My 9-year old daughter, Piper, didn’t want to hear the story again. Neither did my wife, Emily, for that matter. But this morning at breakfast as my 6-year old daughter, Stella, was reading a school book about pigs, I couldn’t help but think about my dad and something he taught me back in high school that I hated at the time but have come to cherish ever since he passed away from cancer in 2005.
As many of you know, I am the youngest of 11 kids — 7 boys, 4 girls. I grew up splitting time between Nebraska and Oregon — born in Nebraska, moved to Oregon when I was 4, and then moved back to Nebraska right after my freshman year of high school, only to return to Oregon years later. That time in life was both exciting and sad. Exiting to come into my own as a teenager. Sad for the fact that my world was quickly changing to the unknown. Thinking of uprooting to the midwest, I pictured horse and buggies, cowboy boots and black and white TV channels. Instead, making that move from the college town of Corvallis to a village of 600 people in Northeast Nebraska taught me everything and more about community, the “Simple Life” and the endless benefits of putting in a hard days work.
See, growing up I was scared of my dad. Not in a fearful abusive way but more about respecting his authority. As the youngest of 11 kids I had the benefit of watching what to do and say and what not to do and say by how he handled my older brothers and sisters if/when they pushed it.
It wasn’t because he was mean or anything — strict, but a caring provider who lived and worked hard for our family, clung deeply to faith and had an unwavering drive to simply get shit done. You have to be with that many mouths to feed. The man was a machine. He’d work a graveyard shift at the papermill and then add a double-shift on top of that. He worked at Oregon State University as a janitor, dabbled in being a tailor and I’m sure there were odd and end jobs I didn’t even realize were going on. In elementary school and middle school, I can remember seeing my dad as I walked home from school at 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon and he’d be driving to work. With a quick wave and emotionless expression, he was on his way.
I was stoked.
Not because I didn’t want to be with my dad, throw the baseball or football around. But because I knew he wouldn’t be around to put me to work. Man, if he saw us kids without something to do — he’d give us something to do. There was no such thing as just sitting around or “being bored”. Once he was home from work, he was back to work. He’d repair the house, cut firewood, keep bees, clean the house and tinker in the garage forever ever. I know some of my brothers and sisters are reading this right now flashing back to Saturday mornings and having dad hand out cleaning assignments around the house. Us boys were either pulling weeds or picking up rotten apples from the front yard, while the girls were “cleaning” the house (translation: watching American Bandstand).
I never got the inside shift.
I can remember my dad losing his job at the papermill in Corvallis. Lay offs and pay cuts. I’m not sure what other jobs he looked for at that time, but in his mind it was time to go home. I’ll never forget overhearing my mom and dad deciding it was what was best for the family. He had no time to sit us down and gently explain why we were about to leave our friends and life behind to start anew. Besides, it’s not like our vote mattered anyway.
We left two weeks later.
By the time we moved to Nebraska in 1990, it was just me and my next oldest sister still living at home.
My dad and I and our dog (a boxer named Tippy) packed up the Ryder moving truck one early summer day and made the 1,300 mile drive from Corvallis to Beemer, about 2 hours Northeast of Omaha . We drove straight through for 19-hours, only stopping for gas, a quick overlook spot in Idaho and Wyoming or to give Tippy a potty break. And then we were back on the road again. We listened to a lot of baseball games on the radio and spoke a handful of words the entire time. That was my dad. A road warrior who didn’t want to burn daylight. He had work to do. Once we got to town, our task was to help set up the house and unload the truck to get settled before my mom and sister arrived a few days later. It was then at 16-years old that I received a rude-awakening — literally. My dad grew up in Iowa and Nebraska as an only child. How insane is that? He went to Creighton University for one year before he and my mom got married, so my dad entered the work force putting up irrigation systems and working road construction. He was always a teacher minus the degree — offering heavy words of wisdom about life whether you wanted to hear it or not.
So, when he woke me up at 5:30 in the morning that summer day long ago with a flip of the light switch and a “hey…wake up…I need your help” greeting, I knew class was in session.
There was no advanced warning.
No, “hey son, we need to get up early tomorrow….blah, blah, blah.”
All I know was one minute I was sleeping and the next I’m sitting cold shotgun without breakfast in a pick-up truck driving past cornfield after cornfield and farm after farm. We pulled up to a white house with a long red barn and hopped out. I followed my dad into the barn and was nearly knocked out by the smell of pig poop and urine, mixed with feed and other farm smells that become part of life growing up in some parts of the midwest. But for a kid who had not yet encountered that kind of funk — it’s something you never forget and oddly enough miss at times when conjuring up such memories.
Packed pig stalls filled the long barn from end to end. There were boars, sows, gilts and piglets.
My job was to hold the piglets as my dad gave them shots to make sure they didn’t carry any diseases from pig to pig, stall to stall and barn to barn as our job would be to also help transfer the little suckers once they grew up and were sold off. The piglets squealed before you picked them up. They squealed getting the shot. They squealed when you put them back. That noise can be piercing for hours on end if you are not used to it. And I wasn’t. It woke me up, that’s for sure. So did cleaning out the stalls with a shovel and a hose for hours that day.
It hit me in that stall like a whiff of pig poop: I was now a pig farmer.
This was my new life.
Basically, we were middle men — except this was a job I didn’t want, didn’t apply for, was told to do and was not getting paid for. I take that back. The clothes on my back, roof over my head and food on the table was my payment. Old school.
That pig farmer job and teenage experience in Nebraska of working with my dad that day is a something I think about between a lot and often. For the next three years of high school, I’d continue working with my dad. It became less and less as I eventually took on jobs of my own that paid actual money — working for a lawn care service, helping out at the golf course, and doing dishes at my dad and older brother’s diner — but I just never knew when he’d bust out the old, “hey…wen…I need your help”.
It went from us working together as a father and son team to my dad dropping me off to clean out the pig stalls by myself. It reminded me of walking home from school as a kid and seeing him drive away, but this time the joke was on me.
“I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours,” he’d say with a smile pulling away slowly on a sunny summer Saturday afternoon.
Now that I have children of my own, those stories and that time in my life means so much more to me. I hated it at the time but couldn’t do anything about it. I’m sure that was the last place my dad wanted to be too: losing his job, moving from State to State, starting over as a pig farmer all while trying to teach his son a lesson or two at 5:30 in the morning. He adjusted to the curveballs life throws at us and then dug in his heals time and again to take another swing at life. I’d give anything to have that time back just so I could spend it with Wendell, Sr.
My dad died before we could have those real-life talks about learning what his dreams really were. What his passion was. What he wanted to do with his life at my age or even as I near my 42nd birthday. We never had time to laugh and joke about how crazy that was for me, but was likely just another day to put in a full days work for him. We never got to recount the near wordless drive from Oregon to Nebraska listening to innings after innings and AM radio playing Creedence Clearwater Revival or Johnny Cash in between.
Time and cancer stole it from us.
Before the girls went off for school this morning I looked at that short school book about pigs and wondered if the author had ever worked on a pig farm with their dad.
If so, I’m sure they feel lucky too.
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