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It was about the fourth day of the first real cold stretch of the winter – still the first week of January. It was the time of year when, each day, I counted the seconds at sundown to try to verify if the days really were indeed getting longer.

Despite all my pretenses to the opposite, I wasn’t a real “farm kid” growing up. My parents brought home the bacon, but it didn’t come from the farm. I never milked a cow, but my brother told me to not have a cow when he got my goat. As a kid, I didn’t feed chickens, but I was prone to counting my eggs before they hatched and rarely had my ducks in a row. And, if you asked my mom, my room was always a pigsty.

“As kids, my brother and I took dynamite into the desert and blew up sagebrush.” That statement came from my grandfather in 1978.

“You did what?” Surely I hadn’t heard him right.

When hauling bulk potatoes out of potato sheds in the winter in southern Idaho, one thing you never wanted to do is pass the last café en route to loading unless you had just eaten. Too many ifs and maybes.

It’s no secret Oliver is my favorite brand of farm tractor. I have talked about this before and the many reasons I feel this way. It’s a shame people were the undoing of this great company and not the exceptional product being sent to the field farmers had come to expect over the years.

I doubt many travelers would have agreed with my assessment of the beautiful scenery I’d been taking in for several hours, but I genuinely enjoyed my drive across the understated majesty of Nevada’s high desert country.