.  I had developed an uneasy truce with everything the Good Doctor still let me use, and I hadn’t made a serious blunder for a couple of days.  That actually made my apprehension worse.

But I was back on the little Kubota garden tractor with the little till behind me.  It had been fun the first day, until I tilled the trees.  I had always wanted to drive a cute little tractor like that, ’cause all we had were bigger ones Continue Reading

We went to the saddle barn, where I got the opportunity to inspect my mount more closely.  He was a red roan, and his name was Rusty.

I am sure that in the history of the West, there have been a hundred thousand red roan horses named Rusty.  This particular horse’s name could just as easily have been “Dusty,” because he looked like he’d spent the last hundred years in someone’s attic.

We brushed him off, and I was disgusted to find that, save for his black mane, tail and socks he was the exact same color as the Hail Mary Swather.  Physically, he was long, tall and gaunt, with spindly crooked legs, and a long wolfy head.

It was clear the moment my butt hit the saddle that I had absolutely no control over Rusty.  I was astraddle of a thunderbolt, and I am not one bit ashamed to admit that I wanted off.

We started down a section-line trail, at a fast trot.  Rusty was setting the pace.  I had the reins fiddle-string tight, and he was fighting the bit, trying to go faster.  The good Doctor rode off to the right of me on his mule, and the dog trailed behind us. Continue Reading

One morning several days into my term of employment, I woke to find that it had rained in the night.

I was getting to the point where I hated to open my eyes.  Every time I opened my eyes, it was the start of twelve to fourteen hours of disasters.  By this time I had, in no particular order, tilled several of the good Doctor’s trees Continue Reading

I got the chance yesterday to visit a place I hadn’t been to for twelve years, a place where I worked for two weeks each in the summers of ‘95 and ‘96.  It brought back a whole flood of memories of those four weeks, so I think I’m going to do almost a mini-novel of my experience.  Here we go…

I drove into Dr. Kovarik’s yard yesterday, and the first thing I saw was the Hail Mary Swather.  Like an old lady at gymnastics class, she was trying to give the appearance that she could do a full days work.

The Hail Mary Swather was an old lady when I met her in ‘95.  My dad volunteered me to work on Dr. Kovarik’s ranch for two weeks that summer.

It was really fitting, in a way, because it was like paying for my birth Continue Reading

This story is for my buddy Jim Thorp, who is very proud of the fact that he is the “only Yale graduate to work at Wall Drug.”

I too worked at Wall Drug.  I have always had terrible allergies to hay, which made summer very difficult for me on the ranch.  When I was a kid, I would mow the lawn, check cows and fix fence while everybody else hayed.

Of  course these days we have cabs on almost all of our haying equipment, but back then we didn’t.  So when I graduated from high school in 1997, I went to work at the world famous Wall Drug Store.  I worked there from June of ‘97 through the summer of ‘98, and again in the summer of ‘99.

As jobs at Wall Drug go Continue Reading